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

JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 123 posts

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#31

Post by amelius »

StavrosK wrote: post #28
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. Ah, the optimism of youth. Frameworks don't rust if you don't mind sticking with the security bugs of 10-year-old kernels. If you need to upgrade your OS, you need to upgrade your programming languages, which means you need to upgrade your frameworks. Everything rusts pretty quickly. Maybe you don't need the new features, but you definitely need the new bugfixes.

The problem is that everybody publishes bugfixes alongside new features. This practice should be stopped, because it leads to dependency hell.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#32

Post by gras »

amelius wrote: post #31
StavrosK wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frameworks don't rust. Ah, the optimism of youth. Frameworks don't rust if you don't mind sticking with the security bugs of 10-year-old kernels. If you need to upgrade your OS, you need to upgrade your programming languages, which means you need to upgrade your frameworks. Everything rusts pretty quickly. Maybe you don't need the new features, but you definitely need the new bugfixes.

The problem is that everybody publishes bugfixes alongside new features. This practice should be stopped, because it leads to dependency hell.

It's either that or backporting bugfixes to every single past release, right? Is that what you propose? Or a "middle way" with LTS releases?

I mean, you could have separate bugfix and feature releases for a relatively low cost, but that would only alleviate the problem for the duration of a release cycle.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#34

Post by scaryclam »

topbanana wrote: post #6
mfoy_ wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Framework churn sucks. It's a shame you're being down-voted, I can totally understand where you're coming from.

It does, but that doesn't mean you can't choose a decent stack and stick with it

Shouldn't we be looking at the task at hand and picking the best tool for the job though?

Using a framework because it happened to work last time isn't a good criteria for selection. More and more I'm seeing over-engineered projects that took longer to build than they needed to and are currently harder to support than necessary, all because someone wanted to use their favorite tool.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#36

Post by eropple »

amelius wrote: post #31
StavrosK wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Frameworks don't rust. Ah, the optimism of youth. Frameworks don't rust if you don't mind sticking with the security bugs of 10-year-old kernels. If you need to upgrade your OS, you need to upgrade your programming languages, which means you need to upgrade your frameworks. Everything rusts pretty quickly. Maybe you don't need the new features, but you definitely need the new bugfixes.

The problem is that everybody publishes bugfixes alongside new features. This practice should be stopped, because it leads to dependency hell.

Open-source maintainers should totally leverage this opportunity to make their projects sustainable. Sell your backports. Enterprises want them.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#37

Post by einrealist »

I totally agree with the sentiment. While others tend to use SPAs with their complex build system and lifecycle for everything, I follow principles of ROCA [1]. I don't understand why people think it is better and faster to make complex clients that include logic, that has to be verified on the server anyway. Everything I saw / see in the enterprise world is reinvented for client-side development again.

[1] http://roca-style.org/

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#38

Post by blktiger »

StavrosK wrote: post #28
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. Ah, the optimism of youth. Frameworks don't rust if you don't mind sticking with the security bugs of 10-year-old kernels. If you need to upgrade your OS, you need to upgrade your programming languages, which means you need to upgrade your frameworks. Everything rusts pretty quickly. Maybe you don't need the new features, but you definitely need the new bugfixes.

This is why you should choose a frontend framework with a LTS (long-term support) program. (For example, Angular 4 or Ember.) You don't have to upgrade to the latest version of the framework, just the latest LTS version which will have all the relevant bug/security fixes. Only when the framework starts to drop support for the LTS version do you have to deal with upgrading and learning whatever new features they have added since then.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#40

Post by madamelic »

shados wrote: post #12
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 mas…

>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 frontend framework we use has had six major releases in a year and a half. And I am talking, rip the guts out and change how it works major releases (How semantic versioning is supposed to work).

Like I appreciate that they are doing active development and making it better (because it is getting better, to be honest), but I still feel like you could fix bugs in some minor versions and do like cut major releases to like every six months at least.

Post reply on HN