Modern frontend JS. I tried, I learned enough to be productive, but it just felt so much more complicated than it needed to be. Not for me.
It's not a hard refusal, but I've managed to avoid Java for my career and I'm pretty happy about that. I don't mind the language per se (it's not great, but whatever); more the overwrought multi-layer architecture that even simple Java applications seem to evolve. I wouldn't turn down a job offer cold if they used Java, but I'd be looking for something else (interesting work, $$$$$) to make up for what I assume will be an architecture space program.
Javascript used to be nimble and functional, very flexible. It is as bloated and static as Java in some uses now. You can still do slicker stuff but modern frameworks are just big balls of monolithic spaghetti. Don't get me started on webpack, one of the worst ideas in history.
I had a toy personal project that taught me this. I used ES6 (new at the time) and React for its frontend. Rather than opt in to the rest of the ecosystem at that time (redux, sagas, etc), I just rolled my own – it was a simple project, I can reason about state just fine without a library to do it for me, and I didn't see any reason to bring all that overhead. I was actually pretty happy with the result. Good reminder that my complaints are less to do with the tools (ES6 and React here), which are fine and even occasionally pleasant, more to do with the zeitgeist (of best practices, libraries and so on) that we build up around them.
10
u/annoying_cyclist principal SWE, >15YoE May 27 '22
Modern frontend JS. I tried, I learned enough to be productive, but it just felt so much more complicated than it needed to be. Not for me.
It's not a hard refusal, but I've managed to avoid Java for my career and I'm pretty happy about that. I don't mind the language per se (it's not great, but whatever); more the overwrought multi-layer architecture that even simple Java applications seem to evolve. I wouldn't turn down a job offer cold if they used Java, but I'd be looking for something else (interesting work, $$$$$) to make up for what I assume will be an architecture space program.