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Here, Orta Therox, Amelia Wattenberger and Scott Tolinski about the state of JavaScript and its fast-paced ecosystem.
The Transcript
Orta Therox
My thoughts on JavaScript as an ecosystem are complicated, in part because I think the JavaScript ecosystem is complicated. I spent a decade working in an environment where there was one provider of all tools, environments and languages, and then you suddenly move to JavaScript and there is no single opinion on what JavaScript is.
Amelia Wattenberger
There is so much noise that you kind of just have to ignore things for a given amount of time until they still stick around and you're like, “Oh, okay, maybe I'll check this thing out”.
Scott Tolinski
It's in this space where it's moving kind of at a breakneck speed. You're constantly getting new things, constantly seeing evolution projects, constantly seeing something else. You have to learn. And for a lot of people, this can be really intense. It can be scary for new developers, people trying to get jobs, people breaking into the market, it can feel very, very, very overwhelming. In fact, we often call this JavaScript fatigue just because there's just so, so much there.
Scott Tolinski
But me personally, as somebody who gets to try out all of these things for a living, you know, what I've seen is a very clear evolution in terms of ease of use. So while we might not like the churn and the change, I think any given period of time that's moved forward has overall made our lives as developers way more functional. We can create new things that we could have never even dreamed about creating ten years ago.
Scott Tolinski
For people out there who are trying to keep up with the pace in their professional careers, it can often feel super overwhelming with all of the different options that are out there. But oftentimes we don't need, we don't need to explore every option that exists. We don't need to go down every avenue. That's not for most developers. Most developers are going to be able to take new things and the result of these new things and integrate it into their lives, hopefully without ever having to deal with things behind the scenes.
Scott Tolinski
I think about when a package can sometimes be updated with a whole new thing behind the scenes that suddenly makes everything work five times faster at no cost to you as a developer. I think the average developer is going to see more gains in their personal workflow and their personal developer experience, not by necessarily paying attention to all of the new latest and greatest things, but by receiving those updates down the line at a later date.
Orta Therox
I think it's hard to really put your finger on what the JavaScript ecosystem is, let alone be able to say like, “do you have a perspective on it?” I think that's great. I think the fact that it is a polyglot environment of many people with many different goals is part of what I think makes the Web succeed, and I want the web to succeed.
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