This kind of rant, culminating in a hackneyed "created in a week" insult, usually comes from backend developers who jumped into frontend work thinking it was a silly little thing that could be mastered in under an hour, discovered that it was a whole separate field, and still failed to adjust their priors.
This time it comes from a "former Delphi product manager" turned clickbait writer. I just hope that my visit with adblock enabled didn't generate any form of income for him or his website.
I think you're dismissing his points too quickly. Even if he could be biased and his points could be presented better, I still think that, as a rule of thumb, anything past 1000 lines of code should be statically typed. If you don't have static typing, you have to keep track of the types yourself. It works for small scripts, but IMO it scales quite badly.
I love JS. Well, that's not true. I love it, and then I hate it, and then I love it again. And I am not sure how to respond.
It has warts. I have seen a staggering amount of flavors / styles of JS.
It is a really expressive language. But that is kind of a cope. You will figure out how to express your wildest ideas. But you will struggle to read others code.
Multithreading is...weird to say the least. Are people spinning up a server per core? Using PM2? Have they discovered the world of testing...without mocks.
If we don't criticize JS it will never get better. So writing off the criticism of the especially hateful BE dev stereotype isn't doing anyone any good. Take it in stride. Nobodies feelings need to be hurt.
Many languages evolve into other languages. JS does not really have that luxury, and I don't know of any langs that preceded it that were similar (my own ignorance).
It is amazing for what it is.
But...if we could start over with what we have learned over the years many things would certainly be very different.
At this point my only hope is that they bake TS into the JS engines so that we could use type information at runtime. It's too entrenched to replace otherwise unless we jump into a new UI paradigm.
The issue I take is that the criticism is vague and outdated. "It was built in a week" is the only direct piece of criticism, which is simply no longer valid. The JS that was built in a week is long dead.
In fact, the whole article is about how TS = good and JS = bad. Except that Javascript is valid Typescript. So every wart or issue that exists in JS also exists in TS, with the exception of a layer of type safety.
This time it comes from a "former Delphi product manager" turned clickbait writer. I just hope that my visit with adblock enabled didn't generate any form of income for him or his website.