JavaScript frameworks and topics to learn in 2017

Well said! Hopefully once wasm becomes mainstream this madness will stop.

You're all selling this as if it were some sort of philisophy. But it's not. Webpack just happens to be a piece of software that for reasons nobody will ever fully understand ended up being the de facto standard, all while being the most miserable to configure piece of software seen by mankind. (I. e. 4-level depth nested configuration with no indication of errors, a few different common patterns – ph, and there are two versions of webpack and the documentation rarely mentions which one it's talking about)[0].

Webpack is, essentially, a compiler. It, or something else, will mature to the point where you don't configure it any more except for maybe a debug flag. At that point learning it's internals will be as useful to a web programmer as learning LLVM's (by which I don't mean "not useful", but probably not worth neglecting whatever the trade-off may be).

[0] I think it was mostly developed by a single guy with a day job, and it has had more impact than any software I have or probably will ever build, so it's not meant to be insulting. Annoyances such as these are the price of a fast-moving field.

That's simply not true. I'm kind of tired of hearing about this kind of stuff said about JS. This comment adds absolutely nothing to the discussion about this article.

Did you even read the article before making this comment? It would appear you didn't since this is just a classic, low effort javascript bashing comment that mentions no evidence from the article.

Every single thing he marks as important to learn is either

1. a mature library that has been around for years and is used in production at hundreds of companies (React is 3 years old and Angular is 6 years old, Lodash is 4 years old, Node is almost a decade old)

or

2. is a fully specced and largely implemented feature of the Javascript language.

How is Ajax gong to be obselete before you finish reading? How is Node, a nearly decade old, battle hardened runtime going to go out of style in 2017? By literally any definition JS builtins, functions, closures, callbacks, Chrome Dev Tools, React, Angular, Tern, ESLint, npm, git, Redux and Promises are all "mature robust solutions". They've all been around for years and are thoroughly tested and used. Many of them are used maturely in other languages as well, for example Futures in C# are basically the same thing as Promises.

The author does mention some newer things like async/await, generators, and ES6, but all these are now official parts of javascript. They simply can't "go obselete", and all of these share ideas with other languages which are also, by any definition, mature and robust.

The author does mention some libraries which are new and less proven, like RXJS, Angular2, MobX, Vue, Yarn, Typescript, and Flow, but did you notice how every single one of these has an asterisk? Which he specifically states means "strictly optional": Cool things to try out that may be useful tools, but not essential. Even most of these are several years old and perfectly mature anyway.

Yes the javascript community moves quickly. Yes JS programmers enjoy trying out flavor of the month frameworks, but it seems I'm one of the only people who sees this as a great thing. People try out lots of new things and learn lots of new strategies, and in the end the ideas of these get incorporated into existing mature frameworks, making them better and more robust.

My 2 cents. I would consider myself a JS expert as I have writen AngularJS and RequireJS clones. Personally, I don't agree with the path that OS JS dev has gone in recent years. The reliance on build systems and transpilers are fundamentally anathema to the spirit of simplicity and low barrier to entry that attracted me to the language and ecosystem inn the first place.

I understand that as we have moved from web pages to web apps the increase in complexity was inevitable, but I question a lot of the tools being used now. For one thing, once we moved to creating full applications using JS, one of the concerns that tooling moved to address was maintainability. This is why MV* caught on and destroyed JQuery as a viable option for many projects. That being said, Angular pretty quickly swapped one kind of maintainability problem (refactorability) for another (over-abstraction and cyclomatic complexity).

As for the dev tooling (webpack and company), one of the reason I avoid a lot of them is in my experience they can get in the way of maintainability. For example, I recently tried to pick up a 3 month old project in Android Studio and it took me around 3 hours just to get it to compile again because of updates and other tooling complexity. This NEVER happened using Eclipse. The same thing is happening and will happen when the apps being built today get dumped on some poor sod 3-5 years from now.

Lastly, an example from my job. I was recently asked to update the verbiage on a sign in form built ~13 years ago. The devs decided to use some java framework that had buzz at the time named JATO. Jato literally doesn't exist anymore and building it is basically impossible. This is to say nothing of modifying it as all documentation has literally disappeared from the web. The devs picked JATO b/c they thought it would be easier to modify and maintain. Exactly the opposite has happened. They could easily have written the form (literally two input boxes and a submit) using plain JSP. If they had, that code would still be useful today.

I agree. The explosion of new ideas is also an explosion of learning curves.

I suppose that's fine for people who just want to learn something new every day. I want to make stuff, and the less maintenance it needs the better. Most of what's on the hype train isn't too appealing for that.