> I've never heard my parents or non-developer friends complain about a site using too much JavaScript
How can they? They don't know what it is. They are complaining about it a lot of times you don't hear about it; every time they have to fill an abomination of a form, every time they hard-close their browser because it's stuck, every time they just wait for a page to load, every time 'something' happens they did not ask for but it happened anyway.
That's not the fault of JS but it is the problem of the ecosystem, the ease of use etc. Messing things up and 'good enough' are very popular things it seems. The thing is that, on the internet, good enough can go wrong in many ways. And the ways it does just tired people out in reporting it. Besides the billion $ sites (and still there , but less), there are so many bugs in the average website; we just ignore them and start over or go somewhere else because it's just not worth burning your energy on; no-one is going to change. And a lot of that is broken JS. Again, not the fault of the language JavaScript, but of the fast and loose usage of the language.
Anecdotally, but I am sure this resonates with people who sometimes do not order only from Amazon, I tried to order some impossible meat from a site here and when it was time to pay, there was a JS undefined error and it emptied my shopping cart. This happens a billion times a day all over the place.
JavaScript is vilified by 'the elite' because of it and that's unfair, but the ecosystem promotes it. Everyone is focused on 'process' (CI, deployment, many irrelevant unit tests; a lot of busy work basically) and 'beautiful code' (style, linting, things a beautifier can do for you automatically) and ego (github stars), but robustness or longevity is just not really a focus of many.
Everyone is focused on 'process' (CI, deployment, many irrelevant unit tests; a lot of busy work basically) and 'beautiful code' (style, linting, things a beautifier can do for you automatically) and ego (github stars), but robustness or longevity is just not really a focus of many.
You just summed up the entire web development ecosystem in general. There's also the trendchasing and continual churn of breaking things that used to work just fine, replacing them with even more inefficient and complex solutions. In the area of the software industry that I work in, doing things that way would quickly make customers disappear.
The "inelegance" or otherwise "lack of purity" of JS doesn't really bother me; a lot of languages have parts like that, and I've written some JS myself.
How can they? They don't know what it is. They are complaining about it a lot of times you don't hear about it; every time they have to fill an abomination of a form, every time they hard-close their browser because it's stuck, every time they just wait for a page to load, every time 'something' happens they did not ask for but it happened anyway.
That's not the fault of JS but it is the problem of the ecosystem, the ease of use etc. Messing things up and 'good enough' are very popular things it seems. The thing is that, on the internet, good enough can go wrong in many ways. And the ways it does just tired people out in reporting it. Besides the billion $ sites (and still there , but less), there are so many bugs in the average website; we just ignore them and start over or go somewhere else because it's just not worth burning your energy on; no-one is going to change. And a lot of that is broken JS. Again, not the fault of the language JavaScript, but of the fast and loose usage of the language.
Anecdotally, but I am sure this resonates with people who sometimes do not order only from Amazon, I tried to order some impossible meat from a site here and when it was time to pay, there was a JS undefined error and it emptied my shopping cart. This happens a billion times a day all over the place.
JavaScript is vilified by 'the elite' because of it and that's unfair, but the ecosystem promotes it. Everyone is focused on 'process' (CI, deployment, many irrelevant unit tests; a lot of busy work basically) and 'beautiful code' (style, linting, things a beautifier can do for you automatically) and ego (github stars), but robustness or longevity is just not really a focus of many.