At some point, JavaScript got good
I’ve been both fortunate and unfortunate to have worked with JavaScript full-time since about 2012. It was “unfortunate” because prior to around 2015—when major improvements started coming to the ECMAScript spec—the language was a real pain to wrangle on a daily basis.
However, I’m also very fortunate because while there’s been a lot of improvements made to JavaScript since then, the fundamental way the language works is still the same, so having a deeper understanding of the new syntax (sans sugar) is useful when it comes to debugging, working with legacy projects, or digging deeper into lower-level code. I’m also able to better appreciate just how good us JS devs have it these days.
I started working with JavaScript professionally back when I worked for a small startup called Lanica back in 2012. It was an Appcelerator-funded company that made a mobile game engine for the Titanium SDK.
Coming from Lua, which is a simple but very “sane” scripting language (that I used heavily at a prior company), JavaScript was quite the nightmare to learn (well) and use. I later moved onto working on traditional web frontends in JavaScript (anyone remember Backbone.js?) and backend development with Node.js.
