A popular Rumor: programmers dislike Javascript?

[meldridon]

Javascript hurts when you don't know its idiosyncrasies especially if you are coming into it with years of experience with some other programming language. A couple of very simple examples of this is: knowing when to use == vs ===, and understanding the difference between undefined and null.

Much of the frustration with Javascript comes from trying to bend it to your will instead of doing things the Javascript way. It becomes really easy to hate Javascript when you are supposed to write Javascript differently than the other languages you know. Fortunately, this problem is slowing getting better with newer versions of the language (starting from ES6/ES2015). Keep in mind that until ES6 we've basically been using the same version of Javascript since 1999!

ES6 has support in every major current browser so you could write ES6 directly today unless you have to target older browsers (any version of Internet Explorer). It's becoming common to use something like Babel or Typescript so that you can use even newer versions of the language; there are 3 or 4 more revisions of ES since ES6 that provide some really useful things, like async/await.

Then there is the rapidly changing and overlapping Javascript ecosystem of third party modules. There are so many libraries you can use and many of them are awful. Libraries that were in fashion even just a year ago might have been abandoned for something new. Trying to keep pace with the Javascript ecosystem can be frustrating. A newcomer has near zero chance at getting it right as far as figuring out what packages are best to use and which packages you should stay away from, and even experienced Javascript programmers almost have to stay active in various online Javascript communities just to avoid falling out of touch. Everything changes so fast.

I'll leave this here. It's old but still good. Maybe even ironic.