The Problems with Modern Web Development

Before I critique modern web development, I want to make some points: I'm not discouraging anybody from web development. This is only my opinion and my experience of the story. Everyone has their own story. Part 1. Javascript JavaScript is known for being the web's language. It's used everywhere in the web, and can also be used to make external applications outside of web development. JavaScript has many flaws in its language, such as its comparison logic. JavaScript uses the "strict equality operator" that tries to solve its weird type coercions (e.g [] == ![] being true). Another flaw is that JavaScript has poor maintainability. JavaScript has a poorly managed type system that introduces errors without proper error handling. You cannot explicitly define what error you're trying to catch in the try-catch statement. try { functionThatThrowsError () } catch ( error ) { console . error ( error ); if ( error instanceof MyError ) { doSomething (); } } instead of modern languages: try { functionThatThrowsError () } catch ( e : MyError ) { print ! ( " error: ${e.message} " ) } This adds complexity to try-catch statements and makes it almost impossible to handle errors in a robust manner. Another issue with JavaScript's maintainability is the wording of the language. JavaScript has two keywords called undefined and null . In practice these should mean the same thing but it doesn't. An undefined variable is an uninitialized variable, or a function that doesn't return anything. Undefined: // Returns undefined function getName () {} // syntactically correct in JavaScript // but will cause undefined console . log ( getName ()); const myCoolObject = {}; console . log ( myCoolObject . property ); // still syntactically correct in JavaScript even though the property doesn't exist. Null: // Returns a null name function getName () { return null ; } // output: null console . log ( getName ()); const myCoolObject = { property : null }; console . log ( myCoolObject . property ); //out