Every enterprise web project started in 2014

Your team has been chosen to redevelop the company’s flagship web-based product as a SPA. Necessarily this will involve a great deal of JavaScript, of which — without jQuery — no-one in the team has written more than ten concomitant lines before.

At this point you stick up your paw and ask when the training course starts. Or at the very least you enquire how many weeks worth of consultancy have been booked with an expert to help the team get up to speed with the language. In theory.

In reality, one of two things occurs.

Typically, the team silently and directly succumb to the Fact. Occasionally however, in an apparent outbreak of common sense, the team has an honest discussion amongst themselves, discovers that no-one in the team has any meaningful experience with JavaScript and agrees that this poses a serious risk.

But here’s the rub. In this latter scenario the Fact still holds (remember: immutable); every team member still secretly believes they already know JavaScript. Publicly however, to maintain congruence, they decide to use a cross-compiler with CoffeeScript or TypeScript (because ‘1' == true, WTF?).

Unfortunately, however, this merely reduces down to the same problem. But with a slightly less helpful ecosystem and a more complicated debugging story.