I like JS. I use JS daily. JS is part of the workflow for nearly everyone I know who works with code. For me, ES6 is fantastic to use. Some of the better books on JS [I'm thinking specifically of Haverbeke's "Eloquent Javascript"] are general computing classics in their own right.

I used to be a snob about JS, due to the fact that in the 90s / early 2000s, it had major shortcomings and produced a lot of slow, crashy web pages. But when I learned modern JS, I realized that it is now a fully mature language equal to any other, and easily used in a huge variety of contexts [thanks in no small part to Node]

I have to use Javascript almost daily at work, I hate it.

Up until a year ago or so I hadn't really had to use it much, I'm finding it so bad I'm seriously looking at how I can get into an alternate career. Working with JS is a profoundly miserable experience.

I hate what this industry has become.

what were you using before JS, and in what domain is the work? Genuinely curious

Previously I was working on C# and SQL. I'm no fan of either of those, but at least with C# I can understand what the designers were thinking. Ideally I would be working in Clojure if it was up to me. Or Scala or F#.

Now it's Javascript as that is the code base our client uses. The client runs a number of production factories and have an internal web app that is mostly Javascript on the front end for monitoring these production lines.

It's made me angrily punch my desk and consider just quitting on the spot on a number of occasions.

I don't know how anyone tolerates using this day to day and doesn't want to jump off the roof. It's absolutely idiotic.

JS is a terrible language. The amount of pitfalls, language features you must avoid, and obscure paradigms you must follow to make JS usable is mind-boggling. Just because you can use JS well doesn't mean it's a good language.

Out of curiosity, what languages do you think are good ones?

Scheme is a good programming language.

Good? That's harder to answer. Not terrible? Java, C, Python, C#, Swift, Go...

no longer is too good or too bad, it depends on how much time you spent on it and how good you're at it actually.

Here's a link to that book you mentioned if anyone needs it: https://eloquentjavascript.net/Eloquent_JavaScript.pdf

Thanks, I'm reading it now.

>JS daily. JS is part of the workflow for nearly everyone I know who works with code.

What about there being no choice when you want to do almost anything web related

WASM ain't mature yet.

Are you pretending that there's not a fair amount of devs writing Node services?

While I certainly wouldn't call JS "great", I actually do genuinely like a lot of parts of it. I like the Lispey style of embedding data structures (hashmaps and arrays) directly into the language, and I like that it has somewhat popularized some functional techniques and made them mainstream.

While callbacks aren't a great way of doing continuation-passing, at least we can credit JS with making continuation-passing mainstream.

In combination with the fact that JS actually does work pretty well on both frontend and backend, it is a language I use semi-regularly for prototyping, given its flexibility. Granted, if I decide to make a "real" version of the project, I'll probably do it with a more functional language, but I think JS doesn't suck too bad.

I love it and think it's a great language. It has bad parts, but they are easy to avoid, especially with a modern linter. So there you go. You're wrong. At least one experienced developer who has coded in many languages thinks JavaScript is a great language.

It's certainly been pleasant so far as I've been learning 2d game development!

The non-vocal majority does.

Literally Douglas Crockford made a second career out of believing this.

Literally no one is impressed by your cynicism.

JavaScript may have its quirks, but TypeScript is a great improvement. And with a few tweaks to your package.json, you can code in TS for Node.js!

What are these tweaks you speak of?

Just do a search for “use TypeScript with Node”:

https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/typescript-wi...

https://blog.risingstack.com/building-a-node-js-app-with-typ...

Basically, you install the `typescript` package which gives you `tsc`. Then you configure Node to run your program with `tsc` through your package.json.

I do.

I do.

I love ES5. The language has gone downhill though.

Now thats an unusual viewpoint? Could you elaborate why you think so?

I personally found js terrible before es6 and love it since then

Here are some things I find problematic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21848597

But I’m happy for you that you like ES6. You all own the language now, so enjoy it. Us ES5 folks are going to have to rewind and fork so we can have a community again.

What about ES6?

I do. I love vanilla JS especially. The way it interacts with the DOM and the way JSON works makes more sense to me than most other languages, and this is coming from a python user and newly lisp user.

Not everyone has the same brain as you. People enjoy things you don't understand.