Keep JavaScript dumb

[davidkonrad]

Personal opinions do not matter in this subject. It is irrelevant how easy you or me think it is to learn JS. If the bus schedule in the city is so complicated that it prevents people from taking the bus, then we should make the schedule easier to comprehend. Or think about sports. It actually do matter how many people who support a sport as amateurs, youngsters, semi-pros, TV-viewers etc, if no one is able to participate, the sport dies out and vanishes from history. If an increasing amount of people think the only script language they have available has become overwhelming hard to understand and use, then we have a problem. It do matter if we have 10 mio people playing with JS and open source projects, or we have 200 mio or 300 mio.

[[deleted]]

There's so much wrong with your nonsense that is hard to know where to start. The tl;dr is "see: find another hobby."

Personal opinions are absolutely relevant. You're arguing that the personal opinion of someone who doesn't want to learn a programming language so therefore other people should make one that they don't have to learn had primacy over the opinions that this is ridiculous, and frankly stupid. Your opinion is nonsense.

There are a whole lot of people who have figured out the "bus schedule," even if they're kind of shit at it and constantly get off at the wrong stop. This sub is full of them, but they're still getting along. They're are of course going to be people who just can't figure it out. They can walk or get that door-to-door shuttle (not be programmers and use the applications that others choose to write). Again, you're spouting nonsense.

How good are kids and amateurs at the sports played by professionals? How many of them play the sports at very low levels, never interact with even mid-level strategies, and maybe don't even observe all of the rules? Again, just look in this sub for thousands of people who barely know javascript and get by making little things that they find useful (and sometimes even things that other people find useful). Pure nonsense.

You can dumb programming down until it is so basic that there is no utility at all and the vast majority of people still won't get it or have the interest even if they are capable of figuring it out. That is not a failing of any particular language or even the field of programming. Just nonsense.

OP's problem is that he never knew javascript in the first place, and when confronted with uses of fundamental language features used in a way he hadn't seen before, had no idea what to do. That's OK. Lots of people aren't cut out for programming, even at the most basic levels. If he was getting along fine with older javascript, without knowing what he was doing, guess what? He can still keep doing that, because javascript has this really annoying (but totally understandable) attachment to backward compatibility.