
Ask HN: Does 'specializing' in JavaScript automatically signify mediocrity? - krrishd
Besides big-name personalities&#x2F;contributors within the JS community of course.<p>I occasionally get the impression that advertising having more JavaScript experience than something like Python automatically creates a negative impression. Is it just me or does that perception exist?
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nostrademons
Among people who don't specialize in Javascript, maybe.

A business owner who's going to pay you is going to pay you because you
deliver something they need but can't find cheaper elsewhere. Almost every
business needs some form of web frontend - even mobile-first businesses often
need good webapps for marketing & administration purposes. The disdain and
loathing from some of the rest of the developer community actually works in
your favor, most of the time: it keeps competition out or makes them
ineffective at learning the skills needed to be effective.

The one thing to watch out for is that frontend technologies typically have a
very short lifetime: in 4-5 years, much of what makes you valuable may be
obsolete, and work in it tends to dry up. Just ask DOS/assembly devs in 1995,
Swing or MFC developers in 2006, or basic PHP/Rails/Wordpress webdevelopers
now. Be prepared to keep learning, and focus on general principles like good
UI design, responsiveness, latency, managing state, MVC/MVP architectures,
etc.

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LeoSolaris
It persists because JavaScript had always been a toy language for the front
end devs to make web sites "pretty" rather than useful. Generally all of that
pretty broke the site, and it was always blamed on the back end.

Node may be turning the perception of JS, but it is a slow process. Node is
still very young. It's community is still highly focused on building the
tooling, while the community around a more mature language like Python has
long since found its voice. Right now, Node is seen as a chaotic mess for web
devs that are forced to do back end work because management thinks a code
monkey is a code monkey and doesn't want to pay for the vastly more expensive
systems devs. (To be fair, a little start up likely doesn't have enough of a
customer base to require that level of performance tuning.)

Python devs are usually seen as academics, more experienced, and very
mathematically inclined. But there was a time when Python was the kiddie
language because it abstracts away so many details. Now it is the majority
language for machine learning, which is a very hot trend.

Once the toolsets stabilize, Node developed a robust multi-threaded model on
the server, and it actually solves an engineering problem better than any
other language, you may start seeing more engineers picking JS as a tool. Till
then, it will just be the hip startup toy used to interest young CS grads that
the companies will have to rip out later to continue scaling.

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alistproducer2
I guess that depends on a person's background. I'm almost certain a kernel
hacker would feel that way. People with more experience in dynamic languages
probably not so much.

I am one of those folks that specialize in JS and admittedly, the freedom of
the syntax can lead to some pretty poor code. I suppose that's why most
"serious" projects have resorted to bolting on type checking systems.

In all depends on where you stand.

