David Heinemeier Hansson (DHH)

It's a very distant second.

Ruby is by far and away number one.

But I actually like JavaScript.

I don't think it's a bad language.

It gets a lot of...

Flack, people add a string of two plus a one and it gives something nonsense.

And I just go like, yeah, but why would you do that?

Just don't do that.

The language is actually quite lovely, especially the modern version.

ES6 that really introduced a proper class syntax to it so I could work with JavaScript in many of the same ways that I love working with Ruby made things so much better.

But in the early 2010s, until quite recently, all of that advancement happened in pre-processing, happened in built pipelines.

The browsers couldn't speak a dialect of JavaScript that was pleasant to work with.

So everyone started to pre-compiling their JavaScript to be able to use more modern ways of programming with a browser that was seen as stuck with an ancient version of JavaScript that no one actually wanted to work with.

And that made sense to me, but it was also deeply unpleasant.

And I remember thinking during that time, the dark ages, as I refer to them with JavaScript, that...

this cannot be the final destination.

There's no way that we have managed to turn the internet into such an unpleasant place to work, where I would start working on a project in JavaScript using Webpack and all of these dependencies, and I would put it down for literally five minutes and the thing wouldn't compile anymore.

The amount of churn that the JavaScript community, especially with its frameworks and its tooling, went through in the decade from 2010 to 2020 was absurd.

And you had to be trapped inside of that asylum to not realize what an utterly...

perverse situation we had landed ourselves in.