I Suck at JavaScript

Hi, My name is Andy Leverenz. I design, code, and am an author of things. Check out my blog Web-Crunch https://web-crunch.com🤘🏻

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💻 Previously published at: https://web-crunch.com/i-suck-at-javascript

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Today, more than ever, more developers are reaching for JavaScript as their programming language of choice. That choice makes sense because JavaScript can exist and run practically anywhere but for me it has been the hardest language to grasp. Why is this? This blog post and video explain.

Let's start by setting the stage

My day-to-day work is all browser based. Using JavaScript in the browser is pretty much the reason it exists in my mind, although it's truly capable of much more. For me, JavaScript started as some enhanced interactions that hooked into DOM elements of my designs (more or less some added flare). jQuery was still the champion of the interactivity of the web and it was perfectly fine to use it since it covered so many obstables early versions of JavaScript and browsers just wouldn't support.

Now-a-days full-fledge frameworks that are responsible for both frontend and backend tasks and JavaScript is responsible for rendering markup directly but in order to do this you need compilers, linters, task runners, uglifiers, and dependencies galore. When did this become the cool thing to do?

jQuery bad, Vanilla JS good ?

It seems like now you get shunned if you use jQuery at all. I get that you want to fit in with the most modern JavaScript developer hype but if you can't write good JavaScript in the first place that supports many browsers then why do we instill these thoughts such as libraries like jQuery are really bad.

God forbid you load in the rather small jQuery library to make writing scripts a little less painful. I say this as many of these newer frameworks and JavaScript patterns depend on Node and what seems like gigs of dependencies. How is this any better than where we were?

I'm not so sure that it is. Besides the nice advancements of ES6 we really only get off with an updated syntax rather than making writing JavaScript that much easier to write. Take the arrow function for instance. That thing can get quite confusing to any type of developer. Rather than reading like English like other awesome languages, ES6 gets redacted to using characters with meanings rather than words like function.

For someone coming from the land of writing the word function a mega ton I fear my hurdle to really learn and understand the JavaScript language will be a never ending one.

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