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Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#61

Post by civilian »

combatentropy wrote: post #24

Is it because it lacks a shepherd? Perl has Larry Wall. Python has Guido van Rossum. PHP had Rasmus Lerdorf and later Andi Gutmans and Zeev Suraski (Zend). Ruby has Yukihiro Matsumoto, and Rails has David Heinemeier Hansson. JavaScript came from Brendan Eich, but it was like a work for hire, wasn't it? Microsoft and Netscape just kind of ran with it. Then I guess it did have a shepherd, the W3, and all the browsers f…

Maybe replace "shepherd" with "standard lib". Python has a pretty complete standard lib. Javascript is lacking it, and that vacuum encourages things like jquery. But then there are people who see jquery getting bloated, and they really just want a few features, so they write underscore and lodash. We've got no standard lib, so we have a continual ebb & flow of unstandard libs.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#62

Post by nnq »

nickstefan12 wrote: post #23

In an industry without a guild / license / what have you, the incentives skew towards articles of proof. Articles of proof could be demo websites, screen shots, and open source libraries. Being the creator or top two contributor of a library is now worth so much more than being a small time contributor that the incentives are skewed towards everyone just making a new thing, always. It's their way to stand out. So why…

Your QA engineer could use a framework like CodeceptJS (http://codecept.io/) and get back the "sync behavior", mostly.

If the app you're testing is messy, some of the test code will have to be injected into the browser by webdriver (so obligatory Javascript, and oblygatory async for getting the results back...) and some (hopefully most!) will run outside, in the test-runner, so JS ends to be the only sane option if you don't want to write "Python with strings of JS sprinkled around".

Also, webdriver itself is a mess with a horrible API forcefully riding another bigger mess (the browser adapters and browser itself), riding a top another mess (your app, however non-messy you imagine it to be, it's still a soup of crap running though the bowels of the browser)... so no "clean" solution here even if you're using Python.

Probably the way out of "webdriver testing hell" is to use a frontend framework with good testing support and write good front-end unit-tests: but they will obviously be Javascript :)

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#63

Post by cjfont »

infinity0 wrote: post #58
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a large extent this is true because the javascript community is busy with the re-invention of all of computer history, only without applying all of the lessons learned. Activity does not equate quality.

Not only are they doing that, but they are insanely arrogant about rejecting criticism that they're doing this too.

You don't drop an incendiary statement like that without at least citing an example of where that has been the case.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#64

Post by onli »

civilian wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a large extent this is true because the javascript community is busy with the re-invention of all of computer history, only without applying all of the lessons learned. Activity does not equate quality.

Dude, comeon. The browser has evolved a lot as a platform, as has the hardware power of computers running them. Maybe we're re-writing computer history, but if that's the case then it's because we have to migrate everything to javascript and the wiser old timers want nothing to do with it. * Do you really want to write CSS without a pre-processor? * Do you really want to control a webpage's state without JS models in…

> Do you really want to write CSS without a pre-processor?

Not him, but yes, I absolutely do. Pre-processors mainly have the effect of forcing you to have a build tool workflow, and the nice thing about web design is that you don't need stuff like that.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#65

Post by rer »

civilian wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To a large extent this is true because the javascript community is busy with the re-invention of all of computer history, only without applying all of the lessons learned. Activity does not equate quality.

Dude, comeon. The browser has evolved a lot as a platform, as has the hardware power of computers running them. Maybe we're re-writing computer history, but if that's the case then it's because we have to migrate everything to javascript and the wiser old timers want nothing to do with it. * Do you really want to write CSS without a pre-processor? * Do you really want to control a webpage's state without JS models in…

> we have to migrate everything to javascript

Why?

What I really want is the whole browser to go away.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#66

Post by mbrock »

nickstefan12 wrote: post #23

In an industry without a guild / license / what have you, the incentives skew towards articles of proof. Articles of proof could be demo websites, screen shots, and open source libraries. Being the creator or top two contributor of a library is now worth so much more than being a small time contributor that the incentives are skewed towards everyone just making a new thing, always. It's their way to stand out. So why…

I made a shell WebDriver tool that makes it really easy to script the browser from the comfort of your command line.

It's not fully polished yet, especially error reporting is a bit ugly, but it works and supports most of the WebDriver API.

https://github.com/mbrock/wd

I'm using it more for automation than testing but it could definitely be used for QA.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#67

Post by life_is_short »

prewett wrote: post #38

I think all the churn is a sign of several problems. First, the language was not designed to do what people are trying to use it for. Second, I question whether the framework makers are familiar with "native" UI APIs (e.g. Java, Qt, NextStep), which solved a lot of these problems years ago. Notice the lack of churn in native UI APIs (exception of Microsoft). Third, it seems like the frameworks try to build on top of…

> provide well-thought out input and drawing primitives

This sounds like a cool idea! What primitives would you suggest?

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#68

Post by falcolas »

nickstefan12 wrote: post #54
inimino wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That explains why lots of libraries get written, but not why they get used .

the lack of a good standard library might have something to do with it. I'll admit im not sure.

The shaming of mature libraries doesn't help either. Try showing off something with jQuery these days.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#69

Post by jameskegel »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
lacker wrote: post #16

The open-source-JavaScript community right now is just the largest, most active open source community that has ever existed. Check out the stats that GitHub recently announced: https://octoverse.github.com/ Open source JavaScript activity as measured by pull requests has doubled (!!) in the past year. It's more than the next two languages (Java and Python) combined. Most of the top repositories on GitHub are JavaScri…

To a large extent this is true because the javascript community is busy with the re-invention of all of computer history, only without applying all of the lessons learned. Activity does not equate quality.

I'll admit, you got a laugh and a smirk out of me, but this still seems like an unfair statement.

The JS community at large isn't reinventing the wheel, just iterating on a wheel as it moves, if that makes sense.

Re: Ask HN: Why is everything in JavaScript changing so fast?

#70

Post by hoorayimhelping »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
lacker wrote: post #16

The open-source-JavaScript community right now is just the largest, most active open source community that has ever existed. Check out the stats that GitHub recently announced: https://octoverse.github.com/ Open source JavaScript activity as measured by pull requests has doubled (!!) in the past year. It's more than the next two languages (Java and Python) combined. Most of the top repositories on GitHub are JavaScri…

To a large extent this is true because the javascript community is busy with the re-invention of all of computer history, only without applying all of the lessons learned. Activity does not equate quality.

Give me a break. The entire internet and software landscape is changing and everyone is in a constant rush to stay current. You make it seem like it's some kind of concerted effort to insult the sensibilities of good, proper software engineers who know the right way to do things.

Everyone is just trying to do the best they can with the incredibly complex stack of technologies in play today.

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