Javascript sucks and the stockholm syndrome

Tuesday, Jul 22, 2014| Tags:

It’s commonly said that the first step on getting over a problem is to first recognize it exists.

Unfortunately, it seems that those of us who are involved in the software development industry, and specially web development are not doing this exercise. If you make a poll asking which is the programming language you most dislike, its very likely that Javascript will get on top of the list. Not surprisingly. I won’t get into details about why it’s such a horrible language to work with, but if you’ve been involved in debugging some browser side javascript issue, you know what I am talking about.

Now, what puzzles me is that, given the fact that the industry just doesn’t like javascript, it seems that we are somehow feeling threated by it, and, instead of trying to work out a proper solution, we just try not only to get along with it (I could excuste that), but we insist on lying ourserlves thinking that it’s the way forward. So we come up with technologies based on Javascript: client side MVC frameworks, and hey, why not then use Javascript on the server (yes, I’m talking about you, node.js). Hey, let’s take it to the extreme and program our cell phones with Javascript (that one is for you, FirefoxOS).

So basically, we find nowadays abducted by Javascript, and, instead of trying to get free, we pretend our captor is our friend, and we should love it. So please, let’s try to stay focused, and use the right tool for the right job.

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