The problem with javascript

It’s very easy to do simple things with JavaScript (like change this div when that link is clicked) especially with libraries like jQuery to help you, this is why in a lot of companies front end web development is handled by the most junior and unskilled developers in the company.

JavaScript is actually a very capable dynamic language that borrows heavily from functional programing, add to this advanced JavaScript frameworks (like Angular) and you got yourself a very advanced and modern environment that uses all that dynamic and functional power.

And with today’s “single page web apps” we write big complex programs directly in JavaScript and want (or even have) to use the power of the language and the environment, those are no the previous generation of web apps where everything happened on the server and JavaScript was used to add a little bit of interactivity – this is real software development that happens mainly in JavaScript.

And this is where things go wrong, that junior developer strait out of school that only studied basic Java (if you’re lucky) doesn’t know anything about dynamic or functional languages and without some serious mentoring their head will explode when they try to grasp “simple” JavaScript concepts like passing inline anonymous functions around.

This is were we are today, frontend web development is often considered simple, unimportant and is generally done by untrained and unqualified junior developers – at the same time that frontend is expected to be both extremely complicated in functionality and look beautiful (and simple).

This leaves us with two options – continue to push this work into the hands of the mass of unqualified so-called developers in the hope they’ll mange to teach themselves a pretty substantial amount of advanced concepts and bring in a “highly paid consultant” when this fails (please do continue to do this, sometimes I’m the highly paid consultant) or – treat frontend web development like the advanced difficult field it is and actually pay to bring in the qualified developers to begin with.

ok, rant over, what do you think?