Ask HN: Help, I'm Drowning in JavaScript
Hey, it&#x27;s okay. I was in your exact boat a few years ago. Javascript has exploded in popularity in just a few years and yes, the ecosystem is horribly complex. It&#x27;s an running gag even among full time JS devs how crazy it&#x27;s gotten. None of us can keep up.<p>It&#x27;s OK. Just tackle it one step at a time. Forget Typescript for now. Don&#x27;t use third party libraries until you need them. Arrow functions are optional. Ternaries are a form of jargon&#x2F;an optional shortcut.<p>If the other developer&#x27;s code is too hard to read, that&#x27;s okay, set it aside for now and you can come back to it when you have a little more experience.<p>Start with the problem you&#x27;re actually trying to solve (which isn&#x27;t terribly clear, sorry). You have XML and HTML you&#x27;re trying to parse? Which is it? (XML will be much easier than HTML, because it&#x27;s much stricter. HTML is notoriously loose, which is why there is only like three real browsers in the world.) What are you trying to do with the parsed input?<p>Regex probably isn&#x27;t the best tool to use here. There are specialized parsers for these data formats that we can help you use, if we better understood your needs.<p>Ask. Ask a lot. Find a mentor if you can. Ask on Stack Overflow if you can&#x27;t. It&#x27;s totally okay. Modern JS is a new and exploding field and we&#x27;re all pretty ignorant about it. Fortunately, 80% of it is relatively easy to learn, and the remaining 20% you can usually ignore or work around. Just take it one step at a time... it&#x27;s not you. It really just is a chaotic ecosystem.