Hooooo boi these past two weeks have been a doozy. Work has been incredibly busy and my school workload increased dramatically. I’m sure every other blog post says the same thing.

You know what else stays the same? JavaScript always reminding me of why it’s a garbage programming language. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two weeks debugging JavaScript imports and exports and all manner of weirdness that comes with it.

I actually learned to code with JavaScript. I used it exclusively for my first 6 months of practice. Once I got to my coding boot camp, we started learning Python and after a single day of getting the feel for it, I much preferred Python. It’s way nicer to look at and typically doesn’t just compile and run with what it thinks you might have wanted, silently failing, doing something bizarre and leaving you questioning your sanity. If JavaScript was a person, submitting your code would be something like this: Handing your code over to an overworked, disheveled oaf who then gives each line a quick glance, half laughs, half grunts something resembling approval and proceeds to shotgun a beer before running your program.

I think you get how I feel at this point.

When I got to my current company I had to learn Java, my first strongly-typed language. At first I didn’t like it. It felt like unnecessary steps and I was constantly forgetting to declare variable types and return types and generics. After I got used to it though, I realized it made the code easier to understand, predict and, most importantly, debug. To me it feels like driving manual transmission versus driving automatic – I feel more in control. (C/C++ is like operating a small aircraft).

I’m sure I’ll get in the groove with JavaScript. It’s just been a frustrating two weeks of dealing with it. Though it does feel good when the dumb oaf finally listens and runs my code as intended.