Javascript Memes

The bell curve strikes again. You've got the newbies on the left who just discovered JavaScript's type coercion and think they've unlocked the secrets of the universe. On the right, the grizzled veterans who've seen enough production bugs to know that literally every language has its own special brand of chaos. And there in the middle? The vast majority who picked JavaScript as their punching bag because it's trendy to dunk on JS. Plot twist: they're using it in their day job anyway because the entire web runs on it. The real joke is that all programming languages are weird and quirky once you dig deep enough. JavaScript just has the audacity to do it in a browser where everyone can see.

When RAM prices quadruple in less than a year and your entire business model is "just download more Chrome tabs," you're gonna have a bad time. Electron devs watching their apps go from "slightly bloated" to "mortgage payment" in system requirements. That sweating guy meme face says it all—they're out here shipping desktop apps that bundle an entire Chromium browser just to display a to-do list, and now users need to take out a loan to afford the RAM. For context: Electron lets you build desktop apps with web technologies, which is convenient but notoriously memory-hungry since each app basically runs its own browser instance. When RAM was cheap, nobody cared. Now? Your Slack, Discord, and VS Code are collectively eating more resources than a small data center.

The eternal debate that splits the programming world harder than tabs vs spaces. Baby's first word is "A-a-a" and the proud parent thinks it's adorable... until some psychopath suggests that arrays should start at 1. Zero-indexing is sacred. It's not just tradition—it's mathematically elegant, it's how memory offsets work, and it's been the foundation of programming since the dawn of time. But then you've got languages like Lua, MATLAB, and R out here acting like index 1 is where life begins, and frankly, they deserve to be left in that dumpster. The horror on that parent's face perfectly captures every C, Python, Java, and JavaScript developer's reaction when they encounter a 1-indexed language. It's not just wrong—it's an affront to nature itself.

Remember when building a cross-platform desktop app seemed like a good idea? Just wrap an entire Chromium browser around your glorified calculator app, they said. It'll be fine, they said. Now every todo list app on your machine is basically running its own copy of Chrome, each one hogging more RAM than your entire OS did in 2010. Your 32GB of RAM? Gone. Your fans spinning up for a chat app? Normal. Your CPU crying because you opened Slack, VS Code, Discord, and Spotify at the same time? Just another Tuesday. The real kicker? RAM prices are skyrocketing because everyone's buying GPUs for AI training, so now you get to pay premium prices to run five instances of Chromium just to check your messages. What a time to be alive.

So you're telling me that accessing an array with a negative index in JavaScript not only works but actually adds a property to the array? And then when you check the array, it shows you this cursed -1: 4 sitting there like it belongs? The bell curve perfectly captures the JavaScript experience: beginners think it's ridiculous (correct), experts also think it's ridiculous (also correct), but the middle crowd has Stockholm syndrome and will defend it with their lives. "It makes sense bro, everything in JS is an object!" Yeah, and that's exactly the problem. JavaScript treats arrays like objects because they are objects, so test[-1] = 4 is just adding a property named "-1" to your array object. It's technically in the spec, which somehow makes it worse.

Electron apps: where your simple to-do list needs 800MB of RAM because why optimize when you can just ship an entire Chromium browser with it? The developer confidently explains their revolutionary idea while someone from a timeline where RAM actually costs money arrives to stop this madness. But modern devs don't care—memory is cheap and abundant, so let's just bundle V8, Node.js, and the kitchen sink for that calculator app. Meanwhile, embedded systems engineers are weeping in a corner with their 64KB constraints.

Nothing triggers a developer quite like someone using snake_case when they're a camelCase purist. The sheer horror of watching other programming communities embrace different naming conventions is enough to make you question everything. Meanwhile, the kebab-case folks are just chilling in their CSS files, and the PascalCase crowd is over there acting all superior. But hey, at least we can all agree that SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE should be reserved for constants and angry commit messages.

JavaScript really said "consistency is for COWARDS" and honestly? It committed to the bit. 💀 So you've got an array [1, 2, 3] and you're like "hey what's at index -2?" JavaScript casually returns undefined because negative indices don't exist in JS arrays... EXCEPT when you use .at(-2) which is specifically designed to handle negative indices and suddenly it's like "oh you want the second element from the end? Here's your 2, bestie!" Then you assign foo[-2] = 4 which JavaScript happily accepts because arrays are objects and you just created a STRING property called "-2" on that array object. So now foo[-2] returns 4 from the object property while foo.at(-2) STILL returns 2 from the actual array position. Same syntax, completely different universes. Very respectable. Very normal. Nothing to see here. 🎪

Discord's genius solution to memory leaks: just nuke the whole thing and restart when it hits 4GB. That's not fixing memory leaks, that's just automated rage-quitting with extra steps. The real kicker? They won't restart if you're in a call. Because nothing says "we care about your experience" like letting the app balloon to 24GB of RAM while you're mid-conversation. At least your friends will know exactly when you rage quit Discord—it'll be right after your PC starts sounding like a jet engine. Fun fact: This is basically the software equivalent of "if you ignore the problem long enough, it becomes a feature." Memory management? Never heard of her.

So cargo watch gets deprecated in Rust and the replacement is bacon . Cool, fine, whatever. But then someone tries to use it with Bun (the JavaScript runtime that's trying to replace Node) and their gherkin—sorry, I mean gerkin , the Cucumber testing framework—starts throwing a fit. The beautiful chaos here is watching someone try to mix Rust tooling with JavaScript tooling while running Chai tests in a runtime that's basically speedrunning the "move fast and break things" philosophy. It's like ordering a bacon cheeseburger but the restaurant gives you a fish sandwich and your pickle is filing a complaint. Welcome to 2024, where we have so many tools that even their names sound like breakfast items and nobody knows what works with what anymore. Just wait until someone tries to run this with Deno and a side of Toast.

So apparently the bar for web development is now "slightly more complex than fermentation." Love how this motivational poster implies that becoming a web developer requires the same level of transformation as rotting in a barrel for months. Honestly? Pretty accurate. You start as a raw, starchy beginner, get mashed up by CSS layouts, fermented in JavaScript confusion, and eventually distilled into someone who can center a div. The process is painful, involves a lot of breaking down, and at the end you're either smooth and refined or you give people headaches. Either way, you'll be dealing with a lot of bugs—though in web dev they're not the yeast kind.

Oh, the absolute HORROR of 12-year-old you thinking that hbglp , vbglp , and cdc were the height of programming sophistication! Nothing screams "elite hacker" quite like variable names that look like someone smashed their keyboard while having a seizure, am I right? And that LINE 210? SWEET MOTHER OF SPAGHETTI CODE, it's longer than a CVS receipt! That single line is basically a novel written in the ancient tongue of "I-have-no-idea-what-future-me-will-think." The nested ternaries, the eval() calls, the complete and utter disregard for human readability—it's like looking at the Necronomicon of JavaScript. Young developers everywhere: this is your brain on "looking cool." Please, for the love of all that is holy, use descriptive variable names and hit that Enter key once in a while. Your future self (and literally anyone who has to touch your code) will thank you instead of plotting your demise. 💀