Very true. I remember vbscript. I still have to write some occasionally. What’s funny is that powershell gets all the attention & security applied to it - but vbscript likely keeps its flaws in the name of backwards compatibility. I’m betting vbscript is a huge attack vector just waiting for some major exploitation that leads to its removal or being severely gimped.

Yeah, everyone hates JS but that doesn't mean the existence of JS is a curse. For a long time it has been the best at what it's commonly used for. Otherwise no one would complain about it because no one would use it.

All I remember about vbscript was that array indexes started at 1.

It’s really not so bad, and worse languages exist.

Esoteric languages do not count. Super obsolete ones don't either. At that point you're left with maybe PHP.

It’s really just a bad, overused joke.

Now that might be true. I guess the main counterpoint is that it's not like you never encounter it, so it's natural it gets joked about a lot.

That’s one of the overused memes we can leave behind at Reddit.

I'd bet that most people who think this way either haven't used it in the last 10 years or they only know it from the memes.

JS isn't that bad provided you just use it for frontend UI, it's quite good at that

I really like Typescript, I think it's a more smooth programming experience than raw JS or even other high level languages like Python . However, I don't mind JavaScript as much as many other programmers so I suppose I'm a bit biased.

One of my favorite languages, it's everything that's good about Javascript plus the one thing that's missing: types.

I love typescript, especially for larger projects and libraries.

Terrible type system, terrible standard library, terrible compatibility and lack of many features, compared to C# for example.

Yeah what's the hate against JS? Did it steal your wife?

Being easy to understand is one of the primary goals of any programming languages.

The problem with Javascript is that it isn't easy to understand. Javascript is easy to write.

That's why it's easy for novices to pick up and why it ends up being spaghetti code. It's very unrestrictive and allows writing very poor code that works based on assumptions and breaks when the assumptions aren't met.

It made sense at the time because it was just a scripting language for some minor website things, and you didn't want your site to crash if your script ran into a problem.

Now it's being used to write full fledged applications and it's past design choices are still haunting it.

Js is what you make of it. It can be a godawful mess but it also can be really awesome.

Agreed. It wasn't always a great language, but by some miracle it eventually became pretty alright.

But it’s also a double edged sword because that means that novices can write absolute spaghetti code in it. That’s not the fault of the language though.

Disagree. The best languages are those which can be intuitively used without having to learn the pitfalls. Take Rust vs. C++, for example: both languages have pitfalls, but only Rust is intentionally designed to help you steer clear of them. JS is like C++ in this regard -- decades of cruft have coalesced into tempting yet painful footguns, much to the chagrin of many a new learner.

Js is what you make of it.

This is one of the biggest issues with JS.

Want to stuff your whole program into one file on a single line? Go for it! Want to use 100 JS files in a single directory? You the boss! Want to tinker with the internals of other modules? Ha! What internals?!?

This is coming from someone that actually likes JS. It's a very loosey-goosey language and it does next to nothing to prevent bad practices. You're expected to pick and choose additional libraries to help with quality and organization. Some people choose no framework, some choose relaxed frameworks, or very opinionated ones. And if you want, you can easily mix strategies. I mainly code in Java, much more strict by comparison, and taking this approach would be a good way to ensure nothing works.

I think the core of JS is good but it needs better official tooling (I still hate NPM) and less of do-what-feels-good approach.

Except nit having strict types makes it harder to read, not easier. You have to try to remember what type of data each object contains. Strict typing makes it easier to read. JS is slightly easy to write though, for better or worse, although usually harder to come back to for the same reason mentioned earlier.

Flex and grid have made CSS so easy I can't imagine how anyone could hate it anymore. Back when everyone used float for layout, it was painful, but no sane person does that anymore.

Flash gives me great memories of watching Camp Chaos Monkey for President cartoons in university though. <3

Hear, hear! In 1998, I did my work experience at a local ISP and was tasked with coding a backend that would create accounts for people wanting to buy an internet subscription from us.
IIS was still in beta so my boss decided I would use Linux, this new fangled language called PHP and just write a CGI in C that would do the actual creation of accounts on our server (IIRC).
I spent a few weeks on a console terminal, using vi, doing C; which was as abominable as one might expect. PHP was fucking magic, in comparison. And on the front-end, I used a bit of JavaScript to add some interaction and reactivity and that was just fun!

Heck, seventeen years later and I still think it's a fun language to use.

Anyway I don't know where in was going with this... you kids don't know how good you have it, is what I'm saying.