The Dark Side of Javascript Fatigue

Javascript fatigue is a real experience for many developers who don’t spend their day to day in Node.js bashing out javascript. For many developers javascript is an occasional concern. The thing I can’t figure out about the javascript development world is the incredible churn. Churn is often disaster for a programming community. It frustrates anyone trying to build a solid application that will have a shelf life of a decade or more. Newcomers are treated to overwhelming choices without enough knowledge to choose. Then they find what they’ve learned is no longer the new and shiny tool only a few months later. And anyone on the outside feels validated in not jumping in.

Many in the javascript community attempt to couch all the churn as a benefit. It’s the incredible pace of innovation. I see sentiments like this:

The truth is, if you don’t like to constantly be learning new things, web development is probably not for you. You might have chosen the wrong career!

Josh Burgess

Even if we accept that it all the ‘innovation’ is moving things forward more quickly, there is rarely the reflection on the consequences. I’ve worked on an approximately 9 year old Rails app for about 5 years now and I’m still shocked by the number different frameworks and styles of javascript that litter the app:

  • Hand rolled pre JQuery javascript
  • Javascript cut and paste style
  • RJS (an attempt to avoid writing javascript altogether in early rails)
  • YUI
  • Prototype
  • Google Closure
  • JQuery
  • Angular

Eight different frameworks in about as many years. And though we adopted Angular about 2 years ago we’re already dealing with non-backwards compatibility, Angular 2.0. This is a large burden on maintenance and it costs us very real time to spin up on each one when we have to enhance the app or fix a bug.

This is a monolithic app that’s been built over quite a few years, but the big difference is the Rails app was opinionated and stuck to a lot of default conventions. The framework churn of Rails has been much more gradual and generally backwards compatible. The largest pain we experience was going from Rails 2 to 3, when Rails was merged with Merb. The knowledge someone built up in their first few years working in Ruby and Rails still applies. The churn is certainly exists, but at a measure pace.

In phone screens when I describe our main app, I list off the myriad javascript frameworks we use as a negative they should know about. And almost none of the candidates have heard of Google Closure, even though a critical piece of the app was written in it. They often assume I must be talking about the JVM Clojure.

Javascript has never been popular because of elegance or syntax. Rants like the following are not hard to find:

You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever designed and put it on the server.

Drew Hamlett

Large majorities of developers would rather avoid it completely to focus on any modern language and hopefully use a transpiler if they have to touch Javascript. In this environment it might do the javascript community some good to settle down some and focus on some stability.