The piece reads like a Unix pastor's pulpit preaching

"Great nutritious technologies to use: Make, Emacs, Lisp, CLI"

"Bad unwholesome technologies to use: JavaScript, Ruby, IDEs, Graphical User Interfaces"

I personally hate Make, it's burned me too many times. Now I use CMake, and I haven't been burned in years.

And is it candy or an olive that I like VSCode and not Emacs (not that I've ever tried Emacs, I just don't feel like investing in that ecosystem)?

I agree the front end web framework churn is out of control; hopefully it will stabilize over time. But come on, don't just rip on random scripting languages that have been around for 25 years

I mean I haven't been a professional for multiple decades but I've written professionally in a very wide range of fields in C, Matlab, Java, Python, Verilog, Assembly, Fortran, and Javascript, and, there is no language that I've seen that has more hair pulling, braindead I just learned to program yesterday type programming nearly as much as I've seen in Javascript.

(I've worked intimately with decades old scientific programming codebases where the scientists didn't give a single damn about writing cleanly and even that was an order of magnitude more readable than the willy nilly, consistency be damned crap I've been seeing in Javascript)

(I feel like I could describe a small portion of hell for me and it would include Javascript)

I have a similar set of experiences but have a feeling that it's at least partly down to the sheer number of people writing Javascript and the very public nature of much of that code that so much of it is a mess. I don't think there's anything inherent in JS that make is produce messy code other than the fact that it's easy for amateurs to get results (thanks to the fact it runs in a browser and there's lots of easily available code samples).

what killed Javascript for me (and I think many others) is that there is no idiomatic way of writing Javascript. There is no "javascript"-y way of doing things (unless you count callback hell).

I'm not saying that a language should only offer one approach to a problem, but there should be general guardrails and guidelines. A shared vocabulary. None of that exists in modern JS

"Standard" [1] and "Airbnb" [2] seem to capture some amount of sensible guidelines. Adding Prettier [3] gets you something akin to gofmt, and adopting standard eslint rules [4] can help too.

[1] https://standardjs.com/ [2] https://github.com/airbnb/javascript [3] https://prettier.io/ [4] https://eslint.org/