The other kind of JavaScript fatigue
Yes, this is a real problem.<p>The solution, as I see it, is to teach less experienced developers about why old school ideas like standardisation and curation and longevity and compatibility are important in the first place. We should be sharing knowledge about the sound programming fundamentals and good practices that we’ve spent half a century and change learning. This is particularly true in fields like web development, where the low barriers to entry and potential for great success (mostly illusory, of course) attract a lot of practitioners who are relatively inexperienced and may simply have no idea how much they are missing.<p>We shouldn’t be praising those who advocate moving fast and breaking things, or auto-updating software every few days, or so-called living standards. We shouldn’t be encouraging a programming style that is one step above join-the-dots puzzles and colouring by numbers (or downloading random modules from some package repo and then asking on Stack Overflow how to make them work, as we call these games in 2016). We shouldn’t be encouraging anyone to treat an applicant’s GitHub account as their CV, and by extension both encouraging less experienced developers to pad out their GitHub with trivial reimplementations of things so they look busy and overlooking anyone who’s too busy doing real work to play the game. We shouldn’t be encouraging those who want to deprecate anything older than five minutes and expect the whole world to stop what it’s doing and update for their convenience. These are the get rich quick schemes of the software development world, the ways that a few people win big but most people just produce poorly-conceived, short-lived, low quality work that in many cases will fail soon afterwards.<p>Unfortunately, the second set of ideas there have been getting far more attention than the first lately, and it doesn’t help that some of the biggest names in the industry are some of the worst offenders. Until some high profile organisations or established thought leaders start promoting a few more old school values like building things that actually work and not penny-pinching at every possible step along the way, it’s hard to see the overall culture shifting in a more healthy direction, and the best we can do is try to do better with our own projects.