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I'm a long-time Javascript hater. I recently did some vanilla ES6, now that browser support is finally at a point where you don't need to transpire to ES5 - I admit, ES6 is much nicer than things used to be, and not having to transpile is wonderful.

But realistically you still want a JS build pipeline of some kind, for minification, compiling SASS to CSS, and other things. And of course if you're doing "modern" frontend work, you're not using vanilla JS like I was - you're using a complicated framework like Angular, React etc, and having to deal with the likes of webpack.

And then there's the anaemic standard library - honestly, barely any better than it was 10 years ago. And then, largely as a result, you've got NPM-dependency hell, with hundreds or thousands of deps for just about anything. Want to trim a string - there's a package for that.

And then there are other languages and ecosystems - when you compare JavaScript to those... well, then you really have to admit it's a turd.

Hating on JavaScript isn't a bandwagon - there are many genuine reasons why people dislike it and the ecosystem. IMO, comparing it to a "circle jerk" is like that meme where some character is surrounded by fire saying "this is fine".



There is a lot to be unhappy about but minification, sass, webpack, these are all just compilers for the language.

People sometimes complain about CMake and g++, but it seems that for JS people criticise even the mere existence of these tools.

Since web "apps" have become a thing, JavaScript and CSS are basically a more readable form of assembly.




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