Ask HN: Is all programming constantly changing or just front-end JavaScript?

    Every programming language consistency is
    inversely proportional to the scale of adoption.

And by adoption i mean how popular it is with actual companies using it and pushing delivery over code-quality, with an ever growing pool of junior devs. Adoption as hobby languages or slim startups full of very experienced devs doesn't count.

> PHP PHP is in usage decline (by the demographic outlined above). So it is getting more consistent (take a look at it during the 3->4->5 timeframe, you will think JS is moving slow)

> [ruby on] Rails This is even on a steeper incline than PHP today. So expect more consistency i guess.

> everywhere or

Java is always popular (it's the bread and butter of the demography defined above!), and people make money selling IDE plugins (something hard to grasp out of the java world) which accelerates the inconsistency. So it is always a crap shot. A pile of incompatible concepts every time a new senior dev passes trhu the project. Not to mention in the last years every project moved full steam to scala and then back. So every 4yr you can see the same project and not have any idea what is going on because they moved from ant to maven or gradle, or rewrote half (only half) the project in another jvm language, or now every method and class is full of never seen before toolkit annotations, etc.

GoLang started as a nice perl/bash script replacement and is becoming the new web application server as it gains adoption. Which was first bringing consistency and parallelization to what used to be done with perl or bash, is now full of weird ways to manage packages, which are mostly implementation of web authentication and what not.

erlang is in sweet spot. Some bigCo uses it as hiring bait, and there is lot's of smaller companies using it. There still isn't a mass of jr devs pumping out features on erlang projects, so consistency is at an all time high. With frameworks that actually add to the ecosystem instead of flipping everything on its head for silly syntax sugar.

Cpp had a bump in adoption recently because of CND related projects and more focus on ssl and things like that. So the new standard bodies are busy at work churning in new things nobody asked for, but that so far everyone is loving.

Does Vue + TS remove the need for Webpack? Which one creates the JS and CSS bundles?

I'm doing Rails now, and I'd say no, it's just JS. Since Rails 4 was released particularly, most things upgrade between versions with only minor hiccups. The changes are mostly adding new modules to have a standard way to do various common things, but the old ways generally don't stop working. You can upgrade to the latest Rails and switch over to the new module, or not, at your leisure. New Ruby versions come out pretty regularly too, and the changes are mostly improvements on speed and memory usage, and addition of new syntax types. I don't think there have been any breaking changes since Ruby 2.0 was released.

I've worked in a few other languages, and I don't think anything else has the vibe of rewriting your whole system around a whole new popular framework every few years.

I managed to get approval to bump my group up to C++11 a couple years ago thanks to some significant new features in the STL like usable smart pointers. So far none of the successive standards have offered anything sufficiently worthwhile to move us off C++11. It's possible that a new standard will introduce a killer features, but I wouldn't be too surprised if we simply stayed on C++11 forever.

While I think things have changed a lot since 2012 (when I started) I don't think they've changed that much since 2015. The language and ecosystem went through a lot of churn as single page apps and front-end complexity exploded. In 2012, there were something like 10 different popular JS frameworks to pick from and most of them have been all but replaced by the top 3, which seem to have stabilized: React, Angular 2+, and Vue.

ES2015 brought a lot of changes to the language itself. But recent years have been less dramatic minor syntactic improvements.

Front-end web has unique challenges and constraints that other front ends don't have to worry about as much.

A web app has to download the full payload of the app code and execute in one sitting. Yes, there's a myriad of ways to optimize this (such as caching, server-rendering, etc), but having to understand that just adds to the complexity of web development (and places evolutionary pressure on JS frameworks).

A web app has to look and run well in a huge range of screen sizes and devices and browsers. Android and iOS apps can target minimum versions of an OS or can usually ignore devices older than a few years. Browsers can't break backwards compatibility.

There is no common, prescribed tooling for the web like Android, iOS, and Windows enjoy, for example. This is a trade-off. I think the web sees more innovation and creativity as a result. But there's something to be able to spin up Visual Studio or xCode without having to worry about researching the trade-offs between 5 different approaches to tackle UI development.

Ultimately, I think JavaScript gets a bad rap, but the churn is intimately bound to its role as the universal programming language of the web. The web is no walled garden and it has evolved dramatically over the past decade. We should celebrate that JS has been flexible enough to grow with it.