I believe the JS community loves to shoot itself in the foot.

Probably some heard the message, at the begining of 2023, from one of the TS creators recommending to not always set the return type explicitly in in the function definition, and that triggered some very good developers that are against this recommendation. (BTW TS: Typescript, JS or js: javascript)

JS is a language of constant changing, enormous growth and one that I am deeply grateful for all the good it has brought to my life and the world in general. The fact that it set itself to be the language of the browsers (the internet) and later of the servers (NodeJS) is a true miracle.

Something to consider, on it’s simplicity JS is a very hard language to understand. The async / promise flow, the callstack, the implicity type definition, context binding, functional (or better said procedural) programming / OOP paradigns / prototyping. The core language developers have made an amazing job. Not to forget the good documentation around for it’s core libraries.

But, core JS itself many years ago stopeped being the sole thing you need to learn to be productive with the language. And developers tend to forget that on top of it, one must also learn about front end or backend frameworks, protocol connections, integration tools and many other packages. Additional linters, testing, package managers, parsers.

For me something is clear, V8 was the biggest innovation that made the language relevant. Npm, made the community shine.

For it to grow it have faced many changes along the years, new libraries, new paradigms, new contributors. And I kinda see a single pattern, every new iteration have tried to make the previous simpler to implement.

That’s a reason server componets are making a weird comeback in the development work.

PHP (Full server) -> JS (Full client) -> server JS (Server components) + small client JS.

Many years ago, the web frameworks were the ones in charge of the client, and it was in charge of rendering the module components. Now the client wants to handle the pre-render of it’s own components server side and compliment them with the minimal client side actions.

It has never been away of controversies. Remember IO.js? Current arguments between frontend libraries against each other?

Javascript, in my opinion has never been harder to learn, but at the same time it has never be in better shape to learn. Newcommers should feel excited from the opportunities the language has to offer and feel joy of they innovations they have at face palm.