I love criticism or, rather, I love to learn and criticism is one of the best ways to learn about yourself and your beliefs.
Someone recently said that they thought JavaScriptU and what we were teaching was crap. They may have said it in much more diplomatic way, but the gist of it was that we were crap.
This came from a Java perspective and, well, it’s kind of true. Here I am teaching people how to use a library called ‘Underscore’ where you access many array, object, function, and templating methods off a single namespace, an actual, literal underscore. A basic anti-pattern (util buckets with unintuitive namespaces) in any other language is a valuable library in JavaScript. Another class I was going over a dependency management solution (requirejs) where I had to actually explain why dependency management in JavaScript is important.
Ok, so maybe the conversation wasn’t around why JavaScriptU sucks, but rather that JavaScript is crap to teach. There is so little that is core to JavaScript that it requires us to teach with seemingly arbitrary third party libraries in order to do anything great.
It’s true, but that’s one of the reasons I (effing) love JavaScript. You have to learn all the time, and the libraries du jour are an indication of this.
You can’t rely on a core bit of knowledge to get you very far with JavaScript and web applications. Even the people writing the libraries that others use to write “cutting edge” software are still learning and reevaluating their patterns. The range of things that people have created in such an inhospitable environment is incredible and a testament to the resourcefulness of the community.
The community is what we’re trying to encourage. We’ve all worked at companies and with people who don’t fully recognize the speed at which the web is moving and we’re trying to pull people up to speed.
One of the things JavaScriptU has been docked on was that we were pushing “advanced” topics too soon, even from people experienced in the industry. It’s almost as if people think that JavaScript is so complicated that you need to tiptoe around others trying to learn it.
It’s not, but we do need loads more developers coming up to speed soon in order to sustain this growth.