It sounds like he doesn't dislike JS, he dislikes what web development has become.
I dislike build tools and all the little doo-dads that we have to have now. Like, sometimes I just want to write some CSS and launch it with `npm start`
JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
41–50 of 123 posts
Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
That actually sounds like an interesting business model.
What form would the transaction take?
Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
#43> [Front-end is] looking more and more like the back-end
This rings true to me. It's also partially why I don't really mind front-end development like I used to.
Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
#44I think this is a good description of how front-end development has become a "tool zoo", where new versions of libraries and frameworks are often radically different, and new libraries/frameworks keep popping up. I compare this to Python, where most of the time learning a new library will keep paying off for years and years. It makes front-end development an expensive (educationally) place to work, and the maintenance costs of the code are substantial.
Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
#45I 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…
> That happened to be React and Redux.
To be fair, I would put react in the same generation of frameworks as Angular 2 and Vue. It just got to the same basic virtual dom + modular components design earlier than the rest. Vue and Angular 2 don't really offer much besides marginal performance boosts (react fiber, preact etc erase this) and a more familiar way of programming for programmers in the last generation of frameworks angular 1/ember.
Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
#46I must admit having a hard time relating to all the complaints over js churn and the new world of...compiling code. I hated website dev in the past, hated using jQuery, hated being driven insane by the css cascade, hated wasting all my time on arbitrary and stupid browser incompatibility bugs with magic arcane solutions.
I develop apps---not traditional websites---so I know this colors my experience. But every single tech change that I've made the past 4 years has been motivated by a real need. (Of course this assumes I have control over the tech: I'm grateful that I've only been forced to work on one Angular project for work!)
I started using React in December 2013 after a shootout of the competing view libraries at the time because I didn't like having to be Sherlock Holmes to figure out how to change someone else's (or my own!) wild jQuery code, and I always inarticulately felt like I was fighting against a natural flow when using the old MVC frameworks. I now haven't churned my basic framework for almost 4 years. And don't expect to for many more! (I know that to an extent I got lucky: it's easy to forget now how much shit I got at the time for using dumb React lol compared to Angular). Ember is fascinating, I'm glad Preact, etc is around as a backup...but churning would solve no problem for me, and most jobs I'd get (for years now) require React, so why worry about changing?
I've been a redux user for over 2 years now. I eagerly switched over the codebase I was working on because it solved a need I had: getting rid of a bug-prone, undocumented state solution of my own design which everyone else had to figure out for themselves. I expect I will switch out redux one of these years. But haven't seen anything to motivate it yet. Mobx-state-tree is very interesting, but until I see the benefits are worth the switch, why churn?
I did really hate having to worry about babel, webpack, etc since it distracted from writing actual product code, though ES6 was just so obviously better than old JS that it was worth it. But now create-react-app and its siblings make the dev environment a matter of typing a single command. Contrary to this article, it points out errors that could easily have gone undetected in the the old world of wild web dev. No churn here. CRA all the way. Until I run into a need for something new.
Styling solutions are something I have actually churned. But because I knew I wasn't committing, all css-in-js library code I write is in two or three "ui library" files. The app code itself only uses a jsx prop interface. So swapping these libraries on a mature app takes an afternoon at best. Though for the first time I now expect that I'll stick with Glamorous. I expect I'm going to stop churning here because I'm aware of no problem I personally have that Glamorous does not solve, unlike previous css-in-js libraries.
I don't know, this guy's rant just put me in the mood for ranting lol. Anyway, I'm glad this guy found his real interest now might be as an animator and UX designer and I wish him the best! Those are important contributions too, possibly more important.
Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
#47But 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…
> - avoiding part of the language that is badly designed to escape traps.
This is universally true for any mainstream language where age > 10 years.
> - fight with the various implementations to find some code that will work for most of your customers.
That's an understandable tradeoff from the ability to write code that can run on thousands of different devices. It's very much preferable than writing native code for each platform and all the various implementations that would require.
Basically agree with your other points.
Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
#48I 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…
Agreed - I've often thought that having to learn these new frameworks will ultimately lead to terminal juniority. I get that each framework does things differently, and you can learn new patterns from each one, but ultimately you're just re-learning the wheel. Not advancing your skillset.
Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
To me this kind of thinking sounds so strange. A framework is (like it's namesake) a frame that you can build around, it's a tool that enforces restrictions on you by design. Obviously there is some overhead to learning that framework, but the idea is that the framework is built by someone who spends their day-job building the framework. They are going to do a better job of designing a framework than you will in most…
Yes, frameworks are tools, but they're typically overspecialized and poorly designed. If vanilla JS is a cnc machine, Angular is an injection mold for a toy truck. If you're building a toy truck, that's awesome. If you're building anything else, say, a hand mixer, you're going to spend just as much time on the cnc machine trying to design toy truck whisk attachments as you would have spent just building a new mold wi…
That metaphor doesn't help with the default thinking behind a large proportion of engineering decisions.
It goes like this:
This is hard
=> I want to do one or two slightly different things
=> Building custom things feels like valuable work
=> Use the CNC machine!
The word 'overspecialized' is a bit sour for web frameworks. There are billions of web sites, most of which are astoundingly similar. Squint at the front-end UI and most engineers are basically building Asana, over and over again, like a boot stamping on a human face – forever. The ways they are differentiated are generally not related to code at all, instead business or meta-engineering needs (e.g. NYT dataviz graphics production, or a small team trying to maximize output).
In contrast, everyone needs a router/nav, a wrapper around XHR/an API, some rendering to HTML, and some buttons to do things. If you think Angular (which, stripped down, is ~20kb gz and very basic indeed), or really any framework is too specialized for some set of needs which includes the above four things, you are attacking a very frightened-looking scarecrow with the might of the U.S. Navy. Framework churn is part of this problem; people think they have such big engineering tasks ahead only the new shiny thing can solve it.
The point is, needing the whole CNC is _very rare_. Anyone who thinks that all of the big or even little front-end frameworks are too specialized should go look in the mirror. If, when you do that, you literally see a company with 300 engineers or incredibly specialized needs – like immersive interactive media, or you need IE6 compat, then go build your crazy stuff while the rest of us churn out decent apps with near-zero friction.
[1]: https://blog.bolt.io/heres-why-juicero-s-press-is-so-expensi...
Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore
#50But 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…
JS, and the web platform in general, is solving problems that are hard in nature. Considering the constraints imposed by these problems, quite a few features of JS are superior to many other languages.
Consider the wide range of devices that a JS code must support. There is some pain in supporting all of them, but compared with Android development, the transpilers and shims available in JS seems like magic. Cross platform programming is hard, and JS seems wierd because any JS code must consider it, while many C programmers never need to think about it. Taking cross-platform into account, I prefer copying some shims from MDN to using IFDEF WIN32's.
Or consider GUI development. The nice API for working with DOM, lots of available UI components, and specially the asynchronous programming model made possible by Promises is really nice by GUI-programming standards.
Also the good parts/bad parts mindset belongs to the past. I can't remember the last time I even thought of using == vs ===, prototype hacks or similar "bad" parts. The usual post about strange behavior of ">=null" on HN is just amuzing, not problematic for my JS coding experience. As said in other comments, maybe everybody should just stick to using their prefered JS framework and master it.