Javascript fatigue

We live in an era where everything is exponential. Life’s getting faster, things are getting more competitive and keeping up with things often seams impossible.

Programming is not getting any better. Sure, some things are getting fixed but mostly, we are inventing new things.

We are inventing new paradigms, new patterns, new ways of doing things and while that might indicate that we are advancing, why does it feel opposite ?

It’s no secret that Javascript community is a mess. Even the community itself agreed on it but what is the community doing to stop this madness and do something about it ?

We keep building abstractions over abstractions. We keep overcomplicating things to a degree of insanity. Our abstraction layers are starting to look like assembly low level programs, with horrible naming conventions, four letter arrow functions and all the syntax nonsense which is unbearable.

We keep releasing new ES versions, abstracting abstractions but we keep our eyes closed on the real issue, lack of standardization, ability of browser vendors to asimilate fast enough, we let random frameworks guide the community, breaking it into tiny pieces of hateful kids fightning who’s using cooler framework and who can write a function in less characters.

Our build process will soon consist of sixteen different transpilers and it will take eighteen hours to build a web project so some random browser can understand the intent.

The fatigue is becoming real. The endless stream of information, the pipe, it doesn’t have an end. The amount of time you need to keep up is not less then the actual time you need to build production ready apps.

You might tell, “well, you don’t need to know all the latest stuff” but you are wrong. Those frameworks and tools are dictating the market. To keep up and stay competitive, you need to swim in all of that void with the rest of the crew.

And lastly, why this article ? There are plenty of articles like this online. I’m not the first and far from last who wrote and who will write about this. But until our community realizes that things are not right and that they are not going in the right direction, things are going to get mad.

How do you feel about this subject ? Do you agree or disagree and how do you handle this insanity ?