The JavaScript Midlife Crisis: A 30-Year Language Losing Ground at Home

Thirty years in, JavaScript has never been more widespread — and, software engineer Maroun Baydoun argues, never more unsettled inside its own ecosystem. In "The JavaScript midlife crisis", published on September 22, 2026, he describes a language that is everywhere while the tools around it are increasingly written in something else. It opens with a half-joke from LinkedIn: all JavaScript build tools compete to use the least JavaScript.

The language that wouldn't die

Famously written in ten days, JavaScript escaped the browser and reached phones, consoles, microcontrollers and refrigerators. The reaction was predictable, he writes: who in their right mind would write servers and tools in JavaScript? Many, many people did.

Replacement attempts started early: Microsoft's VBScript and JScript, Flash and ActionScript from Macromedia and Adobe, Google's Dart, later relegated to Flutter. Others patched the language from outside — jQuery unified a web platform whose browsers barely spoke, Lodash filled gaps in arrays and objects, Moment.js handled dates. The language kept moving through ECMAScript releases and TC39 proposals, and then came TypeScript, which succeeded because it accepted that JavaScript was not going anywhere.

The superpower we're giving away

Node.js let a generation of tools — linters, bundlers, formatters and test runners — speak the same language as the code they processed. When something broke, an ordinary developer could read the source, understand the bug and perhaps fix it. That familiarity travelled from the browser to the server and helped create the full-stack engineer.

In pursuit of milliseconds

Rust, Go and Zig now own growing parts of that toolchain, for an obvious reason: they are fast — so fast that we compile JavaScript with Rust to produce JavaScript running inside an engine written mostly in C++.

The trade-off gets far less attention than the benchmarks. A bundler rewritten in Rust is faster, but fewer developers can maintain it; its internals retreat into a black box, and though the source stays open, the door to contributions narrows. "Written in Rust" starts to sound like a feature rather than an implementation detail.

Destination unknown

Baydoun does not call compiled languages wrong tools — often they are exactly right. His closing image is a railway: we are laying increasingly faster tracks for a steam train that likes to take its time. Individually every step makes sense; together they raise a question he leaves open — how far can this go before rebuilding the web from the ground up starts to look like the saner option?