> JS the language isn't great but it's JS the culture that is the real problem.

This is the money quote of the thread for me. From the perspective of someone whose main language has been JS or TS for about 8 years, it's getting worse since some of the biggest names in the discipline just seem to be people with large social followings giving terrible advice. This advice is then eaten up by hoardes of bootcamp alumni who have been given a loose understanding of React and unleashed on the world as "junior developers".

But maybe I'm just cynical.

Its not just bootcamp alumni, frontend is filled with people with 15 years of experience who were sitting in some shop before the frontend boom basically being a jQuery engineer and never actually learning about software design, never mind basic computer science concepts. Then the boom came and now these types are managers and senior engineers who only know how to talk about "which framework?" as far as design goes and who are eager to call any other discussion as over-engineering.

The fact that it's getting worse says to me that we're just returning to the human mean. For decades programming was seen as the purview of nerds and geeks so the only people who turned to it tended to genuinely like it and master their craft as much as exploit it. Now everyone and their grandma use software so programming has become one of those semi-prestigious professional career paths but without the crazy expensive barrier to entry or restrictions in supply that doctors, lawyers, etc have. Even though programming is largely problem solving and "intellectual" rather than menial physical labor, the field has become so accessible with the internet that the distribution of engineering ability is starting to look a lot more like the usual bell curve centered on "just average".

It was great while it lasted.

Curious if you can share some examples of this bad advice?

It's the same thing with PHP (and Ruby). You can write reasonable code in it, the problem is that the engineering culture leaves a lot to be desired.

In Java, the engineering culture is strong but stagnant.

Python is toxic, it's full of scientists, the engineering is bad (but a little better than PHP because the community is of a higher calibre).

PHP's type hinting can be a nice onramp to typing, albeit runtime checks. With some linters it can be the best of both worlds for those disciplined and educated enough.

>JS the language isn't great but it's JS the culture that is the real problem.

I'm happy you bring this up. Us developers have a tendency to blame bad code on poor tooling/languages or on individual developers or organizations. Not enough attention is given to cultural factors within various ecosystems that systemically induce bad coding practices.

Also worth mentioning that the tooling and language follows the culture to a degree.

Java has incredibly high quality tooling because the engineering culture demands it. (also they tend to pay for it which creates a market. I myself pay maybe ~$400/yr total for my professional tools, Jetbrains Toolbox, Yourkit, etc)

The changes to the language and runtime also follow from this.

I would say Java and it's periphery ecosystems show the most promise in 2020 bar maybe Rust. There is also great things going on in C#/.NET space but I'm less involved there than I was previously so can't speak to how fast it's moving.

In the movie Minority Report, there is a scene where the protagonist is blindfolded and opens a fridge that contains one fresh and one spoiled version of each item.

Eventually, he bites a spoiled sandwich with mold and drinks spoiled milk.

That is the best analogy for npm.