JavaScript, in general, is awful as a language in terms of design, and more astute people have wasted many words on this before me.
It was originally designed for writing throwaway frontend code, but people liked it so much that they started using it to build their system architecture—only to realize it doesn’t work well for anything beyond glorified RPC backends.
The type system is wishy-washy, and TypeScript needs a massive type space to compensate for it. Python is also dynamically typed, but it has a strongly typed system that saves you from runtime blowups. JavaScript doesn’t even properly blow up at runtime—you just get [object Object] or some random undefined error. TypeScript is a fantastic piece of engineering from the C# guy, but even they couldn’t fix all of JavaScript’s language-level blunders.
Few people want to build mission-critical backends on a weakly typed language.
The ecosystem is a mess, and things randomly break after a few days. My Python and Go apps from 2018 still work exactly as they did on day one. Go’s gorm and Python’s SQLAlchemy are the default ORMs that pretty much everyone uses. And how many ORMs does the JS ecosystem have?
And let’s not even start with frontend frameworks—no one loves them two days later.
The Next.js project I built yesterday is already showing 69 vulnerabilities. This sorry excuse of a language, coupled with terrible design and an indecisively childish community, makes it difficult to take seriously.
It was originally designed for writing throwaway frontend code, but people liked it so much that they started using it to build their system architecture—only to realize it doesn’t work well for anything beyond glorified RPC backends.
The type system is wishy-washy, and TypeScript needs a massive type space to compensate for it. Python is also dynamically typed, but it has a strongly typed system that saves you from runtime blowups. JavaScript doesn’t even properly blow up at runtime—you just get [object Object] or some random undefined error. TypeScript is a fantastic piece of engineering from the C# guy, but even they couldn’t fix all of JavaScript’s language-level blunders.
Few people want to build mission-critical backends on a weakly typed language.
The ecosystem is a mess, and things randomly break after a few days. My Python and Go apps from 2018 still work exactly as they did on day one. Go’s gorm and Python’s SQLAlchemy are the default ORMs that pretty much everyone uses. And how many ORMs does the JS ecosystem have?
And let’s not even start with frontend frameworks—no one loves them two days later.
The Next.js project I built yesterday is already showing 69 vulnerabilities. This sorry excuse of a language, coupled with terrible design and an indecisively childish community, makes it difficult to take seriously.