alt Hacker NewsYeah, I don't know how someone can say that with a straight face to other engineers.
It's like people just talk in memes or something.
This is how a lot of discourse feels these days. People living in very different realities.
Though in this case, seeing the most complex C++ app they've built would illuminate what's going on in theirs.
It's not a different reality. To give perspective to what JS I've dealt with - I worked a couple years on a legacy webapp. It used vanilla JS and the only library used was jQuery. It heavily used iframes for async functionality in combination with XSLT to translate backend XML apis to HTML.
Opening up a 10K lines JS file is like jumping into the ocean. Nothing is obvious, nothing makes sense. You're allowed to just do whatever the fuck in JS. Bugs where always ephemeral. The behavior of the code was impossible to wrap your head around, and it seemed to change under your feet when you weren't looking.
Now, the backend was written in old C++. And yes, it was easier to understand. At least, I could click and go to definition. At least, I could see what was going in and out of functions. At least, I could read a function and have a decent understanding of what it should be doing, what the author's intention is.
The front end, spread across a good thousand JS files, was nothing of the sort. And it was certainly more buggy. Although, I will concede, bugs in C++ are usually more problematic. In JS usually it would just result in UI jankyness. But not always.