Re:Choose Boring Technology (2015)
by lostcolony on Sunday February 21, 2021 @02:01PM
(#26216109)
Yeah; even without frontend code, JS is surprisingly compelling. It's easy to hire for, easy to write reasonably performant IO code in, the footguns are pretty much all well documented and generally understood (rather than requiring knowledge of the deep magic to debug), library support is top notch, and as a language it supports both OO and FP, while being pretty small in scope, terse without encouraging too much code golf.
Then there is also the fact that JS is actually a pretty great language if you know how to avoid the footguns. Granted that's not always easy, but it's a language with lexical closures and easy and familiar syntax, it's also very expressive and has a vast ecosystem supporting it. And you can even add the typescript compiler on top if you want compile-time type-checking.
It's also async out of the box, and while that doesn't solve all problems, it scales surprisingly well with no performance tuning whatsoever, it even has decent asynchronous primitives that make it easier to write correct code.