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

JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 121 posts

Re: JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

#41

Post by rk06 »

heavenlyhash wrote: post #27

I want a javascript framework that allows me to update a page incrementally, but also always works correctly and contains full content from the first server-side page load. Are there any options for this? Are there even keywords I can search for that discuss this? Sure, this files under "anything is possible", but honestly, I'd like a javascript framework that doesn't actively fight me also having static content. Any…

that is pretty vague. can you elaborate more? preferably post an example of what you want and what is happenning.

Re: JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

#43

Post by xg15 »

sgdesign wrote: post #13
eranation wrote: post #4

Learn programming, not just frameworks. Frameworks will come and go, but the core programming concepts (good design, algorithms, cleanliness, simplicity, data structures, architecture) will tend to stay relevant longer. Learn the principles of Reactive Programming, not just RXJs, learn the philosophy of Redux, not just its syntax. You won't be able to keep up with it otherwise. Source: a guy who was an actionscript g…

This is a nice-sounding programming mantra but it doesn't make much sense in the real world, in my opinion. Learning the "philosophy" of Redux is a natural by-product of learning how to actually use Redux. To me this is the equivalent of saying "learn molecular chemistry, don't follow recipes" to someone who's trying to learn how to cook. It may be true that the most experienced chefs have a deep understanding of che…

> Learning the "philosophy" of Redux is a natural by-product of learning how to actually use Redux.

I don't think that's natural at all. You might learn some kind of philosophy, but it's not neccessarily the right one. If frustrated or pressed for time, people might also give up completely and just resort to "copy-paste programming".

That said, the answer is not throwing some documentation full of abstract concepts at a novice and expect that they magically understand them in exactly the same way as the designers. That's just as bad. But I think many designers that tried that and are frustrated that it doesn't work try to fix it by declaring the concepts as "boilerplate" and hiding them from the users completely. That will work exactly until the user actually needs to know about the concept.

I believe you can grasp many abstract concepts a lot better if you actively work with them. So it's crucial to have a good progressive learning curve that makes you "experience" the concepts and not just read about them. (Ideally by first explaining why you need them and what problem they solve)

Re: JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

#44

Post by pluma »

roryisok wrote: post #25
andrew_wc_brown wrote: post #10

MithrilJS. Such an underated js framework.

I've never even heard of mithril. Very easy to be a developer and read threads like this and suddenly think "oh crap I don't know ANYTHING!"

Just remember that attention is a limited resource and there are very likely things you know that would trigger similar reactions in others.

We tend to compare ourselves with the extreme outliers and even then we overlook their deficiencies and assume they additionally know everything we do. We also tend to conflate all the people we see talking about things we don't know as if they were all the same person.

It's okay not to know things. It's okay to make trade-offs. It helps to have some spatial awareness what else is going on outside your sphere of interest, but pick a handful of things and focus on them instead of trying to learn everything.

Re: JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

#45

Post by mattmanser »

ehnto wrote: post #11
catshirt wrote: post #3

ugh- how is Angular so popular?

I think it's standing in the industry scratches the enterprise itch, so it's popular amongst professionals and corporates. You can't get fired for picking Angular, in other words. As to how it came to be in that standing, it was and likely still is a very powerful platform.

I recently wrote an embed widget for a client, a simple 5 field form with some dynamic drop-down changing and a date picker. 40/50 lines of js maybe with a simple date picker (pickadate I think).

The client showed me a couple of examples of what they wanted.

One used Angular to make the widget. For a 5 field form that transitions to a "thanks, your order is accepted" div.

Personally, I would consider firing any-one who thought using angular in that scenario is a sensible thing to do.

Re: JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

#46

Post by ExpiredLink »

Or wait another year and pick the winner of the JavaScript framework war. It's unlikely that we will see new and relevant(!) JS frameworks over the next few years as we have seen in the past. 20 - 25 years ago dozens of Windows frameworks appeared on the market. Eventually VB won. History is repeating itself.

Re: JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

#47

Post by pluma »

catshirt wrote: post #3

ugh- how is Angular so popular?

Because it appeals to programmers coming from a background in C# and Java. It can feel out of place to programmers used to jQuery and Node but it's very appealing to the enterprise mindset.

Mind you, there are people using Angular outside the enterprise (e.g. via Ionic), but it's definitely one of its main strengths.

For anyone wondering: detractors criticise Angular for relying on a lot of idiomatic concepts (compared to other frameworks that largely build on concepts that apply to JS in general) and creating a lot of abstractions to the point where Angular can be considered its own language (as is certainly the case with its template language despite people saying it's "just HTML"). All of these things are the way they are for good reasons, it just makes Angular entirely unappealing to a subset of the JS community. Luckily there are plenty other frameworks to choose from.

Re: JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

#48

Post by gamesmaxed »

dictum wrote: post #38

> Webpack: The most popular bundler for standard JavaScript look for simple starter kit/boilerplate config examples to get things running fast Unless you're already familiar with a tool, I'd suggest starting with the very Hello, world basics. For Webpack, that's creating an empty project and incrementally adding config, starting with just an entry point (use a simple script importing some modules) and an output filen…

Wait, are we actually praising the webpack docs now? How far have we come.

Re: JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

#49

Post by erik14th »

andretti1977 wrote: post #30

I must be honest, my experience with node was very short but this article suggests me that working with js may be really more complicated than working with java. Too many frameworks (which often lives too shortly), too many things to learn, it's overwhelming...sometimes it seems to me that working with js has become so difficult that working with java and jquery is still easier and better (i know lot of people will t…

Apples and oranges. You're comparing SPA paraphernalia with a library that basically gives you a sane cross browser JS API's and some goodies.

Yes, you can develop highly interactive, reasonably complex web apps with jQuery, but then you would have to develop a lot of abstractions, guidelines and whatnot to keep the thing from exploding. That's pretty much what those SPA libraries and frameworks are.

About server side, IMO there's no inherent advantage on picking node over java other than the fact you'll have one less language in your stack(or not, since you may end up using TypeScript or some other compile-to-js language).

Re: JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

#50

Post by kaoD »

gamesmaxed wrote: post #48
dictum wrote: post #38

> Webpack: The most popular bundler for standard JavaScript look for simple starter kit/boilerplate config examples to get things running fast Unless you're already familiar with a tool, I'd suggest starting with the very Hello, world basics. For Webpack, that's creating an empty project and incrementally adding config, starting with just an entry point (use a simple script importing some modules) and an output filen…

Wait, are we actually praising the webpack docs now? How far have we come.

I think you're being downvoted due to strawman ([s]he praised documenting concepts, not the documentation as a whole) but you're right though. I've never dived into my toolchain code (due to missing or frugal documentation) more than I've been forced to with Webpack.

It suffers from tutorial-like instructions and a lack of formal list-like documentation, which leads to conflicting or confusing configurations (very easy since there are multiple ways to do the same thing, shortcuts found in the CLI but not in the configuration, etc.)

I love Webpack, but the documentation is really rough in some places.

Post reply on HN