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The State of JavaScript – Survey results

stateofjs.com

21–30 of 357 posts

Re: The State of JavaScript – Survey results

#21
post #3

Super interesting. Lots of data there. Two things that stood out from a quick once-over: Vue is doing better than I expected. PostCSS is less adopted than I expected.

At least in Angular, I can make a template in a directive for styles, which solves the "put repeated stuff in a variable" problem, without bringing in yet another tool.

(use a string for the template, not a file)

Re: The State of JavaScript – Survey results

#22
Glad to see that some stats are the complete opposite of what we usually read on HN about JavaScript.

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> Years of Experience

29% : 2-5 years, 30% : 5-10 years and 23% : 10-20 years

"It turns out JavaScript programmers are not all inexperienced jQuery-wielding junior devs."

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> I would like JavaScript to be my main programming language

49% completely agree and 84% agree

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> I enjoy building JavaScript apps

52% completely agree and 94% agree

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> JavaScript is moving in the right direction

40% completely agree and 94% agree

Re: The State of JavaScript – Survey results

#24
I apologize if the predictability of this comment, but I just want to say, I recently started a new gig at a company that has undergone a full on embrace of Javascript for tooling and server side projects and it boggles my mind how much productivity is wasted on this ecosystem. There is an interesting amount of energy put into making asynchronous code read synchronously in situations where asynchronous code provides no benefit. The dependency tree of any one project tends to be incomprehensibly sprawling. Runtime version numbering is... weird. Don't even get me started on the interplay of Gulp, Grunt, Webpack and NPM. ES6 is bizarrely noisy. ESLint fascism is a necessity given the history of legal anti-patterns the language must shoulder. Scoping can occasionally lead to absurdist solutions [1].

I know this is the future and I'm trying to embrace it, but boy does it feel icky doing it.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33629343/what-is-the-best...

Re: The State of JavaScript – Survey results

#25

I apologize if the predictability of this comment, but I just want to say, I recently started a new gig at a company that has undergone a full on embrace of Javascript for tooling and server side projects and it boggles my mind how much productivity is wasted on this ecosystem. There is an interesting amount of energy put into making asynchronous code read synchronously in situations where asynchronous code provides…

Could it be that you are still just new to it (in the grand scheme of things)?

Because all of those things sound very similar to the complaints I hear from web developers on their first foray into desktop development.

There are so many tools it's impossible to know them all (or to even know which one is best to use in which situation), so much legacy code out there it's tough to learn what the "right" way to do things is, it often feels like you are fighting the OS or the language to get what you want how you want it, and dependencies are hard.

Application development is hard, and is still far from "solved". And while the "web stack" is far from perfect, I'm personally significantly more productive in it than I ever was in anything else. And in my experience that extra productivity makes better applications because I spend less time just trying to get it working, and more time getting it working well.

Re: The State of JavaScript – Survey results

#28
post #9

This seems to suggest the rate of framework churn has rather settled down. Are JS devs finally starting to be satisfied with their current tools and not needing to restart every 18 months?

I see this same, tired old meme in every thread about web technologies. It's funny to me that certain people are so disdainful of the churn in web development on a forum dedicated to "hackers". Web application development is hard, and the reason why there's so much churn is because smart, inventive people are constantly finding better ways to do things. Things aren't just resetting from scratch every 18 months. The w…

> "... the reason why there's so much churn is because smart, inventive people are constantly finding better ways to do things."

It also follows that at some point, these smart, inventive people will come up with fairly stable frameworks that are sufficiently flexible and powerful to accommodate most of the problem space out there. It is reasonable to ask if such a point has been reached...

Re: The State of JavaScript – Survey results

#29

Some interesting things on the "Front End Frameworks" page: * 53% of the respondents used React, and would do so again. * 47% use "No framework", and would do so again. (hmm. that doesn't leave much room, unless you can use more than one tool depending on the situation) * 43% had "no interest" in Angular 2. One other thing to consider, of the "had used X, would/would-not use again" responses: there is of course a lot…

> (hmm. that doesn't leave much room, unless you can use more than one tool depending on the situation)

Or: There are projects that they would use React for AND projects (presumably different) that they would use no framework for.

Re: The State of JavaScript – Survey results

#30

I apologize if the predictability of this comment, but I just want to say, I recently started a new gig at a company that has undergone a full on embrace of Javascript for tooling and server side projects and it boggles my mind how much productivity is wasted on this ecosystem. There is an interesting amount of energy put into making asynchronous code read synchronously in situations where asynchronous code provides…

Yes, it's awful - and you're making a huge mistake by actually doing it yourself. There are plenty of people that love this stuff, as unfathomable as that is. Why not let them do it?
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