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How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

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Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#91

Post by cycomachead »

sotojuan wrote: post #23

I'm in a weird position where I like JavaScript and Node but dislike frontend (or at least I am disliking it more and more). With Node, I can get quite far with just a couple of dependencies that install quickly. I don't need transpilation unless I want to use TypeScript or PureScript and I can target any version I want. I find it very fun to mess around with Node and a bunch of little modules. I am slowly "transferr…

JavaScript, admittedly, has a few more quicks than the average language but I quite like it. I know a lot of people who also feel the same way. (And as many how, of course, hate JS.)

It still feels to me like we're in the early days of node and the dev infrastructure for "modern" sites. Hopefully, things stabilize soon(ish).

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#92

Post by therealdrag0 »

wamatt wrote: post #74
gadrev wrote: post #6

This was actually a didactic piece. While criticizing the current state of affairs, it gives a nice overview of many of the emerging technologies and how they fit together, even if for some tasks it feels retarded to pull such an entangled mess of dependencies. You can then go insane diving into any particular one :)

>This was actually a didactic piece. As a matter of curiosity, would you mind unpacking this statement? Not really sure if you mean to say the piece imparts a moral lesson. Or perhaps it relates to the writing aesthetics; Or something else

I think they just meant it was instructive. It gave an overview of the scene.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#93

Post by voltagex_ »

realrocker wrote: post #83

Ok, So I have only ever done backends and some android stuff,and been trying to learn building UIs. It's been hard. This post finally cleared some of the confusions I had but was afraid to ask.

I'm a (mostly backend) web dev, and I've been trying to get a simple Android app up and running - it's definitely more challenging than I'm used to.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#95

Post by glenndebacker »

I don't use ES6 because of the cool kids, but because it makes some Javascript things more tolerable.

One constructive thing that I would like to add is that the "You don't know JS" book series has really taught me a lot about the common pitfalls of JavaScript. Since then my JS stress levels have been reduced dramatically!

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#96

Post by bhrgunatha »

Fuzzwah wrote: post #72
voidfunc wrote: post #64

Just a couple days I got into a conversation with my coworker about UI stuff. I had to test something against our dev UI. Last time I did UI work was back when having index.html, img/, css/ and js/ directories with maybe a script or two was the norm. I had to fucking run make and I still have no fucking idea what was going on when I ran make which compiled a bunch of shit. There was all this NPM shit going on (isn't…

I'm a content guy who knows enough web dev to be dangerous. I made 3 manual edits to a css file to fix a couple of incorrect background colours in our web content the other day. I was a good boy and made a pull request for those same changes in the git repo. Our developer explained that he doesn't actually edit the css file. He would have to work out the change in the hue (as a percent of the base colour) and update…

> this simple build process required 15,000 files in my node_modules subdirectory

You would think people learned a lesson about packaging every tiny item as a dependency with left pad, but apparently yesterday it was downloaded 16104 times.

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/left-pad

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#97

Post by dvcrn »

I know the irony of introducing a new tool in the comments of this particular blogpost, but a while back I decided to completely ditch javascript and go the clojurescript route. I've been super happy ever since.

The syntax is stable, clojure is extremly well designed, the ecosystem a lot clearer and tools - well you have lein as the main one and that's about it. On top of clojure, you get google closure for free and can optimize the hell out of it with advanced mode compilation out of the box.

And that's the 'vanilla' experience! No separate library required! You can still interface with normal js and npm modules of course but you find yourself using npm install a lot less.

All major tools have cljs wrappers that are just a joy to use (looking at reagent (react), re-frame (redux), om (react+graphql)

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#99

Post by majewsky »

dhruvkar wrote: post #47
natmaster wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is really very simple. It only takes a short amount of time to learn it, and then when you do you won't get headaches all the time trying to keep track of state. You don't need to know all the toolchains and crap if you just use create-react-app.

Good to know. Just trying to find a thread (in front-end dev) to latch on to was challenging. So I threw out everything, and just started from HTML on Gitlab Pages. I've added on CSS, and just started adding in little JS functions. I can now (sort of) appreciate frameworks. React seems to be a popular choice.

I would argue that, for a lot of sites, plain HTML + CSS + little JS functions is the right choice, because building stuff in plain JS is more painful than with frameworks. Having to do it in plain JS makes you think more carefully if you really need this JS. (At least, it does that for me.)

Also, the site loads so much faster, esp. when HTTP/2 is not an option for you (because your hosting does not support it or whatever).

I won't argue, though, that a complex web app should be built on a proper framework.

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