Real programmers are language agnostic. Anyways what's the project?
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2025
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We're writing an online banking service entirely in brainfuck. Backend, frontend, even middleend if we have to
I enjoy the contradiction of middleend
The middlemiddle
E: My backend don't middlemiddle, it forks
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For something you're getting paid for, sure. But if you're contributing in your free time for fun or whatever, presumably you'd prefer to use a language you actually like.
Real programmers will write in a way that user’s resources are not being wasted because you need a full browser, a JS runtime, and DOM juggling, to show even the simplest application.
It’s not rare for simple JS applications to consume over half a gigabyte of RAM on startup, and way more CPU than their native counterparts. That this was normalized and even defended is stupid.
I think you’re thinking of Electron apps, but that’s not really a criticism of JavaScript, that’s a criticism of Electron. There are plenty of JS platforms that don’t require a browser/DOM. React Native is the biggest example. Also, GJS if you want native Linux apps.
Yes and no. "Real" programmers care about engineering choices ; and JS is the cardboard of programming languages.
Perfect for packaging (which in this metaphor is UI), horrible for building a bridge with. And vice-versa, I wouldn't try and make amazon packaging out of reinforced concrete.
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I worked in heavy JavaScript codebases back in the IE days and wasn’t too crazy about it. Then JIT compilers like v8 came along and made it run a lot faster and TypeScript also made it more usable for larger codebases. I now consider TypeScript among my favorite languages. I’ve also written a lot of Go lately, and while I appreciate its speed and smaller memory footprint, the missing language features kind of grate on me and I don’t mind taking a bit of a performance hit for the (IMO) superior ergonomics of TypeScript, especially for workloads where I/O is more of the bottleneck than compute.
agreed. typescript is excelent, especially if you make it strict and know a bit of complex types to make sure things stay put.
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If you care this much about JS being cringe I don't trust you to contribute good code to a project anyways
People on here really think the language determines the quality of the project lol
Not determine, but allows. C is a shitty language too. Linux is great because Linus bars off shitty contributors.
JS has saved me many hours of mind-numbing, error-prone manual keyboard work by giving me a way to hack together a simple bit of automation as a web page.
Even when a computer has been ham-fistedly locked-down by an overzealous IT department, I can almost always still access a text editor and a browser that will load local HTML files.
Add to that the beauty of bookmarklets.
It's silly that IT departments forces us to resort to techniques used before browser extensions became a thing, and it's ironic that it's because they don't know how to code, but here we are.
Unless you are making a HTML/CSS only site (based) what do you want to use instead?
Invent a new internet where you can script pages directly in Python or TypeScript.
Otherwise, you get to enjoy a silly toy language from the 90's.
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Feels the same whenever a project is written in python, but I uninstall it too.
why?
Same, so I’ll only answer for me: Python is dependency hell, also breaking existing code with every second update. Hard pass.
Python versioning is terrible
breaking existing code with every second update
Still remembering python 3 release from 17 years ago?
They have breaking changes in their minor versions...
We are no longer in the Python 2 days. You have lots of wiggle room for using the version you want and are rarely forced to use specific releases.
There still plenty of "this version of pytorch doesn't run reliably with Python 3.12, please use 3.10", though. It's not all sunshine and roses.
pytorch is a unique kind of mess
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Personally, I find that (complex) software implemented in Python tends to be so unreliable that I typically don't want to use it after all, but I only find that out after wasting a bunch of time learning the software.
It's just frustrating, especially if I come back to the software every so often, naively thinking that it's been a few versions, so maybe they've fixed it. It's always just different bugs, which still end up being too frustrating to use the software.
To give an example, I like to compose music using Lilypond, which is more-or-less a programming language to create sheet music. And there is a program that's supposed to give you a well-integrated workflow for that (i.e. an IDE), called Frescobaldi.
The first time I tried it, playback of the composed music wouldn't work.
The second time, I couldn't click on notes to jump to the respective code snippet.
And I tried it again a few weeks ago and it just crashed immediately with an obscure error message.
Instead, I've slapped together a script, which just opens the sheet music in my PDF viewer, the code in my normal editor and then uses a CLI tools to generate and playback the sheet music. And while it's definitely not perfect, it has been working more reliably for me than Frescobaldi ever has.
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A few lists of javascript WTFs:
- https://javascriptwtf.com/
- https://github.com/denysdovhan/wtfjs
- https://wtfjs.com/ (last updated 2016 but most of these things can/will never be fixed)
To anyone who thinks they know JS well and that its quirkiness is not a problem, let me know how you do on these quizzes:
You’re not wrong, but newer version of the language have steered devs away from these quirks. The quirks remain because the JavaScript language is 100% backwards compatible. It’s fun to laugh at these quirks, but I’ve been a full time JavaScript developer for 4 years and part time since 2015, and I’ve never seen any of these quirks come up in the real world. If you tell your developers to use === instead of == in code review, you eliminate most of the problems imo.
JavaScript tooling deserves more hate imo. The ecosystem is kinda a disaster, but Vite is making a lot of progress in fixing that. If you ignore React Native and metro bundler, I think the state of web is looking pretty optimistic right now. At least from a technology perspective. From a business/AI/enshitification perspective we’re cooked lol
this quirkiness doesn't materialise in real world applications on any scale that makes it harder to deal with than the alternatives.
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JavaScript really depends on the people writing it restricting themselves to a sane (ish) subset, just like C++
My personal gripe with JavaScript is how horribly slow it is. C++ at least has the merit of being fast once compiled. I wouldn't feel great contributing to a JS project knowing fully well that a rewrite in a faster language would be 10x as effective as anything I could improve as is.
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Prissy little programmers
Genuinely curious, how many of you hating on JS have done professional frontend work recently? If you have done professional work, was it part/full time, using TypeScript, how big was your eng team, did you have to worry about Server Side Rendering? Maybe some extra context will show certain types of projects yield devs that hate the language.
I like minecraft 
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