How did Rich Harris, a "graphics editor," write Svelte? So many designers hardly know JavaScript at all. This one wrote one of the most advanced JavaScript frameworks I've ever seen. It's not just JavaScript. He wrote a compiler that takes a custom, declarative syntax and converts it to imperative JavaScript to surgically update the DOM.
I have a theory that Svelte originated from his work with Rollup.
He was already a great developer when he started Rollup, but writing it brought him to a new level.
Rollup is super clever: most bundlers back then would treat JS modules like giant strings and concatenate them. It was just plain string concatenation, similar to require.js's "define()", so you needed a runtimes that answered to "require()". Modules were assembled during runtime. [1]
Rollup, instead, uses an algorithm to transform the AST of multiple modules into a single AST, inlining all modules and turning them into variables [2], and renaming duplicate identifiers. The final code looks like something that a human would do if asked to put everything in a single file. [3]
This is done by manipulating the AST returned by the Acorn parser, something he seems to have become an expert on.
I'm pretty sure that it was during the development of Rollup that he had other ideas for crazy optimizations, but unable to apply them to a Bundler, he created Svelte.
The NYT graphics team is one of, if not THE, best graphics teams in journalism. You need a significant amount of JavaScript to work on the team. Yes, the team does have designers, but there are many developers on the team, including Harris.
If you look at the Svelte repo, the project didn't appear overnight. The first commit dates to 2016, and since then there have been many contributers. Don't think Harris solely built the project to where it's been. He's had help.
He probably was interested in it. Not everyone has a traditional background or even day job in the area they're passionate about. One of our neighbours growing up in a small village was a nice old retired man who barely had any formal education, years later I found out he was publishing original maths research online. There's also a guy from Finland who IIRC was a bus driver who is putting great C++ low level graphics and retro programming content on Youtube.
He have also written Ractive.js and Rollup.js. From what I've seen Harris doesn't only "know JavaScript" but have a better _vision_ about its future than most, a lot of cool ideas and the skills to try them.
Programming is not a particularly difficult skill. During the 1980s, it was taught in grade schools. JavaScript may be a worse and more difficult language than the ones you could find in the micros scattered across schools, but it's not an order of magnitude more difficult to use effectively.
In a field that goes hand-in-hand with programming, which includes pretty much every artistic one, it shouldn't be all that surprising that people know how to use/are at least curious enough to learn the tools available to them.
Actually JS is better: try writing a compiler in BASIC. In 2020 a graphic designer can do LISP style metaprogramming because of a number of subtle properties of the module system.
