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Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

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Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

#1

Post by saltcod »

I've been working on frontend dev for several years now, in the pre and post framework era. React and the other frameworks and ES6 in general, has meant a ton of change to the very basics of how we work.

The way I do basic things has changed fundamentally in the last 4-5 years. Some of that is because I'm no longer a "beginner", but much is because things have just changed a ton.

People who know the JS / frontend ecosystem AND backend stuff as well:

Is this rate of change unique to JS, or is it everywhere? Is Rails very, very different now than 4-5 years ago? Django?

I use PHP a bit and I've seen that change a bit, but it feels like mostly for the better, with namespaces in particular. Otherwise, I don't feel like PHP has had near the amt of change that JS has had.

tl;dr: is it crazy everywhere or just with JS/frontend?

Re: Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

#3

Post by jjgreen »

halfnibble wrote: post #2

The biggest change I can think of in my Python/Django development over the past few years is: print "" >>> print("")

True that, I had a load of code in 2.7 which I was dreading migrating to 3, but pretty much that change sorted it.

Re: Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

#4

Post by jppope »

I would argue that the frontend js changes are mainly to do with user expectations for what constitutes a well designed user interface. People expect more, and we have to give it to them to survive.

Addressing your specific question => have the backend languages/ frameworks changed? meh. sorta. They've made incremental changes, but the meat and potatoes look the same from 4-7 years ago for the opinionated frameworks.

However, the massive backend change that is probably more relevant to your questions is the shift in how we do infrastructure. Cloud based Version control, Microservices, Containers, Kubernetes, Docker, IaaS, Serverless, CICD systems... all of these things are transformational changes to backend ecosystems- both in scale and in the way that we interact. It has also made it so we write less code which is actually an increase in velocity for what we can produce.

thats my $0.02 anyway

Re: Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

#5

Post by armadsen »

No, it’s not, or at least not as fast as the current churn in frontend JS dev. I started doing Cocoa dev on the Mac in 2005. There have been changes to be sure, the biggest being the introduction of Swift I’m 2014. But I’m still using AppKit. I can (and do) still use Objective-C alongside Swift. And I have a pretty big codebase dating back to 2006 that still compiles and runs fine even with the latest version of Xcode.

(I realize this isn’t backend dev, but there are other kinds of programming besides web development :-))

Re: Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

#7

Post by maxxxxx »

In a lot of areas the tools are fairly stable and progress is more linear. That’s what I liked about C/C++ development where you could go deep and really learn details. The JavaScript world feels to me a little like reinventing the wheel every few years and recreating the same thing over and over. Maybe it needs a few more years/decades to shake out issues and reach some stability.

I think part of the problem is that JavaScript/HTML/CSS are so flexible that it’s really easy to create new stuff.

Re: Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

#8

Post by LyndsySimon »

halfnibble wrote: post #2

The biggest change I can think of in my Python/Django development over the past few years is: print "" >>> print("")

I don't necessarily agree with that, but it might be a matter of when I started. My first Django projects were done with 0.96 if I recall properly.

Environment management has changed a ton - first with pip replacing easy_install and directly using setup.py, then with a bevy of tools for managing development and deployed environments (Vagrant, Docker, Spinnaker, K8s, etc.), and nowadays with more advanced packaging tools like pipenv or poetry. Along the way we've seen the maturation of CI and all of those supporting tools - linting, style enforcement, and coverage all growing rapidly.

Re: Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

#9

Post by brightball »

It’s the result of a language that already had 85% of the tools needed for its domain where the changes in frameworks come down more to preference than anything else.

The same thing happens in PHP world where you have all the tools needed built into the language so most of the frameworks are essentially “arranging stuff”.

In other web frameworks for other languages, you tend to see them creating the actual tools you need to use that language effectively on the web so it’s easier for the community to coalesce around it than whimsically reinventing things every day.

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