What's the worst part about the JS ecosystem?

Photo by m wrona on Unsplash

Seriously, give me your honest opinion and save any rant: what's the worst part about being a developer in the JS ecosystem? What makes you roll your eyes up to the sky? What makes you wondering if you've chosen the right developer career?

Also, most importantly:

What would you change, if you could?

Let me know in the comments 👇 or just leave a 🦄 and share this discussion 📣

Thanks for reading 🙏

Comments

[official_dulin]

Too many frameworks, tools do the same thing. Everyone suggests that they are the best, even though they didn't say it. I prefer to use w3c standard and language built-in features rather than the frameworks and tools.

[tamusjroyce]

None. npm is the ecosystem. And Deno fixes it.

As deno gains support, parsel, Babel, and snowpack will get rewritten into rust and tied into deno native speed improvements. Deno sis written in rust and can connect to rust. Deno can access gpu for speed up. It can run web assembly. And so can the browser.

[Gary Howard]

The ridiculous number of packages npm installs. I have NO IDEA what could be in there, besides my desired package. Vulnerabilities? Ok, glad to know but that side wastes time resolving.

[Eduardo Ortega]

Having a new framework every 5 mins.

[Julien Cayzac]

package.json and require().

PNPM now has support for package.yaml but half of the npm modules insist on parsing a package.json, preferably with a JSON parser from the early 2000s that doesn't support JSON-with-comments or trailing commas. Just give us an import.meta.moduleInfo(packageName) to get the package information already.

require() is completely broken but at least it's almost dead now.

[Julien Cayzac]

What makes you roll your eyes up to the sky?

And yes, having to deal with JSON in 2021 keeps me up at night.

[leob]

LOL "WebDevs actively work to prevent their usage" ... conspiracy thinking much?

I've worked plenty with SOAP but never liked it, TBH hated it, like pretty much almost everyone else I knew. You know, those corporate and proprietary "standards" tend to be over complicated, over engineered, feel like "designed by committee" and are terrible to work with.

The open web standards though are simple, easy to work with, and are sufficient in 95% of the common scenarios, that's why people like them. In case you need more sophisticated, you step up to GraphQL.

Microsoft got better yes, mainly due to their leadership, Satya Nadella is lightyears ahead of what Steve Ballmer ever was, it's like the evolution from the chimpanzee to Homo sapiens. And they (Microsoft) finally embrace open standards and aren't actively trying to sabotage them (remember IE6/7/8, ActiveX, JScript?)

MS also abandoned Silverlight, and embraced HTML5, JS, CSS ... so ironically your "heroes" have started to bet on and embrace the platform that you dislike.

Seriously though, I fully admit that the web was conceived as a platform for content delivery - it was never designed or meant to be an application development platform - a lot of it feels bolted on, even though arguably a lot of effort has been put in to improve it as an app dev platform (of course it's not true that JS hasn't made any progress).

That's why I made the comparison with mobile ecosystems (Android and iOS) with their native client apps, and wondered why a similar development hasn't taken off on the desktop - web for content delivery, native apps (connecting to backends via web technologies) for apps.

Oh and by the way - if you despise Javascript as a language (and even Typescript, conceived by MS) then there are plenty alternatives (all of which "compile" to JS, so that you don't have to write that): Elm, Dart, ReasonML (the last one is really interesting and I'd expected it to take off, but it hasn't) and others ... so I'd say that you can hardly use the weaknesses of JS as an argument against "the web".

[leob]

I was about to start arguing again lol but I do have to admit you have a point here. Look at the mobile ecosystems (Android and iOS), where there's a clear market for native client apps which aren't web based, but which use web tech (HTTP, JSON and so on) to communicate with the backend.

So yeah I'd say use HTTP and all of the web standards on the backend (and in MOST cases do NOT Javascript or node.js there, use a proper language) but for the client I'd argue we should have more choice than just HTML/JS/CSS. Something like the iOS or Android app model but then for the desktop.

P.S. on a tangential note, you're clearly a Microsoft fan but I'll never forgive them their monopolistic practices of the 90s, which included threatening PC manufacturers if they'd dare offer Linux on their hardware, or anything non-MS. I have to say they've changed a lot and they sing a different tune now, but the days of Steve Ballmer were horrible (and so was Windows back then).

[leob]

I agree that node.js isn't ideal, but hey, to equate node.js with "web dev" is a bit misleading isn't it? There are dozens of platforms for doing web development (backend).

Also: "95% of WEB devs, not devs" => okay, but the large majority of devs are now "web devs", maybe not 95% but well, probably like 75% - so still "the majority of devs"

And: "Most non-web-devs hate web dev with a passion" => that's a bold (and subjective) claim, can you back it up with facts? I rather think most non-web-devs are neutral, or even mildly positive, and are MAYBE even using it themselves occasionally ;)

And finally: "for the reasons I listed" => I haven't seen any clear reasons mentioned anywhere, have I missed them?

You can program in a backend language with strong typing and still be doing web dev, I've done Java for years and considered myself a web dev (or at least a "web dev" among wearing a number of other hats) most of that time, so I don't see the artificial divide you're trying to put up.

[leob]

Well, you're pretty outspoken to put it mildly, and with an opinion that I think is at odds with what 95% of devs are thinking ... interesting discussion, to be continued!

[leob]

No idea really, but what do consumers use? web browsers, and mobile apps (Android and iOS) ... I don't see how that's going to change. Standards are good in my opinion, even when they're not perfect.