Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 198 posts

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#111

Post by atemerev »

natmaster wrote: post #32
dhruvkar wrote: post #21

I couldn't get through the entire thing. Even knowing that it's a fun/sarcastic piece of writing, the portrayed pain is all too real, as someone just starting to dive into the front-end. In all honesty, can I still use jQuery for new projects without issues in 2016? Is there a real reason not to?

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.

React is simple, right until the point it isn't anymore.

The point of breakdown probably starts with Redux. There is no simple way of structuring multi-component pages in React. All is suddenly complicated.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#112

Post by ubersoldat2k7 »

sotojuan wrote: post #67
blacksmythe wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> fine just learning ES6, a front-end technology like Angular (2) or React And in 2015 you would have been just fine learning Ember or Angular 2. And in 2014 you would have been just fine learning Angular 1 or Ember. And in 2013 you would have been just fine learning Backbone and Ember. And in 2012 you would have been just fine learning Knockout and Backbone...

So Ember's the right choice? :-)

Ember has virtual DOM? Then no, it is wrong.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#113

Post by bengale »

blacksmythe wrote: post #55
FrancoDiaz wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "flavor of the week" is mostly a meme. You would be fine just learning ES6, a front-end technology like Angular or React, and a bundler like Webpack. Learning Webpack is painful, but there are other choices. The front-end is harder IMHO, but as another poster mentioned, the opportunities are tremendous.

>> fine just learning ES6, a front-end technology like Angular (2) or React And in 2015 you would have been just fine learning Ember or Angular 2. And in 2014 you would have been just fine learning Angular 1 or Ember. And in 2013 you would have been just fine learning Backbone and Ember. And in 2012 you would have been just fine learning Knockout and Backbone...

None of those technologies disappeared or stopped working.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#114

Post by throwmenow_0139 »

nikdaheratik wrote: post #80
tibbon wrote: post #11

This is pretty much why I don't do front-end. I'm fully capable of it, but I just don't like keeping up with this flavor-of-the-week. It just doesn't feel like programming to me, or at least not the programming I enjoy. Strangely, I see so many new developers rushing toward the front-end, which seems much more complicated in many ways than just building solid web API services, analyzing data, etc.

The toolset itself has the weirdest gaps. You can get to 80-90% of a website design really quickly with the standard angular+bootstrap or whatever. But when a client wants it to do "Feature X" that is in one of the gaps then you're stuck spending hours trying to either hammer the problem into one of the frameworks or roll your own solution. And it's very hard to explain how "Feature X" took nearly half the time of st…

I don't think that it's fair to blame the frameworks. You should see it the other way 'round: They save you 80% of your time. The 80/20 rule is real (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle), 20% of the whole work needs 80% of your time.

If you have problems explaining why features need their time, it's not about your frameworks, it's about explaining the clients in all honesty what happens. Or, if you want to get paid enough, you simply factor in some risks into your budget planning and up your budget. They don't have to know that you only needed 2h to get nearly everything up and running and 6h for that one sneaky feature. Use asymmetric information (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...) to your advantage. It's not about the toolset, it's about your mindset.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#116

Post by Cthulhu_ »

romaniv wrote: post #44

And to think that I went into web dev precisely to avoid dealing with complex build chains and horrible UI libraries...

That's because when you started, all of the complexity was in the back-end; this has moved to the front-end, with backends becoming simpler and more focused on providing data.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#117

Post by JustSomeNobody »

adamrezich wrote: post #73

Cross-posting my comment from reddit: I don't know about anyone else, but the problem I personally have with the crazy, messy JavaScript ecosystem is: - I am a relatively experienced amateur programmer (with limited [nine months] professional experience) - I can learn any new programming language, library, methodology, or whatever pretty easily - I don't have any formal experience using anything of this newfangled st…

1. Rule out any company that says they want 10 years of X. Especially if X hasn't been around 10 years. These companies are looking for such a narrow set of individuals it isn't worth your time. Or, the company doesn't understand technology and you'll be pulling your hair out (assuming you have any; it's cool if you don't) in no time.

2. Understand that rule 1 rules out 99% of tech companies.

3. (And I suck at this) Network. Network. Network. I truly wish I was better at this. I'm currently doing C#/Java/C++ (yes, it's that kind of project. It's been fun, but my interests are changing.) and want to transition to Python full time. I live in a mid size but rather secluded city with an absolute dearth of tech companies, so networking is extremely difficult here.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#118

Post by Ajedi32 »

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…

> He uses a mac. I use windows.

Aaah, good luck. For me it's basically gotten to the point where if the build doesn't immediately work on Windows, I just fire up a Linux VM and work off of that.

And that's not just for front-end projects, but for open-source projects in general. Windows support is often really lacking in an environment where devs seem to use Linux and Mac almost exclusively.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#119

Post by JustSomeNobody »

dhruvkar wrote: post #21

I couldn't get through the entire thing. Even knowing that it's a fun/sarcastic piece of writing, the portrayed pain is all too real, as someone just starting to dive into the front-end. In all honesty, can I still use jQuery for new projects without issues in 2016? Is there a real reason not to?

As long as you stop reading popular blogs and all HN javascript posts, you can use whatever you feel will get the job done. Likely, you'll get it done faster than someone who reads all the popular blogs and chases the shiny.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#120

Post by JustSomeNobody »

natmaster wrote: post #32
dhruvkar wrote: post #21

I couldn't get through the entire thing. Even knowing that it's a fun/sarcastic piece of writing, the portrayed pain is all too real, as someone just starting to dive into the front-end. In all honesty, can I still use jQuery for new projects without issues in 2016? Is there a real reason not to?

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.

> You don't need to know all the toolchains and crap if you just use create-react-app.

I love the hand wavyness of this! Yes, you DO need to know the toolchain. Because if you don't, it is going to be murder on you if you need to track down why something isn't working.

Professional developers need to use professional tools and understand them deeply. There's no compromises here.

Post reply on HN