I'm kidding, but sometimes it feels like that. Javascript is never just Javascript.

It depends on whether you use Typescript (with tsc or tsx or esrun?).

It depends whether you use V8 or Node or Deno or Bun.

It depends whether you're using AWS Lambda or the Serverless framework or a Cloudflare Worker or a Vercel or Fastly edge function.

It depends whether you use vanilla or HTMX or React or Next or Vue or Nuxt or Svelte or Astro or Remix or Angular or or or.

Then if you go native, it depends whether you use React Native and Expo and Electron and Tauri and and and.

Somehow we went from a universal language that can run in all web browsers to a hundred mutants that each only work in some niche...

I've never seen two Javascript codebases that looked the same :/ Every one is like a new archeological dig. Sure, you can still find some identifiable generic pottery fragments and such, but somehow they managed to build an entire civilization in a totally different way from the one next to them, using technologies that no longer exist just a few years later.

> I've never seen two Javascript codebases that looked the same

I think you may have described every programming language.

Except maybe Go

True, but Go codebases only look the same because there's only so many ways to make a neolithic handaxe.

Probably JS was a victim of its own success in this regard, being both incredibly popular and incredibly long-lived, which drew hordes of amateurs (myself included) in. We all re-invented the wheel, though in my case it was more like an oblong hexagon =/ I rolled with it... but I feel terrible for anyone who has to maintain my old code after me, lol.

Most languages have perfectly functioning wheels right there installed and ready for use.

People keep reinventing the wheel on javascript because it doesn't have any.

that's why JS/TS is to easy to hate: it's got a lot of surface area.

May you descend into the Inferno…