Responsible JavaScript

There’s a genus of solitary wasps named Sphex — and if you’re wondering what wasps of all things have to do with a book about JavaScript, I’ll explain.

Wasps of the genus Sphex nest underground and prey on crickets. When one of these wasps brings a cricket back to its nest, it does something uncharacteristically thoughtful: the wasp conducts a nest inspection, leaving the cricket outside. Once the wasp finishes, it reemerges to retrieve the cricket.

Now for the kicker: if you — a prankster god of insectkind — move the cricket during the nest inspection, the wasp’s behavioral program reboots. The wasp knows only that the cricket wasn’t where it once was, so the wasp relocates it, drags it back to the nest entrance, and inspects the nest again.

While this behavior isn’t consistent across digger wasps, the concept offers rhetorical usefulness by way of a word coined by Scholar Douglas Hofstadter: sphexishness. When we say something is sphexish, we’re describing highly deterministic, preprogrammed behavior with the appearance of thoughtfulness. I often grumble to myself about our industry’s sphexishness and the effect it has had on the collective usability of the web.

I’m not implying that most web developers are drones incapable of critical thought — and that’s certainly not the case. We all strive to do our work the best way we know how. Yet we do many small, almost ceremoniously repetitive things as web developers that are definitely sphexish.

Consider our relentless adherence to best practices, even when they result in poor user experiences. We npm install packages without considering potential downsides or alternative methods. We chase new tools in the hope that they’ll increase our productivity — even though that constant churn invites its own insidious productivity cost.

We just do a lot of stuff that results in bad outcomes for the people who use what we make. It’s a bold assertion, yes, but one that’s well supported by data: there’s been a five-fold increase in the amount of JavaScript that websites have sent from 2012 to 2020.

Increasing the amount of JavaScript we ship results in poor user experiences, and the iron law of our work is that users must come first. Our preferences and comfort as developers are secondary.

That’s a mission to take to heart while we figure out how we can use JavaScript more responsibly in an industry that relies on it more than ever and I think that Responsible JavaScript — a carefully written book that the talented people at A Book Apart have worked with me to publish — can help you along the way.