Unless you are making a HTML/CSS only site (based) what do you want to use instead?
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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Invent a new internet where you can script pages directly in Python or TypeScript.
Otherwise, you get to enjoy a silly toy language from the 90's.
I'm on, but no one is interested.
Kotlin/JS would be my first choice ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
If you care this much about JS being cringe I don't trust you to contribute good code to a project anyways
People on here really think the language determines the quality of the project lol
Genuinely curious, how many of you hating on JS have done professional frontend work recently? If you have done professional work, was it part/full time, using TypeScript, how big was your eng team, did you have to worry about Server Side Rendering? Maybe some extra context will show certain types of projects yield devs that hate the language.
I worked in heavy JavaScript codebases back in the IE days and wasn’t too crazy about it. Then JIT compilers like v8 came along and made it run a lot faster and TypeScript also made it more usable for larger codebases. I now consider TypeScript among my favorite languages. I’ve also written a lot of Go lately, and while I appreciate its speed and smaller memory footprint, the missing language features kind of grate on me and I don’t mind taking a bit of a performance hit for the (IMO) superior ergonomics of TypeScript, especially for workloads where I/O is more of the bottleneck than compute.
It's funny because I learned to program with strongly types languages and when I moved over to JavaScript I always complained about it for the longest time but now that I use mostly typescript at work I kind of miss some of the old JavaScript patterns and their flexibility. But for working with large teams or large projects in general it's nice to have typescript
agreed. typescript is excelent, especially if you make it strict and know a bit of complex types to make sure things stay put.
Chiming in as a professional TS dev. It's really a joy to do web dev work in the post TS world.
What do you think of JSDoc? As someone who knows neither I find the idea of no required transpilation very appealing, while still getting the TS ecosystem tools.
JSDoc is much more cumbersome than using TypeScript. That's it. It clutters the code in a way that TypeScript somehow avoids. TS types are smoothly integrated in the code itself, IMO. Not as much the case with JSDoc.
Thanks! As a hardware guy it'll be a long time before I do anything with this information. Nice to hear the opinions of actual Devs.
I suspect most Lemmy users hating on JS haven’t done much professional JS work. Especially these days with TypeScript and all the modern conveniences.
I’m curious, what kinda hardware do you work on?
Digital hardware, mainly top-level design in verilog and associated checks using python/perl (sad)
Right now working on a GPU which is fun!
Ah alright 🙂 My pleasure! Yeah I wouldn't even consider JSDoc if I had the choice of TypeScript. I even did some years of Advent Of Code in TypeScript. It's performant enough and simple to employ some kind of quasi functional programming style with it. I think it's great.
I think Rich Harris famously migrated Svelte from TypeScript to JSDoc, while still supporting TypeScript via JSDoc. I don’t use Svelte, so I have no idea how well this works in practice. However, Rick Harris seems smart to me, unlike other overly opinionated devs like DHH. I still wouldn’t use JSDoc over TS, but I guess if it works for your project, who cares. What matters is that we all remember the one true enemy, DHH
I would actually love to hear the rationale behind migrating from TypeScript to JSDoc. Mind boggling to me.
Especially nowadays when there is promising work towards very fast, Rust-based TypeScript tooling, which web devs are in love with.
So yah, very interesting.
But yeah, DHH 🖕🖕
Why is transpilation unappealing to you?
Being honest, I'm an outsider looking in. Most likely these things are solved problems, but alternates are always interesting to hear insider opinions on.
Sounds like it's developer experience Vs required post processing in this case, which is a reasonable tradeoff to think about
i wish a more performing language would have this type system. the only other ones I know are Rust which is a bit strict and slow to dev on, and Haskell which is too much.
JS has saved me many hours of mind-numbing, error-prone manual keyboard work by giving me a way to hack together a simple bit of automation as a web page.
Even when a computer has been ham-fistedly locked-down by an overzealous IT department, I can almost always still access a text editor and a browser that will load local HTML files.
Add to that the beauty of bookmarklets.
It's silly that IT departments forces us to resort to techniques used before browser extensions became a thing, and it's ironic that it's because they don't know how to code, but here we are.
Real programmers are language agnostic. Anyways what's the project?
We're writing an online banking service entirely in brainfuck. Backend, frontend, even middleend if we have to
I enjoy the contradiction of middleend
The middlemiddle
E: My backend don't middlemiddle, it forks
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For something you're getting paid for, sure. But if you're contributing in your free time for fun or whatever, presumably you'd prefer to use a language you actually like.
Yes and no. "Real" programmers care about engineering choices ; and JS is the cardboard of programming languages.
Perfect for packaging (which in this metaphor is UI), horrible for building a bridge with. And vice-versa, I wouldn't try and make amazon packaging out of reinforced concrete.
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Real programmers will write in a way that user’s resources are not being wasted because you need a full browser, a JS runtime, and DOM juggling, to show even the simplest application.
It’s not rare for simple JS applications to consume over half a gigabyte of RAM on startup, and way more CPU than their native counterparts. That this was normalized and even defended is stupid.
I think you’re thinking of Electron apps, but that’s not really a criticism of JavaScript, that’s a criticism of Electron. There are plenty of JS platforms that don’t require a browser/DOM. React Native is the biggest example. Also, GJS if you want native Linux apps.
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This meme should be rewritten in js
JavaScript really depends on the people writing it restricting themselves to a sane (ish) subset, just like C++
My personal gripe with JavaScript is how horribly slow it is. C++ at least has the merit of being fast once compiled. I wouldn't feel great contributing to a JS project knowing fully well that a rewrite in a faster language would be 10x as effective as anything I could improve as is.
That’s funny because I - having not written much C++ - have an irrational hate of the language. But I like JavaScript. I think I need to look at C++ through the same lens I look at JS through.
Imo you can write pretty performant websites in JS. I guess it depends what you’re doing, but e.g. if you pay attention to you’re rerenders in React, you’re gonna have a much better time.
But I also totally understand as soon as you wanna do some compex stuff, JavaScript is not a good time. I don’t think webassembly has worked as smoothly as promised, but in theory, that should let you bring some C++ into the browser.
JavaScript is great for making websites !
Written in PHP
Feels the same whenever a project is written in python, but I uninstall it too.
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Prissy little programmers
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