by jauntywundrkind | 2025-12-28 19:19:51+00:00
What a sad miserable cult it is, to be obsessed with performance, and to so desperately need to beat up on a language. I don't know if people spewing this shit are aware of how dull their radical extremism is?

You really don't have to go far down the techempower benchmarks to get to JS. Losing let's just say 33% performance versus an extremely tuned much more minimalist framework on what is practically a micro benchmark is far from the savage fall from civilization & decadence of man, deserving far less scorn and shame than what the cult of js hate fuels their fires on.

I could go on about how JS has benefitted from having incredibly work poured into it, because it is the most popular runtime on the planet, because it's everywhere, because there was a hot war for companies to try to beat each other on making their js runtime good (one of the only langs with many runtimes is interesting). It's a bit excessive & maybe it should have been a more deserving language perhaps (we can debate endlessly), but man... It just doesn't matter. Stressing out, being so mean and nasty (huffy vs Kawasaki, @hoppp's even worse top-voted half sentence snark takedown), trying to impress upon people this image that it's all just so bad: I think there's such a ridiculous off kilter tilting way too hard, and far less of it is about good reasons and valid concerns, and so so so much of it is this bandwagon of negative energy, is radical overconcern.

Like most tools & languages, it's what you do with it. With JS, we have a problem that (mainstream) software hadn't faced before, which is client server architecture, that the client might be a cruddy cheap phone somewhere and/or on a dodgy link. We are trying to build experiences that work across systems, with significant user perceived latency sometimes. And so data & systems architecture matters a lot. Trying to get keep the client primed with up to date data that it needs to render, doing client work without blocking/while maintaining user responsiveness, are hard fun multi-threaded (webworker) challenges, for those folks that care.

And those challenges aren't unique to js. Other languages have similar challenges. Trying to multithread a win32 UI to avoid blocking also was a bit of a nightmare, working off main thread. Doing data sync is a nightmare. There's so many ways to get stuff wrong. And I think a lot of the js code out there does get it wrong. But we experience hundreds or thousands of websites a week, and crucial tools we use that are js client-server are badly architected. I sympathize with why js has such a bad rap. To me it usually seems like architectural app design issues, that companies are too busy building features to really consider the core, to establish data architectures that don't block or lag. And that's not a specific js problem.

There are faster systems yes, but man, the energy being poured into blaming the worst of the world on JS seem ridiculous to me, like such a sad drag, that avoids any interest or fascination on what is so so interesting & so worthy. The language is the least remarkable part of the equation, practically doesn't matter, and the marginal performance levels are (with some exception for very specific cases) almost never a remotely critical factor. Just so so so tired, knowing such enormous and pointless frivolous scorn and disdain is going to overwhelm all conversations, going to take over every thread forever, when it matters so so little, is so very rarely a major determinant.

JS does not have to be the thought terminating cliche to every thread ever (and humbly, I'd assert it doesn't deserve that false conviction either. But either way!).