Today’s Javascript, from an outsider’s perspective
I had a similarly frustrating experience when I first set up Python to use Django. The complete mess that is the Python 2/3 split (thankfully somewhat better now after many years), trying to figure out what the hell pip and pipenv were (this was before I was familiar with package management).<p>However, I initially learned some Python in university and I liked it then. We just installed Idle and ran some simple scripts, and everything worked. That's the right way to learn a language. If you dive straight into JS package management, you are attempting to learn multiple things at the same time:<p>* Node.js environment<p>* Browser environment<p>* JavaScript syntax<p>* 'running a localhost'<p>* JavaScript modules<p>* NPM package management<p>You need to tackle these one by one. If you do them all at once, even with prior experience in other languages, of course you're gonna have a bad time.<p>Really what I take away from this post is that the author is a bad teacher, although the experience of her student is probably similar to what many people experience when trying to learn by themselves.<p>There are many improvements that could be made to the JS ecosystem, but this post does not do the current state justice. What it highlights, if anything, is a problem with the available of a standardized learning path. But I'm not sure what the solution to that would be.