Link tags: transpile

The best reason to write a library in plain JavaScript is that it lasts forever. This is arguably JavaScript’s single most underrated feature. While I’m sure there are some corner cases, JavaScript from 1999 that ran in Netscape Navigator will run unaltered, alongside modern code, in Google Chrome downloaded yesterday. That is true for very few programming environments.

Of course, most people’s experience with JavaScript is that it ages like milk. Reopen a node repository after 3 months and you’ll find that your project is mired in a flurry of security warnings, backwards-incompatible library “upgrades,” and a frontend framework whose cultural peak was the exact moment you started the project and is now widely considered tech debt.

This story is just a personal reminder for me to repeatedly question what our tools spit out. I don’t want to be the neophobe in the room but I sometimes wonder if we’re living in a collective delusion that the current toolchain is great when it’s really just morbidly complex. More JavaScript to fix JavaScript concerns the hell out of me.

I am responsible for the code that goes into the machine, I do not want to shirk the responsibility of what comes out. Blind faith in tools to fix our problems is a risky choice. Maybe “risky” is the wrong word, but it certainly seems that we move the cost of our compromises to the client and we, speaking from personal experience, rarely inspect the results.

If you’re interested in predicting the future of the web, just look at what high-performance native systems look like, then figure out how we can apply those ideas in the browser.

Our job now is figuring out how to adapt the ideas of high-performance native code while preserving what makes the web great: URLs, instant loading, and a security model that allows us to forget that we run thousands and thousands of untrusted scripts every day.