It could be true writing good JS is a little harder than good Java, especially on the server. This is a consequence of the callback oriented nature of JS frameworks and APIs. Once you get used to it, it wouldn't really matter and there are real performance benefits that come out of it.
As for the many warts people bring up, how hard is it to follow a few good practices? If those trivial issues can't be overcome, that person will have problems programming in any language.
I have indeed worked on multiple large JavaScript code bases. Some of this work was in the late 1990s (using Netscape Enterprise Server's support for server-side JavaScript, unfortunately), and some of it within the past few years.
Having worked on large JavaScript-based systems, in addition to ones written in languages like C, C++, Java, C#, Fortran, COBOL, PHP, Erlang and several proprietary languages/platforms, the problems with JavaScript become excruciatingly clear. The wider your experience, the more obvious it becomes how terrible JavaScript is.
The problems with JavaScript, especially for any sizable development projects, run far deeper than merely needing to stick to some "good practices". It just doesn't provide the infrastructure needed for anything but small-scale development. Its many flaws render it further inadequate for any serious use.
Now, that won't stop some people from trying to push it far beyond what it's capable of. The results are never good, however, and generally inferior to what could be obtained when using other technologies.
Once you know which pitfalls to avoid it's possible to write some really elegant code, but the mere presence of those pitfalls causes a ton of problems when you bring in engineers from other programming languages.
I find it kind of concerning that when someone criticizes JavaScript, everyone's first response is, "he must not have any experience with the language." That's an unfounded personal attack and ignores the crux of the argument.
Look, we love JavaScript, but it doesn't do us any good to pretend it's perfect. It'd be much easier to ramp up new engineers on the language if we admitted its flaws and made efforts to educate "the right way."
The interesting thing to me about JavaScript is that insofar as it lacks "crucial" language features it turns out to provide the necessary tools to build them yourself. Exactly gow do you want inheritance or modules or whatever to work? E.g. While JavaScript doesn't impose a module structure it's very easy to come up with one, and because you build it yourself you can tweak it to deal with your exact needs rather than adhering mindlessly to "patterns" developed for working around the shortcomings of more tightly defined languages (Java, cough)
Java programmers moving to JavaScript seem to write horrible code because the freedom to actually just do stuff rather than build boxes with tiny weird-shaped holes cut in them to package pieces of functionality is so alien.
I wish Python, with its (fewer) warts were as ubiquitous and useful as JavaScript, but it's not, and Javascript is pretty darn good.
Like you said, bad code is somewhat inevitable when you drop a classically-trained OOP programming into JavaScript. And that specifically is not a fault of the language. But I think we can all do a better job of pointing newbies in the right direction.
No. I've written non-trivial JS code and the amount of possible mistakes that a person writing JS can make is a lot more than say, Python or Ruby. You have to be really really careful and simple things that you shouldn't even have to think about become tedious.
Not to turn this into a JS hate thread, but I'd rather write C code that doesn't pretend to be safe, than write JS code that does, and screws up anyway.
Whether I can write a useful program in it is uninteresting, because that's a property of almost all languages, good or bad. The question is whether its a pain.
This is an anti-programmer programming language. The fact that so many people love it is a bit of a mystery to me and I've actually used it for both DOM manipulation a long time ago and for mobile apps more recently. I will say that it's quite good at being a scripting language for an app UI (QML).
* C declarations (experts can get into flamewars discussing good ways of reading C declarations)
* C (and worse C++) keyword overloading
* C strings
* Most of C++ (i.e. most of C++ - C)
* Most Java libraries
* Objective C's declarations (which at least have gotten markedly better recently)
* Perl's variable prefixes and subroutine declarations (even if you don't mind Perl's other quirks)
* semantic whitespace in languages with semantic whitespace
* PHP -- which I find useful and perfectly capable of supporting large projects -- is hilariously awful.
The object declaration is painful, it has variable hoisting and doesn't have proper block scope leading to all sorts of weird bugs, it doesn't have simple namespacing, it didn't have a foreach, it didn't have get/setters until recently and even now the syntax is bad because they wanted to maintain backward compatibility.
Oh and everything's a bloody function. A function is a function. A class is a function. An anonymous method is a function. It can get really hard to read and pick out what a bit of code is actually doing on first pass.
And that's just the big, really simple but important, every day stuff that a normal coder needs to do their job in even the slightest complexity scenario.
I sometimes wonder if the 'other' language that netscape was going to use was really as frustrating as javascript is when you start working on more complex code.
What it did have which most languages didn't have is treating functions as first-class objects and closures. They're brilliant.
Unfortunately almost all other modern languages now have these and javascript still doesn't have all the other goodies so that's one of the many reasons it gets so much hate.
So now compared to any other language it looks so dated and archaic.
I really enjoy writing javascript at times, but as the code gets complex I despise it. And I hate coming back to my old javascript code.
Well There are no classes in javascript at all. A constructor is a function in most OO languages. The difference here is the underlying OO implementation.
Anonymous methods are by nature functions as well. Could there be a more succinct syntax for them? Perhaps, but of all of the complaints about javascript this is a relatively minor one.
I would never say that there are not things about JS that don't drive me nuts. But the relatively simplicity of thinking of just about everything being treated equally from a language standpoint gives you a flexibility to work that can be really refreshing.
The everything is a function is because at least in other languages it's clear what a constructor is, what a function is and what an anonymous method is. They all look distinctly different and have different keywords or declaration syntax. Generally speaking something like:
class Thing
Thing() { } //constructor
function Thing() {} //function
(p) => {} //anonymous method
It's pretty telling that Crockford's "JavaScript: The Good Parts", which is the most widely-recommended book by the JavaScript community, essentially says to not use huge parts of the language. One doesn't have to intentionally avoid so much core functionality when using most other programming languages.