JavaScript: The First 20 Years
I don&#x27;t think its physically possible to read this in the time since its been posted, but since people are commenting anyways I might as well join in.<p>I&#x27;ve been using JS since the JScript days, and let me tell you it was horrible. Awful. I would rather use VBA, Perl, early PHP, really anything I&#x27;ve touched besides COBOL. It was buggy, horrifically slow, had an even worse standard library than it does now, didn&#x27;t work the same way between anything. I remember testing performance and getting 1000 integer increments a second in an empty for loop. Even back then an alarm clock running C was orders of magnitude faster.<p>But the massive popularity of the web has made it decent. Its a good example of the (overused) axiom that you can pour enough money into anything and make it good. With JS, this actually happened. Probably because the other choice was transitioning the web to Flash, Silverlight, and Java Applets. The proprietary solutions lost the battle thankfully, even though admittedly they were better than JS for a long time after they died.<p>There&#x27;s still lingering problems, some which may prove un-fixable. The standard library is a joke. The 1 million line ancient Java monolith at work pulls in less libraries, by count and space then create-react-app. And not having threads is just terrible. People that don&#x27;t know better ape over async, not knowing that most languages have async, threads, sometimes fibers, and fast shared memory between them. And NPM works decently but putting 5 million files into my node_modules folder is absurd. NPM is the only reason I know that most OS&#x27;es still have a path length limit. You would think the world could standardize on putting libraries into a zip or something like even ancient crufty languages like Java do. If it wasn&#x27;t for SSD&#x27;s modern JS wouldn&#x27;t even be usable. And can we just compile JS already? Minification seems so normal that everyone&#x27;s forgotten its a shitty hack. If you&#x27;re going to minify to the point that JS resembles bytecode why not just standardize a format. People say &quot;JS runs right away because its not compiled&quot;... Well... How long does your WebPack take to transmogrify 150MB of spaghettified JS into a pile of chunks you can actually feed a web browser in prod? Probably longer than it takes most languages to compile. If we just compiled to a reasonable format like other VM languages, we wouldn&#x27;t waste so much time parsing and keeping these tools working with every semantics update.<p>Here&#x27;s to the hope that money poured into JS will finally fix the remaining issues. I give it another ten years and I&#x27;ll finally enjoy most of my time in JS land.