Spend enough time procrastinating on reddit, you inevitable end up reading the same links again and again and again. One of the common links I see are the ones that complain about JavaScript. There’s wat, the tried and tired ecosystem article and many many more.

To all of those articles, I just want to say:

We get it

We get it, JavaScript sucks. It’s insecure, it has weird features, npm is out of control, etc. Heard it all. Yep, even that one. Thanks for your feedback.

Now what are you gonna do about it? Complaining about valid issues is great! But ultimately you need to stop complaining and start fixing. Which is where a lot of these articles stop¹.

And oh boy are there a lot of projects working on fixing JavaScript. For one, you can make TC39 proposals to add new features to the language. You may say the damage has been done, but I disagree! Features such as triple equals (===), arrow functions (=>) and optional chaining (?.) have done a lot to improve the JavaScript experience. I’d go as far as to say that if you don’t know ES6+, you’re not really qualified to judge JavaScript. That’s like judging Java pre-generics, or C++ pre-templates or Go, uhh, well you get my point.

Another great place to start is contributing to tooling. Whether it’s TypeScript, npm or whatever tools you use, you can help make the JS ecosystem better. A great innovation that npm just pushed is automatic dependency screening. That way you can see if your project has vulnerabilities whenever you run npm.

Or hell, if you just hate JavaScript, why not work on getting another language into the browser? With WebAssembly, you can compile a number of languages to the browser. Go, Rust, C# and many others are already targeting the browser.

You’re not obligated to help the JS community. But if you’re so passionate that you’re screaming from the rooftops about how JavaScript sucks, maybe spend that effort helping make it suck less.

However while I will admit that parts of JavaScript truly do suck (semicolon insertion, automatic globals, etc.), I don’t think JavaScript gets enough credit for the stuff it does get right. For one, arrow functions are totally awesome! The syntax is concise and clear, and totally makes me want to strip out all the fun/func/fn/function keywords in other languages.

Also package management is pretty nice now! npm installs locally by default. We have lockfiles and dependency auditing. It’s pretty great! Python’s whole pip install is global by default doesn’t look as great anymore².

It’s also great having a lightweight object/struct type with destructuring. Almost feels antiquated to have to put quotes around keys in a Python dict.

I don’t want this to turn into a language bashing session, so I’ll end with this: If you don’t like JavaScript in its current state, consider doing something to change its current state.