JavaScript

`0:22:32`

to be able to use more modern ways of programming with a browser that was seen as stuck with an ancient version of JavaScript that no one actually wanted to work with. And that made sense to me, but it was also deeply unpleasant. And I remember thinking during that time, the dark ages, as I refer to them with JavaScript, that this cannot be the final destination. There's no way that we have managed to turn the internet into such an unpleasant place to work. Where I would start working on a project in JavaScript using webpack and all of these dependencies. And I would put it down for literally five minutes and the thing wouldn't compile anymore. The amount of churn that the JavaScript community, especially with its frameworks and its tooling went through in the decade from 2010 to 2020 was absurd. And you had to be trapped inside of that asylum to not realize what an utterly perverse situation

`0:23:37`

we had landed ourselves in. Why does everything break all the time? I mean, the joke wouldn't be just that the software would break, that would annoy me personally. But then I'd go on Hacker News and I'd see some thread on the latest JavaScript release of some framework. And the thread would be like, someone would ask, "Well, aren't we using the thing we just used three months ago?" And people would be like, "That thing is so outdated. That's so three months ago. You gotta get with the new program. We're completely rewriting everything for the oomph-teen time." And anything you've learned in the framework you've been spending the last amount of time on, it's all useless. You gotta throw everything out and you gotta start over. Why aren't you doing it, stupid idiot? — Is that a kind of mass hysteria that took over the developer community you think? Like where you have to keep creating new frameworks and new frameworks. And are we past that dark age? — I think we're getting out of it, and we're getting out of it because browsers have gotten so much better. There was a stagnation in browser technology.

`0:24:38`

Some of it was an overhang all the way back from IE5. So IE5 essentially put the whole internet development experience into a deep freeze, because Microsoft won the browser wars in the mid 2000s, and then they basically disbanded their browser development team. 'Cause they're like, "All right, job done. We don't need any more innovation on the internet. Can we just go back to writing Windows forms or something now that we control everything?" And it really wasn't until obviously Firefox kind of kindled a little bit of something. Then Chrome got into the scene and Google got serious about moving to web forward. That you had a kindling of maybe the browser could be better. Maybe the browser wasn't frozen in time in 2005. Maybe the browser could actually evolve like at the development platform that it is. But then what happened was you had a lot of smart people who poured in to the web because the web turned out to be the greatest

`0:25:38`

application development platform of all time. This was where all the money was being made. This was where all the billionaires were being minted. This was where the Facebooks and whatever of the world came to be. So you had all of this brain power applied to the problem of how to work with the web. And there were some very smart people with some, I'm sure very good ideas who did not have programmer happiness as their motivation number one. They had other priorities and those priorities allowed them to discount and even rationalize the complexity they were injecting everywhere. Some of that complexity came from organizational structure. When you have a company like Facebook, for example, that does depend on the web and wanna push it forward, but have sliced the development role job into these tiny little niches. I'm a front-end glob pipeline configurator.

`0:26:41`

Oh yeah, well, I'm a front-end whatever engineer. And suddenly the web developer was no longer one person. It was 15 different roles. That in itself injected a ton of complexity. But I also wanna give it the bold case here, which was that some of that complexity was necessary to get to where we are today. That the complexity was a bridge. It wasn't the destination, but we had to cross that bridge to get to where we are today, where browsers are frankly incredible. The JavaScript you can write in a text file and then serve on a web server for a browser to ingest is amazing. It's actually a really good experience. You don't need any pre-processing. You could just write text files, send them to a browser, and you have an incredible development. — And we should also say that it can kind of be broken, at least the HTML, but even the JavaScript could be a little bit broken and it kind of still works like maybe a half-ass works. But like, just the amount of mess of smelly code that a browser has to deal with is insane.