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The Dulin Report

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2015

On Managing Stress, Multitasking and Other New Year's Resolutions Jan 1, 2015 Configuring Master-Slave Replication With PostgreSQL Jan 31, 2015 Trying to Replace Cassandra with DynamoDB ? Not so fast Feb 2, 2015 On apprenticeship Feb 13, 2015 Where AWS Elastic BeanStalk Could be Better Mar 3, 2015 Finding Unused Elastic Load Balancers Mar 24, 2015 Do not apply data science methods without understanding them Mar 25, 2015 Microsoft and Apple Have Everything to Lose if Chromebooks Succeed Mar 31, 2015 Two developers choose to take a class Apr 1, 2015 What can Evernote Teach Us About Enterprise App Architecture Apr 2, 2015 Exploration of the Software Engineering as a Profession Apr 8, 2015 Ordered Sets and Logs in Cassandra vs SQL Apr 8, 2015 Building a Supercomputer in AWS: Is it even worth it ? Apr 13, 2015 Apple is (or was) the Biggest User of Apache Cassandra Apr 23, 2015 My Brief Affair With Android Apr 25, 2015 Why I am not Getting an Apple Watch For Now: Or Ever Apr 26, 2015 The Clarkson School Class of 2015 Commencement May 5, 2015 The Clarkson School Class of 2015 Commencement speech May 5, 2015 We Need a Cloud Version of Cassandra May 7, 2015 Guaranteeing Delivery of Messages with AWS SQS May 9, 2015 Smart IT Departments Own Their Business API and Take Ownership of Data Governance May 13, 2015 Big Data is not all about Hadoop May 30, 2015 The longer the chain of responsibility the less likely there is anyone in the hierarchy who can actually accept it Jun 7, 2015 Your IT Department's Kodak Moment Jun 17, 2015 Attracting STEM Graduates to Traditional Enterprise IT Jul 4, 2015 Book Review: "Shop Class As Soulcraft" By Matthew B. Crawford Jul 5, 2015 The Three Myths About JavaScript Simplicity Jul 10, 2015 Social Media Detox Jul 11, 2015 Big Data Should Be Used To Make Ads More Relevant Jul 29, 2015 On Maintaining Personal Brand as a Software Engineer Aug 2, 2015 Ten Questions to Consider Before Choosing Cassandra Aug 8, 2015 What Every College Computer Science Freshman Should Know Aug 14, 2015 We Live in a Mobile Device Notification Hell Aug 22, 2015 Top Ten Differences Between ActiveMQ and Amazon SQS Sep 5, 2015 Setting Up Cross-Region Replication of AWS RDS for PostgreSQL Sep 12, 2015 I Stand With Ahmed Sep 19, 2015 Banking Technology is in Dire Need of Standartization and Openness Sep 28, 2015 IT departments must transform in the face of the cloud revolution Nov 9, 2015 Operations costs are the Achille's heel of NoSQL Nov 23, 2015 Our civilization has a single point of failure Dec 16, 2015

The Three Myths About JavaScript Simplicity

July 10, 2015

Pondering
There is a perception among many in the software industry that JavaScript is simpler to learn and use than, say, Java. I've even heard some say that JavaScript developers are easier to recruit.
While there are many myths about JavaScript that detractors cite as reasons not to use it, there are also at least as many myths propagated by advocates of this technology. These are the most common ones I've heard over the years.

1) JavaScript Developers are Easier to Recruit

That only holds true if you are trying to hire a 17 year old who built simple websites out of his mother's basement. Yes, he knows JavaScript, and yes he'll take you up on that low ball offer that no experienced developer will accept. Will you get a timely professional result ?

Lisa Eadicicco writing for Business Insider shows that average JavaScript developer salary is right up there along with C++ and Java:


  1. JavaScript - $91,461

  2. C++ - $93,502

  3. JAVA - $94,908


A cursory search of LinkedIn reveals almost 5 million people listing Java as their skill, and less than 3 million who list JavaScript as their skill. By this statistics alone, one is almost twice as likely to recruit a Java developer than they are a JavaScript developer.

2) JavaScript is Easy to Learn

By the law of Turing Equivalency most programming languages are equivalent and if you know one you can learn any other. The complexity is never in the language itself - it is in the frameworks and libraries.

I am writing this post in 2015 and JavaScript has been powering web apps for at least 20 years. One would think that by now handling HTTP and building MVC apps would be part of the platform. Yet, JavaScript leaves much to be desired.

JavaScript, for example, has multiple libraries for HTTP REST requests. In Node.js it is not uncommon to use one library on the server and a totally different one on the client. Consider the multitude of single-page app MVC frameworks - each one has a drastically different philosophy of using it.

The difference between null and undefined and between == and === as well as lack of type safety leave much to be desired. The developer has to constantly keep those nuances in mind, as if they have nothing better to do.

3) Non-Developers Can Learn to Use JavaScript

This argument usually goes along with myth #2. The only advantage JavaScript has over other languages is that the most one needs to get started writing in it is a text editor and a web browser. That is not something to be overlooked -- JavaScript really is an easy language to get started in because of that.

More often than not developers will learn the business domain of their apps long before business users will learn how to program. There are languages that business users may be more comfortable writing code in -- SQL comes to mind, for instance, and perhaps the data and reporting APIs can and should be built by the business analysts.

So Why JavaScript ?

The points above should not be a reason not to use JavaScript. Reality is that when it comes to building dynamic webapps and microservices there is no choice other than to use it. It is a great tool for rapid prototyping and for building backend services using platforms like AWS Lambda. Despite what I said, it is a great language and has many useful applications -- but make no mistake, it is a programming language like any other.

Last updated January 20, 2026. Return to home.