> As a rule, any mention of religion on an online forum degenerates into a religious argument. Why? Why does this happen with religion and not with Javascript or baking or other topics people talk about on forums?
Being a well rounded programmer though means you can talk about the tools, not blame the people who use them.
A virtue of open-mindness is that you can respectfully listen to opinions of others and empathize with them. Having the urge to advise or "mentor" somebody who hasn't really asked you or is not your child is futile.
He didn't have any bone to pick with the language _per se_, but rather with the inability to easily replace an app running in the browser with a modified version, even though the license allows you to do so. It was arguably a lot easier to modify scripts in place in 2009 with tools like Proxomitron or extensions like Greasemonkey, but modern complex SPAs made that harder.
It's a reasonable argument against JS in the browser, but it's not what actually bothers the vast majority of the detractors of JS. They hate the language itself and the rapidly changing Node.js ecosystem. RMS wouldn't have any issue with Node.js apps, since it's dead simple to modify and replace a free app there.
Not just SPAs, but the pace of web development. A web app like Facebook or Github can see changes to its coding multiple times a day, sometimes with dozens of versions being A/B-tested at once. Have fun maintaining a Greasemonkey script for that.
This is an online forum, and despite the mention of religion and Javascript it hasn't yet degenerated into an argument.
It seems the rule has exceptions.
Hacker News is an exceptionally civilized forum. But even then: this is not a discussion about JavaScript or religion, this is a discussion about discussions about JavaScript or Religion. So one level of abstraction away, which probably helps avoiding the flame war.
I only remember having seen merit-based discussion about Electron.
Electron is good for developers because it saves them time and they can use their HTML and JS skills instead of having to learn another language.
Electron is bad for users because the resulting applications are way too memory and CPU hungry.
Both of those are merits. The question then becomes, is Electron worth it? Some say yes. Personally I don’t use any Electron software, but if I found an app made in Electron to which there was no non-electron alternative, or none that was as good in terms of utility or function or user-friendliness, I might have used it. First someone will have to make Electron apps run on FreeBSD though, which last time I checked they didn’t unfortunately but whatever.
Edit: Seems that some people are quite close to getting Electron to build and run on FreeBSD. https://github.com/electron/electron/issues/3797 Question is, will it be maintained in the future?
Javascript has aged up I think!