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Mo3 | 8 months ago

So how did JavaScript break the web then?

It didn't. Badly engineered sites suck. Nothing new.

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const_cast|8 months ago

No this is partially Javascript's problem. JS has virtually no standard library and was, for a long time, a bad, lobotomized language. ES6 helps a lot, but in the meantime we had to rely on absolutely huge frameworks.

JS also did not properly address the complexity of the web. We didn't have good APIs for manipulating the DOM. We didn't have good APIs for making server requests. We did things like spawn iframes to call XML endpoints that we then transform the result of into HTML via XSLT and then inject that into the DOM.

And, on top of all of this, JS is not performant. It's an extremely footgunny language, too. So we build on top more complexity. Minimizers, linters, static analyzers, compression, obfuscators, and more. These days JS is no longer a scripting language - it has more build steps than a C++ project.

So anyway, now here we are.