The nice thing about walking minefields is learning how to watch your step.

I like this because it could be said seriously or ironically

"If you're walking on eggshells, don't hop."

-- unknown

That's like the idea of planting a bamboo plant, then jumping over it every day. It's a nice idea, but you won't ever be able to jump over a two story house. Instead, you'll eventually catch your foot and tumble. Likewise with the minefield. The result, is that you'll eventually step on a mine. At best, you can use a simulated minefield as an exercise, then use mine detection equipment and proceed with caution.

Or, you can avoid the minefield entirely.

My enjoyment using any given language always tends to grow as I get more productive with it, even if I have a more general dislike for the language itself.

Making computers do things is fun (usually)! The programming language is (almost) immaterial - depending on the task at hand of course.

Despite myself, I've even found myself enjoying JS in the few times I had no choice to avoid it. shudder

That part about JS is pretty much the story of my career - I started out completely hating JS, was forced to use it enough to get more familiar with it, and eventually eventually started enjoying it to the point that it's now the primary language I write.

(I still hate it occasionally, but there's a lot more joy these days.)

The initial turning point was probably around the first release of jQuery...

[Javascript isn't actually that bad of a language. It really is about 90% of Scheme plus prototype inheritance, which takes some getting used to but ... eh, it's as good as any other option. The problem was that it was one of the battlefields between Microsoft and Netscape and has some really hideous scars in the landscape.]

I did not write this. My fingers did not type it. Nothing to see here. Move along. I'm a hedge.

>Javascript isn't actually that bad of a language

Well, the basic parts are not that great. Plus, it has almost nothing of Scheme (nothing more than e.g. Python has of Lisp), that's just an old wives tale. It just has closures and that's it. Scheme is a Lisp, whereas Javascript isn't [1]. Not sure what Brendan had in mind when he was inspired by Scheme, but the end product is nothing like it.

Coercion rules are crazily bad. No integer type is stupid. Prototypal inheritance nobody much cared for (where nobody = very few). An empty array is not falsy. And several other stupid decisions besides.

The only reason it wasn't that bad, is that it wasn't big enough to be bad. It was just a handful of features plus a tiny (and bad) standard library (some math, some string stuff, etc). Everything else people had to build on top (and usually the did it badly).

[1] https://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2013/07/18/javascript-isn...

I think JS is very fun to write. It's making sure it does what I want it to do that is irritating.

>Interesting, that I saw a similar pattern like "at first I complained, but as time went on I found some benefits" quite a lot.

Isn't that also a classic example of "boiling the frog" or Stockholm Syndrome?

This. Plus folks are always comparing to their previous experience, which is likely to still be a subjective and also hard to compare at all too. It's like apples (Go) vs oranges (C#) vs broccoli (Python).

+1 for 'fractal of shit' - that is a keeper.

I read the "fractal" part as a hat tip to this rather famous article: https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/