Programming

Yep.

On a rare occasion I hit a website that loads just like "boom" and it surprises me.

Why is that? Because now we are used to having to wait for javascript to load, decompress, parse, JIT, transmogrify, rejimble and perform two rinse cycles just to see the opening times for the supermarket.

(And that's after you dismissed the cookie, discount/offer and mailing list nags with obfuscated X buttons and all other manner of dark patterns to keep you engaged)

Sometimes I wish we'd just stopped at gopher :)

See also: https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

EDIT: Yes, this is facetious.

An fuck off with these dumbass, utterly vacuous Anti JavaScript rants.

I'm getting so sick of people being like "I keep getting hurt by bullets, clearly it's the steel industry that's the problem".

Your issue isn't with JavaScript it's with advertising and data tracking and profit driven product managers and the things that force developers to focus on churning out bad UXs.

I can build an insanely fast and performant blog with Gatsby or Next.js and have the full power of React to build a modern pleasant components hierarchy and also have it be entirely statically rendered and load instantly.

And guess what, unlike the author apparently, I don't find it a mystery. I understand every aspect of the stack I'm using and why each part is doing what . And unlike the author's tech stack, I don't need a constantly running server just to render my client's application and provide basic interactivity on their $500 phone with a GPU more powerful than any that existed from 10 years ago.

This article literally says absolutely nothing substantive. It just rants about how websites are less performant and react is complicated and ignore the reality that if every data tracking script happened backend instead, there would still be performance issues because they are there for the sole reason that those websites do not care to pay to fix them. Full stop. They could fix those performance issues now, while still including JavaScript and data tracking, but they don't because they don't care and never would.

Now it takes four engineers, three frameworks, and a CI/CD pipeline just to change a heading. It’s inordinately complex to simply publish a webpage.

Huh? I mean I get that compiling a webpage that includes JS may appear more complex than uploading some unchanged HTML/CSS files, but I’d still argue you should use a build system because what you want to write and what is best delivered to browsers is usually 2 different things.

Said build systems easily make room for JS compilation in the same way you can compile SASS to CSS and say PUG or nunjucks to HTML. You’re serving 2 separate concerns if you at all care about BOTH optimisation and devx.

Serious old grump or out of the loop vibes in this article.

Around 2010, something shifted.

I have been ranting about Javascript breaking the web since probably close to a decade before that.

Very much true what the author writes, even if the title blames javascript but then in a subtitle he says javascript is not the villain and puts the blame on misuse.

IMHO that possibility of misuse is the reason why javascript needs to have stricter reins.

Ðis is on point for almost everyþing, alþough ðere's a point to be made about compiling websites.

Static site generators let you, e.g. write content in a markup language, raðer ðan HTML. Ðis requires "compiling" the site, to which ðe auþor objects. Static sites, even when ðey use JavaScript, perform better, and I'd argue the compilation phase is a net benefit to boþ auþors and viewers.