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

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71–80 of 139 posts

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

#71
post #39

* Yes, JS is changing stupidly quickly. * C++ has changed a lot starting with C++11, and is still changing quickly. However, not nearly as quickly as JS. * C is still stuck in the age of the dinosaurs. The tooling has gotten a little better with clang, cmake, etc. (though these are as much a result of its close relationship with C++ as anything). * Assembly is not moving, mostly because it's dying. There's one notabl…

> * Assembly is not moving, mostly because it's dying. There's one notable exception: ARM.

What? Assembly is not moving, because it's complete. You can pick Intel or ATT syntax, and then you just need to handle new mnemonics when your processor or choice ads new opcodes. Certainly, assembly has a smaller market share than in the past, but there's nothing to replace it for critical sections, so I don't see how it's dying, since it won't ever be dead.

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

#72

Be grateful for JS. It keeps people occupied who would otherwise shit up other languages’ communities. It’s the Great Filter of languages.

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments to Hacker News so we don't have to ban you again?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#73

I've been doing frontend dev for 10 years and had to change my stack & way of working only 3 times: - HTML templates (served by Symfony/ASP.NET/Rails/Django) + jQuery + dependencies manually downloaded/updated/deleted/added to the index.html - ~2014: Angular SPA + Grunt + dependencies managed with Bower and added manually in the index.html - ~2017: React SPA + Webpack/Babel + dependencies managed with NPM and added a…

This has been about my experience too. Down to the exact technologies and years.

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

#74
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the matter with Webpack? It carries quite a lot of advantages, like tree-shaking, code splitting, and lazy loading. These are real, tangible performance benefits, so I'm going to need some kind of compelling evidence as to why avoid Webpack.

Configuring it is a giant time suck. Particularly if you want to do hot reloading and all that kind of stuff. I'm a big fan of Parcel for 90% of the things I do. It just works.

Webpack works well without any configuration.

The nice part is you can do advanced stuff with it if you so choose.

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

#75
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the matter with Webpack? It carries quite a lot of advantages, like tree-shaking, code splitting, and lazy loading. These are real, tangible performance benefits, so I'm going to need some kind of compelling evidence as to why avoid Webpack.

Configuring it is a giant time suck. Particularly if you want to do hot reloading and all that kind of stuff. I'm a big fan of Parcel for 90% of the things I do. It just works.

It does just work. Until you want to use something that the core devs don't use.

Like having the most popular front end framework be unusable for at least 6 months: https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel/issues/645

Often you'll need to hope some third party made a plugin or make one yourself, which isn't really any different than using webpack, but the webpack ecosystem is much larger.

I struggled through parcel for a long time before I switched to Webpack 4 and had all of my existing build system and some additional niceties working in <45 minutes (probably 30 min of that was just reading the docs).

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

#76
post #71
post #39

* Yes, JS is changing stupidly quickly. * C++ has changed a lot starting with C++11, and is still changing quickly. However, not nearly as quickly as JS. * C is still stuck in the age of the dinosaurs. The tooling has gotten a little better with clang, cmake, etc. (though these are as much a result of its close relationship with C++ as anything). * Assembly is not moving, mostly because it's dying. There's one notabl…

> * Assembly is not moving, mostly because it's dying. There's one notable exception: ARM. What? Assembly is not moving, because it's complete. You can pick Intel or ATT syntax, and then you just need to handle new mnemonics when your processor or choice ads new opcodes. Certainly, assembly has a smaller market share than in the past, but there's nothing to replace it for critical sections, so I don't see how it's dy…

> it's complete

That might be a better way to phrase it, you're right. I've got nothing at all against it, and appreciate using it for certain applications. I meant less dying in the sense that it will go away entirely and more that it is slowly becoming relegated to critical applications (i.e. very few applications are written in it).

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

#79
post #70
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About web pack and many others: I use Vue with several others dependencies. But 0 package managers. This is mine: cat js/vue.js js/vue-router.js js/vuelidate.min.js js/validators.min.js js/vuex.js js/vuex-i18n.umd.js js/translation.js js/vue-moment.js js/vue-virtual-scroll.js > js/build.js 0 problems. Predictable, not folder with millons of little JS files, etc...

What about Babel, JSX? I'm a C++ dev that's trying to learn JS. As I know if you want to use modern JS you have to compile it with babel to "portable" JS with Babel. And it was really painful to create DOM elements with createElement and small wrappers around them, so JSX should help here. Or you can just skip those?

Listen to the pain. You can skip JSX and Babel. As I’ve mentioned before, Vue obviates the need for both.

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

#80
Ive been using Django for almost 10 years, and it is still basically the same. There have been some breaking changes betweem versions but they have all been very easy to pick up. Even the python 2-3 nonsense has been relatively painless.
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