# JavaScript 216 Hacker News commenters recommended JavaScript and 265 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months; owners who said how long report a median of 20 years (12 owners). **Verdict:** Runs in every browser and nearly everywhere else, with fast iteration, strong backward compatibility and a huge ecosystem; critics call it rushed and poorly designed, with surprising type behavior. ## Why people recommend it - Runs everywhere, built into browsers (5 comments): "Javascript actually had a pretty nice core, and an utility of being in all web browsers that no other language could replicate." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45991053)) "it's good-enough for practically any use case and I've been able to leverage it for web, mobile, desktop, server and games" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50292016)) "an amazing tool to learn programming as everything you need is right there in the program that's already installed" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49724453)) - Fast feedback loop, quick iteration (4 comments): "JavaScript is dynamic and supports live reload which means iterations are far faster than would be in a compiled language" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48969501)) "The nice thing about JS is that there is not very much overhead in setting things up, debugging weird things, restarting." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47567031)) "the ease of e.g. writing plugins or having a fast feedback loop outweighs the benefits of other languages" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120908)) - Fast enough for most uses (4 comments): "I appreciate that you personally think JavaScript is poorly designed (I mostly agree!) but that doesn't mean it's slow." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47662067)) "JS is pretty fast these days, so the speed boost from WASM isn't actually that meaningful for most use cases." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46551294)) "JavaScript is a nice backend language. It's fast, has a massive ecosystem, and many people know it well." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49071082)) - Strong backward compatibility (3 comments): "JS 100% respects compatibility, they even avoided some methods because some popular libraries in the past used to extend the Prototype for arrays" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45983413)) "the browser so far has been super reliable in maintaining backwards compatibility of HTML, CSS and JS for years and years." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46508453)) "Got a lot of things right that others copied later, and also made improvements without breaking compatibility." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48391473)) ## What people warn about - Hastily and poorly designed (6 comments): "far from simple -- JS and C++ are basically the only two programming languages where books plead with you not to use all their features" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48459541)) "JS at the time was obviously thrown together in a huge rush as a very poorly designed landgrab during the dotcom IPO goldrush." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46149633)) "designed to be "accessible" by oversimplifying things and ended up being more complicated to actually use than better tools" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152494)) - Silent type coercion and rounding (3 comments): "JavaScript, in general, errs on the side of giving you some answer when you try and do something very unusual with types" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46606080)) "Javascript WILL interpret your bigints as Number() and round them down because they are too big without telling you!!!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420881)) "why is it trying to parse a number thats too big and instead of throwing it just rounds down without telling you" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48427139)) - Hard to maintain large codebases (3 comments): "Dynamic languages like python or JS might be faster to build, but they’re certainly not easier to maintain." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48479406)) "JavaScript for one never gave me this feeling, and I always felt that either the language, or the libraries, but something was always a struggle to overcome." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49681543)) "I still find the development of software in a large JS system unmanageable versus old C++ development approaches" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46203895)) - Slower than compiled languages (3 comments): "JavaScript engines also are also JITted which is better than a straight interpreter but except microbenchmarks worse than compiled code." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46414033)) "I love JavaScript and TypeScript, but like all interpreted languages, they really do have a hard time" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49809594)) "JS is definitely on the “harder to optimize” side of the spectrum, leading to very complex code with a higher chance of subtle errors." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47352111)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [Rust](https://hackerapproved.com/p/rust.md): 2039 recommend - [Go](https://hackerapproved.com/p/go-programming-language.md): 1254 recommend - [Python](https://hackerapproved.com/p/python.md): 1067 recommend - [Zig](https://hackerapproved.com/p/zig.md): 743 recommend - [TypeScript](https://hackerapproved.com/p/typescript.md): 574 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "JavaScript", https://hackerapproved.com/p/javascript/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).