> You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever designed and put it on the server.
Had to laugh at that!
In the recent Westworld episode (S01E05), the lab tech was trying to program the bird's AI and his file was called "New Script.wws", where .wws is apparently "west world script".
Immediately, the thought crossed my mind, "Must be fucking JavaScript! No wonder the AI will soon start killing the humans" :-)
In my faux outrage, I went into theoretical scenarios of how exactly JS caused SkyNet. To be fair, once my flash of righteousness passed, I took a closer look and .wws looks nothing like JS. Also, there seems to be C or C++ on the LHS.
I still bet WWS is some kind of duck-typed shite that relies on the cult of TDD to keep the robots' behaviour safe.
checkNoKillMode(str). "Look, all my tests pass. We have 100% coverage".
Yeah, except when str == '', in which case it evals to false. Of course, there's no test case for that.
"You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever designed and put it on the server."
My theory is that there are many front-end designers that only know html, javascript, and css, and suggested javascript on the back-end, because they don't know any other language.
I've been a part of many of the javascript framework communities like Ember.js over the years and it's filled with designers, not developers.
But it also depends on your optimizations. If you are a small company, you want to focus on having a small footprint because server space costs more to you.
Large companies don't care about server space costs, because it's negligible compared to the cost of a developer salary and benefits. So, they would rather use a large and bloated framework that helps with productivity because less lines of code need to be written.
I've worked at a few large corporations that didn't get that much traffic. They all used enterprisey, inefficient, and bloated frameworks. Nobody really noticed because they could just throw some more hardware at it and the traffic to the site was fairly low.
I think this is a result of all of the tooling and automated building that's "necessary" to cludge everything together.
ES6 features and TypeScript are great, for many reasons, but they don't work immediately in the browser. You need precompiling and something like CommonJS or SystemJS to handle importing libraries not defined in HTML. SASS/SCSS really improves stylesheets, tremendously improves them, but you need to...precompile. Finally, JS heavy apps turn into a hodgepodge of JS, CSS, and HTML that just doesn't really...sit well, so most people will use tooling to establish some sense of ordering.
That last step is both a boon and a curse. Automating the process makes development very easy and saves a lot of time. That tooling is also inherently complicated to an outsider and is a large, ugly barrier to entry.
Frankly speaking, if you invest some time in learning these tools it's not really that bad. Once the project's toolchain is setup properly one can be productive for a long time without worrying much.
One of the major problem front end development seems hacky is the browser quirks and developer's wish to get more out of browsers for which they were not designed for.
https://medium.com/@wob/the-sad-state-of-web-development-160...