I think most of the problems are ecosystem/people issues–in turn driving the language/framework problems.

Selected short gripes on people (any one of which I could write volumes on):

• Conflating standard library problems with language problems. ES5 was actually a pretty reasonable language–the problem came from having a standard lib so anemic (to this day!) that people feel the need to keep adding stuff. If TC39/W3C spent less time getting high on their own supply and more time fixing the standard library then so much of what I hate goes away.
• Permanent neophilia and just an overwhelming lack of restraint and good taste. Nobody seems to acknowledge the costs to chasing new shiny.
• Everybody uses solutions backed by Big Players without regard for whether it’s a good idea or not. Your blog doesn’t need React. Your E-commerce site probably doesn’t need Cognito. Staaaaaahp.
• Everything has so many dependencies and this nests. Left-pad should’ve been a wake-up call, and yet apparently nobody is actually serious about fixing that.
• Tooling is too complicated and takes too long to run. Why is setting up Webpack annoying? What is it hard to just run off a config off the top of one’s head?
• Testing culture seems to have gone super far into unit testing and just really sucks for actual can-the-user-do-the-thing-that-makes-us-money testing. It should be easier to script UAT than to do the DI and other stuff around unit testing, but for some reason that’s not where we evolved.
• Too much popularity-driven development. We could be forgiven for assuming that most technical decisions being made in Webland are the result of conference talks and Big Personalities posting online.

Selected language gripes:

• ES6+ is getting past what comfortably fits in a person’s head.
• CSS really needs to just have nested scoping already.

Select framework gripes:

• React has made dumb decisions and devs won’t back down on them. className, full stop.
• ThreeJS keeps carving out key stuff–say, orbit cameras–into the examples instead of core, keeps adding other shit into core, and somehow bungles packaging the ‘extras’ into friendly NPM modules. At least this was the case last winter when I ran into it, again.
• D3 is super easy to make slow and awful, and just always looks like spaghetti code to me.
• There is no good framework to do some of the Java computational geometry stuff we did two decades ago. This is likely because making a holey concave polygon from other smaller holey concave polygons and triangulating it is Real People Hard but making another vdom knockoff is Frontend Engineer Hard.

I could go on, but why close the year on a negative note?

For me, it’s the “bundling” situation. I’ve never worked on a production project where “the webpack” wasn’t the most hated part of the stack. Webpack’s source code is a rat’s nest, so I feel very unmotivated to understand the situation or improve it from within. There’s tons of projects in this space that seek to simplify, but they never seem low-risk enough to migrate to: what if I actually do need to customize?

So, I’ve been stuck with webpack pains for far too long. Maybe Airbnb or Facebook will open-source their Metro (FB bundler used for React Native) configs one day and we can escape…

I want ipython in every language.

friendlysock said a bunch of stuff that I agree with, so I won’t rehash that. I’ve been doing webapps since my boss (claimed to, and he is incredibly smart so maybe it’s true) come up AJAX independently by reading Microsoft’s docs…. it drives me crazy how complicated it is to get started now, and to do project configuration. Babel, webpack, CSS compilers, code splitters, linters, npm vs yarn, plugins… module syntax!! not being able to fucking import { } from package in node (depending on the version and config!!) like you can in your browser code! I mostly like Typescript the language, but oh-my-god there are even more config options with that! How the actual fuck is anyone new to programming supposed to leap all the hurdles required to just start programming [0]?! No wonder they give up on things that matter and choose Mongo instead of learning a relational database: they’ve driven themselves mad just trying to get the frontend off the ground! They don’t have the mental bandwidth for databases or data structures - they’re exhausted already! They’ve made a hundred configuration choices they don’t really understand, based on whatever they’ve cobbled together from thousands of Medium posts that were inaccurate to start with, or out of date 3 months after being published, but which still come up 1-through-10 in Google.

Ugh.

Rant over.

[0] I realize there are other languages and not everyone starts with JS. But a lot of people do.

My biggest pet peeve is how many people want JavaScript to be the language they know best. Some come from Ruby and want it to be Ruby. Some from Java who want it to be Java. Some from Python.. you get the idea. I do like the amount of attention JS gets, but all of the various proposals that are not quite there yet that keep being used as if they are (like decorators/annotations) drive me a little bit nuts. I’ve been using JS for a really long time and I don’t feel like it’s missing that much stuff. It really just needed some things cleaned up (which has generally happened over time).

Also the insistence that JS needed “class” syntax (though it still isn’t classical inheritance), which was implemented, and now many people are trying to move back to functions/functional-based programming, throwing out the whole class baby with the bathwater. There’s too much flux there and not necessarily for the best reasons.

I am with the other guy who was talking about bundling and packaging things. If I can avoid it and use modern browsers, I do. But the reality is that those bundlers are still very useful particularly on applications that work on older browsers.

I use Fable Elmish. I think my pet peeve is how sometimes the event system can be confusing due to how things are more fully described.

You said frontend, so I’ll take this as an opportunity to talk about iOS :D

In general, the move away from dynamic dispatch. I mean, I understand it’s for performance, but it makes things less fun :( I’m also incredibly skeptical of SwiftUI, and am not looking forward to doing jobs/contracts using that framework.

I have a gut feeling Apple’s making these changes purely for “developer PR” reasons, and not because they’re actually good changes. e.g. Objective-C brackets are too ugly -> make Swift, UIKit is too hard -> copy React.js. FWIW I have nothing against Swift but the reasoning behind making it doesn’t make much sense to me, from a technical perspective.

If changes like these continue I will probably switch to backend or embedded or something. At least there, I won’t be subjected to the whims of post Steve Jobs Apple.

UI work in general → extremely asynchronous. It hurts to track.

But most of all, as others have said: packaging/bundling story. It’s a shit show. Interoperating with 3+ module standards kills you.

Other than that, JS as a language has massively improved. I use TypeScript when I can, but otherwise, JS is just fine no matter what people are saying. It’s objectively as good as any other dynamic, weakly typed language. It has great ergonomics now.

These days for “frameworks”, I just use React and sometimes Redux. Really depends what the needs are. Otherwise I use nothing but HTML and CSS. Recently I’ve found a great urge to push CSS hard, so that JS can be minimized to purely data fetching.

Some UI genius needs to come around to show everyone how to deal with these asynchronous spaghetti monsters. The only way I know of, so far, is to use something like Redux and “travel” through all the states. But I’m not talking just web, but all UI across all platforms. There must be a sane, composable, maintainable, easy way to create UI. I feel we are super close to this reality.

I hate elixir so much.

• diabetes-inducing levels of syntactic sugar
• two different, incompatible string types (charlist & binary)
• slow compiler, but not much in the way of compile-time checks–since the language isn’t explicitly typed
• too many options for error handling (catch vs rescue vs tuple return)

I could go on and on.

Big part of making good software is keeping combinatorics under control. Elixir clearly disagrees with that.

I use Erlang for funzies and love it, but a few of its age spots are still noticeable:

• Default latin8 encoding (today everyone likes utf8).
• <<"Bitstring syntax">> is way less convenient than "most languages string syntax".
• Hanging commas, periods, and semicolons still feels strange lol.
• Language doesn’t have a native pipe operator, and the stdlib makes it hard to imagine a consistent one (lists puts the list argument as the last param, queue puts it as the first).

But I love it, on the whole! And Elixir fixes many of these.

My professional work is mostly in Python, which I largely abhor due to how it gets used. It’s great for codebases you can fit into your head and/or with a few responsibilities (or even small teams that don’t churn much, and are consistent), but I’m on my fifth high-growth company that’s used it for as much as possible, touched by many hands over many years, so it’s an incomprehensible mess of bad patterns. Hard to blame the language for this, it can’t help that companies decided to optimize for the first 4 months of development at the expense of the next 7 years 🤷‍♂️ and there’s a decent argument that it’s flexible enough for the company to have hit PMF, whereas a language with more invariants wouldn’t have let them get even that far.

I guess what peeves me the most is that my favourite tech choices are not all used at $income_provider, and the concrete has set there, so changing tech is looking increasingly unlikely. Hum.

Redux Sagas, and generators in general. I don’t understand why generators were added to ES6; I’m convinced they’re hardly ever useful to solve a real problem anyone has (and this is also true in Python). When you throw Sagas on top, and then try to step through that code in a debugger [0], well: good luck following what’s going on there.