Why I’m thankful for JavaScript fatigue
JS fatigue is not a fake problem, it&#x27;s real and different from other forms of fatigue.<p>The metaphor used in the article i.e. &#x27;learning another language every 6 months&#x27; is not apt - because those are not &#x27;new languages&#x27; and they are not &#x27;new and critical parts of the landscape&#x27; for any specific vertical.<p>If any one of those languages were to have the same degree of evolution as JS ... then &#x27;fatigue&#x27; would also be an issue.<p>JS has a pernicious problem for a few reasons:<p>1) The language is quirky, fragmented, there are still no &#x27;agreed upon&#x27; approaches to do many things even outside the context of libraries. There are really no analogues to &#x27;prototype&#x27; based languages, which possibly makes it great for some things, but it&#x27;s not great for those wanting to use more classical ways of thinking about information organization.<p>2) Runtimes, particularly browser - are highly fragmented, and there&#x27;s scant documentation. Safari docs for Mac&#x2F;iOS are literally empty in some spots.<p>3) JS doesn&#x27;t come with a lot of things &#x27;baked in&#x27; to the language that most others support, so discovering those &#x27;standard libs&#x27; has been a painful process.<p>4) Due to the limitations of the browser, we see a lot of churn in frameworks.<p>Though there is some advantage to &#x27;community participation&#x27; - the pernicious problem is <i>most of the churn is not fully forward</i>. It&#x27;s 3 steps forward, 2 steps back, and a step sideways.<p>There&#x27;s a lot of time and investment in learning something new that won&#x27;t exist in the future - that&#x27;s costly.<p>Learning Lambda&#x27;s for Java 8 is probably worth investing in for Java programmers ... because Java 9 will surely use them as well.<p>Taken as a whole - there is an enormous amount of inherent &#x27;reducible complexity&#x27; in the JS ecosystem, which any JS developer intuitively senses.<p>If someone were to have made up their mind about JS right from the start, and had come up with some good standard libs ... and the evolution of the language were to have been more &#x27;version&#x27; and less &#x27;pick and chose&#x27; (Es6 means something different in each environment) ... then the complaint would be valid.<p>It is what it is ... but JS fatigue is a real thing.