JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore • Hacker News Board

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#11

Post by ythn » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:45 PM UTC

gtsteve wrote: post #7

I don't think there's that big a problem with how many front-end frameworks there are, and the pace of development. I think the problem is people who feel they have to use the latest and greatest feature and they have to know all the frameworks. At my company we picked a stack and stuck with it. That happened to be React and Redux. I hear Angular 2 and Vue are really great frameworks but I feel under no pressure to r…

> Frameworks don't rust

Unless the framework is iron [1], of course

[1] https://github.com/iron/iron

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#12

Post by shados » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:46 PM UTC

gtsteve wrote: post #7

I don't think there's that big a problem with how many front-end frameworks there are, and the pace of development. I think the problem is people who feel they have to use the latest and greatest feature and they have to know all the frameworks. At my company we picked a stack and stuck with it. That happened to be React and Redux. I hear Angular 2 and Vue are really great frameworks but I feel under no pressure to r…

Agreed. Honestly at this point I'll take boring. I'd welcome boring. People really need to stop upgrading 0.1 second after something comes out. Take the Java world. You can have a lot of criticism for the language or the platform, but the reality is people get shit done without upgrading right away. It's not even part of the culture. This allows people to master the platform and tools.

In the JS world, there's no mastery. People just keep jumping to newest versions and spend all of their time fighting the new problems. Just. Stop.

The company I work for almost standardized on react/redux. We're not done getting rid of our old stack that people are already looking at Relay Modern, Apollo, MobX, etc. If it wasn't for our investment in a massive home grown React component library, there would probably be VueJS all over the place.

So we lose the ability to help each other. Every team is different, dealing with different problems. We can't build libraries since we don't have a platform to target. That to me makes us much weaker.

So I welcome boring. I welcome the day when people are no longer interested in it so they stop spamming npm to check if a new version of their favorite library is out to upgrade to it when the existing one is working fine.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#13

Post by sametmax » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:47 PM UTC

But JS dev has never been fun.

Web dev is fun because the browser is a freaking awesome plateform.

However, it is _despite_ of JS.

There's not a single characteristic of this language that makes it better than any other mainstream high level language out there. We use it because we have no reasonable alternative on the browser. It has always been a pain to use, requiring:

- avoiding part of the language that is badly designed to escape traps.

- recreating basic features that you take for granted in any other tech like isolation, namespacing, primitive stlib features, etc.

- fight with the various implementations to find some code that will work for most of your customers.

- use tooling to compensate any weakness you can. Remember the most popular projects in JS (coffee, tsx, jsx, babel, webpack, etc) are mostly projects allowing you... to avoid writing JS.

The fact that the community is now shooting itself in the foot by providing so many incompatible, badly documented and breaking-compat-all-the-time tools is just icing on the rotten cake.

P.S: since this comment is getting upvotes, I will say that having used in prod vanilla, jquery, react, angular and Vue, I will stick with Vue for the next years. I'm done. My quest is over. It takes 3 hours of reading to be productive with it. It requires no tooling and yet can be used with existing tooling. It's fast. It's well documented. I can now focus on writing software again.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#14

Post by robodale » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:47 PM UTC

14 year .NET veteran here. For me Javascript (actually Typescript) using Vue as the front-end reinvigorated my joy of creating web applications again.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#15

Post by joshribakoff » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:48 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #5

rhapsodic wrote: post #2

>Plus, now I have to learn what Redux is, and how Vue is the next best thing that happened since Angular 2.0. How to use styled-components to make JavaScript in React do what CSS can do on it’s own. I'm glad I get to call the shots where I work, and I've steered my team clear of all of this stuff. If you have a deep knowledge of the core technologies -- HTML, JS, and CSS -- you can build a great front end with a reas…

> If something breaks, it's likely going to be our own code, and much easier to diagnose and fix. But conversely, common problems and issues with frameworks are easy to find via Google and StackOverflow.

Plus more people are familiar with a popular open source framework than OPs. There's 100s of thousands of react devs. But only OP knows OPs framework. Most people need to use an existing framework before they try to write their own, because a lot of people try to write frameworks not knowing what frameworks actually do or what is involved.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#16

Post by pavel_lishin » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:49 PM UTC

joshribakoff wrote: post #15

pavel_lishin wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If something breaks, it's likely going to be our own code, and much easier to diagnose and fix. But conversely, common problems and issues with frameworks are easy to find via Google and StackOverflow.

Plus more people are familiar with a popular open source framework than OPs. There's 100s of thousands of react devs. But only OP knows OPs framework. Most people need to use an existing framework before they try to write their own, because a lot of people try to write frameworks not knowing what frameworks actually do or what is involved.

I wonder if OP doesn't have a framework at all.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#17

Post by lanna » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:51 PM UTC

gtsteve wrote: post #7

I don't think there's that big a problem with how many front-end frameworks there are, and the pace of development. I think the problem is people who feel they have to use the latest and greatest feature and they have to know all the frameworks. At my company we picked a stack and stuck with it. That happened to be React and Redux. I hear Angular 2 and Vue are really great frameworks but I feel under no pressure to r…

> I think the problem is people who feel they have to use the latest and greatest feature and they have to know all the frameworks.

The problem is the marketplace and the companies that will demand the skills when one is job searching.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#18

Post by cc81 » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:52 PM UTC

React + (early flux and later mobx) made web development fun again for me. I was burned out at the end of the jquery era with all the different homemade structures and the limitations of browsers.

Then I came back to React and babel/gulp (later webpack). Suddently there was structure in the front end that was easy to get into a project and contribute. Building components just felt right. Also js was almost a modern language now and I could use it even if the browsers did not actually support it yet.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#19

Post by abhisuri97 » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:52 PM UTC

I teach a course at upenn on intro to javascript. Perhaps the most useful advice I give to my students is that often the simplest tools will get the job done i.e. you don't need React, Redux frontend stack because for most cases jquery will get the job done much quicker. Only worry about the frontend libraries when you feel it's getting out of hand, otherwise, the simple, straightforward tools will suffice.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#20

Post by gorpomon » Wed, Sep 20, 2017, 2:53 PM UTC

The desire to constantly switch JS frameworks is really confusing. I find each one different, exciting in their own way and fun to learn. However, and this is a big however, none of them radically change the work you'll create, so I'm happy with React, and not interested in learning just to learn. Maybe in a year or two, I'll try Vue, it won't be too hard to pick up.

If you're at BigCo making internal apps, each one is basically dressing on a way to make various interactive UI states. How you get there is no big deal. How the data flows is no big deal. What test runner you use is no big deal.

As a JS dev, my passion is to learn completely non-JS related things. Cryptography, Blockchain, CS Fundamentals I missed. These are much more interesting than the churn.