It’s 2022. We’ve Suffered Enough: Developers Use Whatever You Want

I am an avid reader of Medium, and it’s no secret that the quality of Medium articles has gone downhill over the last couple of years. Clickbait articles are intentionally titled and written to garner a response but lack substance. Amongst the shining gems, is a pile of faeces.

One recently caught my eye. An article titled. It’s 2022, Please Don’t Just Use “console.log” Anymore.

You are probably already rolling your eyes at the title without even reading the article.

And one would assume the article would propose console.log alternatives like debugging and other developer tools we can use to debug code. But, no, it proposes methods like, console.table basically, alternative console methods.

And, this is not a hate on Medium author article. There are plenty of those around already. This article’s point is to stop letting people tell you what you are doing is wrong.

We see it in development all of the time, especially front-end. You’re told not to use Javascript classes and only to write pure functions. You’re told not to write CSS and use CSS-in-JS solutions. Everyone has an opinion that challenges the way some developers like to work.

Proposing alternative solutions to problems is fine, but outright telling them they shouldn’t be doing something is wrong. Does it matter if you use console.log or a debugger? No. Sure, there are better tools and ways of doing things, but we need to move away from telling people to stop.

It’s 2022: haven’t we suffered enough? Let developers use whatever they want. Whatever gets the job done is good, in my opinion.