I’ve been a hobbyist programmer since I got my first computer in 1984 or so. I greatly enjoy it and I’m terrible at it.

I mainly use JS to create utilities for myself that take me 1,000 hours to write and save me a lifetime of 45 seconds. I like Javascript for tawdry reasons: It’s straightforward, there’s a huge collection of libraries, any question I might ever have has already been asked and answered at StackOverflow, and I get to see the results immediately on screen. It’s of course also useful for the various bush league Web sites I occasionally have to put up (e.g., Everyday Chaos). Also, jQuery makes dumb HTML (DOM) work easy.

But here’s the but…

But, ECMA is taking JS in a terrible direction: it’s turning it professional, what with the arrow functions and the promises, etc. If you’re a hobbyist who enjoys programming for the logic of it, the new stuff in JS hides that logic on behalf of things I happen not to care about like elegance, consistency, and concision.

Now, I know that I don’t have to use the new stuff. But in fact I do, because the community I rely on to answer my questions — basically StackOverflow — increasingly is answering with the new stuff.

There’s a reason JS became the most used language on the planet: not only can you do webby stuff with it, it has a pretty linear learning curve. Now I literally feel like I’m in danger of losing “View Source” from my browser … literally because while I can view the source, increasingly I can’t understand it.

I’m going to lose this argument. I already have lost it. I should lose it. My position is wrong. I know that. Nevertheless, I stand firmly on the wrong side of history as I declare in my lonely, quavering voice: Keep. JavaScript. Dumb.

Categories: programs, tech dw