The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue • Hacker News Board

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#161

Post by dclowd9901 » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 5:13 PM UTC

I hate to sound curmudgeonly, but the reason the state of JS is always in flux is because app developers suddenly decide they want to do front end development, and they come in and say, "WTF, everything here is weird and broken. I'm going to fix it. Make it more like python/ruby/.NET/C++/LISP/Haskell/Objective-C".

So then some high brand developer heads up a project, it gets a lot of attention because a big name company adopts it, and then we're off to the races.

Before you know it, our simple little dynamic prototypal SCRIPTING language has Classes and typing and build systems and cascading transpilers.

I'm not saying we should go back to the bad ol' days of writing kitchen sink code for MVCs a billion times, but why do we need Typescript, Flow, Babel, Dart, Coffeescript, and Clojurescript? Why?

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#162

Post by Yaggo » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 5:14 PM UTC

evook wrote: post #134

Yaggo wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> [Javascript] simply is too limited a language to be used for large and complex applications. The proof of this is that JavaScript is used for exactly zero non-browser runtime environments (discounting node.js whose only appeal is to use the same language on the server as in the browser). Electron? Atom? Slack? React Native? Espruino? Also, there are plenty of non-web Node.js applications, e.g. https://github.com/si…

Wrapping a browser instead of using one directly doesn't make your application run in a non-browser runtime environment. And to be completely honest, probably sacrificing a bit karma. All of your examples enforce my point of view on JS as a 'use it as minimal as necessary' language else avoid it.

> use it as minimal as necessary

Interesting point of view, considering that people are building javascript desktop applications, server applications, embedded applications, web (browser) applications, and what not.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#163

Post by tomc1985 » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 5:20 PM UTC

pcwalton wrote: post #24

cgh wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hear, hear. I wrote gui applications fifteen+ years ago in MFC and the ATL. Front-end programming was boring then and it's boring now. I can't believe people are wasting so much time re-figuring this stuff out.

> Front-end programming was boring then and it's boring now. Not if you care about performance (to name one tricky aspect). It's all too easy to write a slow app.

I second this. Performant code is not so opaque as to be super hard, people simply need to know their shit.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#164

Post by tomc1985 » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 5:21 PM UTC

NDizzle wrote: post #144

The only horse to bet on at the moment is jQuery. I know, I know. I'm old and I don't do exciting things. I work mainly on a niche product in a boring field. But you know what? My site works with IE8+. I can deploy code without much thought as to what is going to break. My deploy script takes 15 seconds. I don't have to rewrite anything every 3-6 months. I can update something that hasn't been touched in 2 years and…

jquery spaghetti code can be quite readable if you're smart about layout... group things into sections, arrange everything sequentially where possible, etc etc

I've had to do a fair amount of complex UI and, frankly, I don't see why people stress so much about it. I rarely end up with more than a screen's worth of event handling code (which is a small amount of pasta, really), and things flow around fairly intuitively if you've any experience building non-web UIs

It feels like a lot of this language churn is purists reinventing the wheel. In previous comments I've ripped into specific aspects of this complaint, and an alarmingly large proportion of responses boil down to, "well, but I can't have feature XXXXXXXX or YYYYY with your stack! it's worthless!" XXXXXX is usually something like syntax highlighting, or intellisense, or some other triviality. Nobody EVER mentioned maintainability, or simplicity, or elegance, or any of these other, broader principles, without also providing a dissonant opinion.

Well you know what? I can write clean, performant, raw javascript and jQuery and I am damn proud of it. I don't need your stupid, always-changing tech. It sucks; I'm 31, but the only people I can relate to here are the old men. GOML, you kids are cray-cray

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#165

Post by marssaxman » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 5:26 PM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #59

marssaxman wrote: post #46

This is interesting but good lord, I want nothing to do with any of this. How are you supposed to get anything done if you have to spend so much time just ramping up on whatever the new hotness happens to be?

I don't really understand this. The height of confusion was at the beginning of the article when the author's friend regretted using RequireJS > We talked again last night, and he said that he’d chosen RequireJS. By now, his company had built a massive codebase around it –- “I guess we bet on the wrong horse there.” What makes RequireJS the wrong horse? Is it not doing what it was originally doing? Do you need more f…

I'm not anxious about it, because I don't have to deal with it, because I continue to focus on interesting problems which are almost entirely unrelated to building web sites. But I choose that in no small part because the world of web development appears to be an insanely unstable froth of fads and complication offering tons of tweaky API-fiddling and not much in the way of abstract design problems. Besides which I just don't see a lot of value in JavaScript and wish people would stop writing so much of it and trying to convince my computer to run it for me.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#166

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 5:28 PM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #59

marssaxman wrote: post #46

This is interesting but good lord, I want nothing to do with any of this. How are you supposed to get anything done if you have to spend so much time just ramping up on whatever the new hotness happens to be?

I don't really understand this. The height of confusion was at the beginning of the article when the author's friend regretted using RequireJS > We talked again last night, and he said that he’d chosen RequireJS. By now, his company had built a massive codebase around it –- “I guess we bet on the wrong horse there.” What makes RequireJS the wrong horse? Is it not doing what it was originally doing? Do you need more f…

[deleted]

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#167

Post by brightball » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 5:33 PM UTC

cognivore wrote: post #122

samcodes wrote: post #44

I have learned so much from comments on Hacker News. Every time one of these articles gets posted I hope that I will get to see some thoughtful commentary on why the ecosystem looks like this: is it the enormous influx of new talent? Is it the consensus to finally drop IE support, and that we're getting a decade of progress in two years? What business demands are driving this technology? Is this a race to make the br…

"...but let's have a productive conversation." Okay, I'll bite. With a web browser, a DOM, and Javascript, where do you see this all heading that's full of truth and beauty? Where does the churn end if it's not pointless? Cause you've got a web browser that was designed to view pages of linked information that has now been pressed into service as a ad-hoc run-time for building applications, a DOM that is so poorly im…

Monty Python explains the foundation of frontend web development better than anyone.

"When I first came here, this was all swamp. Everyone said I was daft to build a castle on a swamp, but I built in all the same, just to show them. It sank into the swamp. So I built a second one. That sank into the swamp. So I built a third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth one stayed up. And that's what you're going to get, Lad, the strongest castle in all of England."

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#168

Post by zeveb » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 5:48 PM UTC

mapgrep wrote: post #141

cognivore wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"...but let's have a productive conversation." Okay, I'll bite. With a web browser, a DOM, and Javascript, where do you see this all heading that's full of truth and beauty? Where does the churn end if it's not pointless? Cause you've got a web browser that was designed to view pages of linked information that has now been pressed into service as a ad-hoc run-time for building applications, a DOM that is so poorly im…

I'm not sure putting down JavaScript, web browsers, and the DOM, and saying the ideal future is completely free of apps built on this platform, is technically being "productive" in a conversation ABOUT those things, but setting that aside: The web app platform represents one of the largest, if not literally THE largest, explosions of programming and application development ever seen in the history of humankind. It al…

> I'm not sure putting down JavaScript, web browsers, and the DOM, and saying the ideal future is completely free of apps built on this platform, is technically being "productive" in a conversation ABOUT those things

Would everyone is discussing the high quality of the Emperor's new clothes, is it productive to point out that he is, in fact, naked as a jaybird?

At some point we have to face up to the simple truth that JavaScript, the DOM, XML and HTML-as-she-is-written are bad. The people who assembled them over time aren't evil, or even generally incompetent: there are historical reasons for almost all of the cruft. But that doesn't mean that it's not horribly, horribly crufty, that is is objectively bad and in poor taste.

> The web app platform represents one of the largest, if not literally THE largest, explosions of programming and application development ever seen in the history of humankind.

That's the logical fallacy known as argumentum ad populum, i.e. arguing that because something is popular is is correct.

> To look at all this and land on the conclusion that JavaScript and the web stack are fucked up‚— "a language that is universally regarded as one of the worst ever" — period, full stop, EOM, throw them out — seems aggressively contemptuous and beside the point.

It is aggressively contemptuous because the current web stack deserves contempt. That is the point.

> It's sort of like looking at a raging party filled with some of the most interesting people you've known and some of the most interesting people you've ever heard of and complaining about the type of speakers being used to play the music.

No, it's more like complaining that each of the interesting people is wearing a blindfold, earmuffs & a gag, with a hobble to prevent him from getting within arm's reach of anyone else and can communicate only by reaching out with a stick or probe and tapping out Morse code messages on other's arms. Sure, all those impressive people are doing a bang-up job of overcoming the absurd limitations of the insane party, but that doesn't make the party one bit less insane.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#169

Post by dham » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 5:51 PM UTC

sklivvz1971 wrote: post #154

dham wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imperative jQuery isn't that bad at all. I agree with you. Once I actually sat down and really learned Javascript 4 or 5 years ago my jQuery got a lot better. I don't think developers understand how to write maintainable jQuery. I see a lot of code where people unbind events before they bind and not using the .on methods. It will still crumble in super complex interfaces though. Which in my experience don't pop up th…

The new tabbed interface of Stack Overflow (in alpha) is all pure jQuery and it's fairly complex. I don't think it "crumbles" at all. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/308875/new-navigatio... Disclaimer: I was one of the developers.

That's awesome. We need more developers like you writing blog posts and going on Podcasts to kind of balance out this "chasing new shiny things all the time developers". When a tech becomes big there's a million blog posts about why it's awesome(extjs, backbone, knockout, angular, react). I've seen it all. Not enough constructive views on the other side.

Re: The Deep Roots of JavaScript Fatigue

#170

Post by tmsam » Wed, Mar 16, 2016, 6:11 PM UTC

cognivore wrote: post #122

samcodes wrote: post #44

I have learned so much from comments on Hacker News. Every time one of these articles gets posted I hope that I will get to see some thoughtful commentary on why the ecosystem looks like this: is it the enormous influx of new talent? Is it the consensus to finally drop IE support, and that we're getting a decade of progress in two years? What business demands are driving this technology? Is this a race to make the br…

"...but let's have a productive conversation." Okay, I'll bite. With a web browser, a DOM, and Javascript, where do you see this all heading that's full of truth and beauty? Where does the churn end if it's not pointless? Cause you've got a web browser that was designed to view pages of linked information that has now been pressed into service as a ad-hoc run-time for building applications, a DOM that is so poorly im…

The "fundamental building blocks are too flawed" argument is so strange to me. Too flawed for what? To become, by far, the most popular platform in history for running applications? Because it's already done that.

This is a case of the evidence not fitting the theory well, so people complain about the evidence. If the browser/DOM/HTML/JS ecosystem "technically" is terrible, but in practice dominates the competition, then there is something about it that is better. This is not a fallacy, but a simple supply and demand argument.