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How Much JavaScript Do You Need To Know For an Entry-Level Job?
Nerval's Lobster writes: JavaScript is a programming language that's easy to pick up, but extremely difficult to master. Even some of its beginner-level functions are decidedly not beginner-friendly. When someone lands their first JavaScript job, they're going to want to know as much as possible, if only so they can navigate through some of the language's trickier aspects without needing to ask for help. Developer Jeff Cogswell picked through JavaScript and came away with a couple of lists of what he thought were the minimum baseline of skills for JavaScript use in a work context. That list included understanding how to use built-in objects, functions , closures, and DOM (Document Object Model). While his points are comprehensive, not everyone will necessarily agree with what he lists (and doesn't list).
I've been programming professionally since the 1970s. I cut my teeth on COBOL, ALGOL, FORTRAN, and PL/I. Then I did years of Ada, a few months of Smalltalk, some Modula-2, and years of C and C++. I very briefly used Objective-C on actual NeXT systems. Then came a decade of Java, with some Delphi, VB and Perl. That was followed by some time with PHP, Ruby and JavaScript. Of all of those languages, JavaScript was the hardest to learn, and even after using it for years, it is the hardest to use. It's just so fucking awful, and I've worked with some pretty awful languages in the past. So much of it is just plain dumb. It's the kind of dumb that just shouldn't happen. It's the kind of dumb that shouldn't be allowed to exist 20 years on, even if it was first introduced during a rushed release! What's dumber is when people defend the dumbness as if it's some kind of a feature or a benefit. It's neither of those. It's just dumbness gone wild. It's fucking idiotic that it has taken over 20 years for JavaScript to get something that barely resembles a usable form of object orientation. It's stupid that its standard library is so terribly lacking, and what is there is mighty shitty. It's beyond belief how bad its type system is, and how awful its automatic type conversions are. Something is really fucking wrong when a so-called 'modern' language is worse than the ones developed 20 or 30 years prior to it, back when programming language design was in its infancy. That's right: the people who developed the earliest programming languages managed to do a much better job at it than those who have created JavaScript, decades later. In the 1980s and 1990s, I never though I'd be dealing with a programming language as shitty as JavaScript, especially so far into the future. We could have done great things, yet now we're saddled with the worst programming language around.
Followed by,
"I know all the languages; what else do I need to get an entry level job. Any job. I haven't worked in years -- I'm desperate! Please!"
High unemployment has a terrible social cost.