[I apologize for the absurdly snarky and ranty post, but I'm going to do it anyway:]
> You can pick it up in a weekend. A lower entry bar means more people will try it out.
... and then you get the JavaScript situation where everyone thinks they're an actual programmer at $TEAM_LEAD level of sophistication when it comes to modeling, design, architecture, testing and implementation... but they're really not. It's not their fault per se, it's just that they do not have the necessary experience to realize the areas that they're lacking in. (This is a well-known cognitive bias: More than 50% of people think that they're an above-average driver. There are a precious few who realize that they're not -- they are the exception.)
Programming is hard[1] and if there was an instant-humbling device, I'd buy it in spades.
[1] Most people focus on the "oh, that's Undefined Behavior" bits of it, but it's not really about that. It's about recognizing the types of mistakes that you make and working to avoid them or creating a system that does, whether that's by testing or proof or whatever. Obviously it still has to be _practical_, but AGAIN... it's about tradeoffs. If you don't care about correctness, I'm pretty sure I can whip up a "solution" to any problem that's fast as hell... and not correct. Summa summarum: I think we need to be thinking a lot more in terms of tradeoffs and not so much in absolutes.
What you described is basically true for any job, and it's more about the culture surrounding the language and particular use case rather than the entry level.
I've seen a lot of people in academia writing C++, mostly horrible code. I've seen electrical engineers writing awful assembly code. Because the incentive is mostly to get one task done today. None of these languages have a lower entry bar.
JavaScript is pretty much bound to a singular use case (web development) where there is a lot of incentive to get quick money, which attracts all kinds of people. I don't see the status quo you're referring would be much different if the browser scripting language was Haskell or brainfuck.
> What you described is basically true for any job
I agree, but there are a lot of jobs where it's actually effectively impossible to distinguish between good vs. bad practitioners of said jobs.
I just have this feeling that it should be possible in programming. (Because it's quantifiable... or at least quantizable into "works" or "doesn't work" along any number of axes.)
> I've seen a lot of people in academia writing C++, mostly horrible code. I've seen electrical engineers writing awful assembly code. Because the incentive is mostly to get one task done today. None of these languages have a lower entry bar.
Same here, only with FORTRAN and C.
(This hints that this may be a meta-problem.)
> JavaScript is pretty much bound to a singular use case (web development) where there is a lot of incentive to get quick money, which attracts all kinds of people. I don't see the status quo you're referring would be much different if the browser scripting language was Haskell or brainfuck.
Well, there is node.js, but really, the problem with JS is... JS. It's just a horrific language semantics-wise (syntax: meh). It was invented and implemented in ~7 days(?) and it really shows. (No blame towards Brendan Eich, he did the best that he could within the deadline and even got a little bit of higher-order programming in there.) It's been improving, but just imagine the burden of improving a language that's already been deployed to 1B+ computers. Not an enviable task.
Hopefully WebAssembly will (in time) address these problems and give us a real way to program the front end in $WHATEVER_LANGUAGE_YOU_WANT
> You can pick it up in a weekend. A lower entry bar means more people will try it out.
... and then you get the JavaScript situation where everyone thinks they're an actual programmer at $TEAM_LEAD level of sophistication when it comes to modeling, design, architecture, testing and implementation... but they're really not. It's not their fault per se, it's just that they do not have the necessary experience to realize the areas that they're lacking in. (This is a well-known cognitive bias: More than 50% of people think that they're an above-average driver. There are a precious few who realize that they're not -- they are the exception.)
Programming is hard[1] and if there was an instant-humbling device, I'd buy it in spades.
[1] Most people focus on the "oh, that's Undefined Behavior" bits of it, but it's not really about that. It's about recognizing the types of mistakes that you make and working to avoid them or creating a system that does, whether that's by testing or proof or whatever. Obviously it still has to be _practical_, but AGAIN... it's about tradeoffs. If you don't care about correctness, I'm pretty sure I can whip up a "solution" to any problem that's fast as hell... and not correct. Summa summarum: I think we need to be thinking a lot more in terms of tradeoffs and not so much in absolutes.