> Plenty of incompetent developers at all levels and all languages. I don't think it's a javascript issue.
While that's potentially true, I do suspect that there's a lot fewer, say, Haskell, Clojure, or Elixir developers than there are for some other languages. Not that they don't exist, but it seems unlikely that you'd cross paths with them.
There's orders of magnitudes less developers and jobs available for those languages. I'm only not an elixir developer because there's almost zero elixir jobs.
Well, both versions are true, the latter mostly following from the former. With a lower absolute number of developers, the number of incompetent programmers is going to be lower in absolute terms, despite the ratio staying the same as in other languages.
But I believe there's a difference in the ratio, too, due to the way Haskell, Erlang, Lisp, etc. programmers learn these languages. Basically, they learn the languages not because someone wants them to (eg. Java, C#, etc.) and not because they have to just to be able to do something they want to do (eg. JavaScript, SQL, etc.). Instead, people learn such languages because they themselves want to, which makes them more probable to delve deeper, learn more and acquire more important skills.
Well, that's a conjecture I can't prove and I may be completely wrong on this, it's just what my anecdotal experience suggests.
Another part of it is that someone who's incompetent in, e.g. JavaScript, is likely to not make it very far trying to do Clojure. And, again some conjecture, I'd bet that someone who is great at Clojure would write very nice JS.
When I was learning Python back in, 2006 or so, I remember someone stating "You can write Java in any language". This was referring to people who wrote Python code with these huge class hierarchies that inherited from stuff all over the place, when a "Pythonic" solution would have just involved a couple of functions.
While that's potentially true, I do suspect that there's a lot fewer, say, Haskell, Clojure, or Elixir developers than there are for some other languages. Not that they don't exist, but it seems unlikely that you'd cross paths with them.