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

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

#81

From what I could see, the amount of churn in the Javascript world is unsurpassed by anything in software or product, almost to an order of magnitude. I ended up being a product designer (my main, academic education), a frontend, and a backend with varying levels of expertise in my lifetime, so I have some direct experience. My current advice as of April 2019 is to keep calm, if you can stay away from JS, do it, if y…

Which production-ready options do you see for frontends without JavaScript?

None yet, unfortunately. I expect the first ones to come out of Go compiling down to WebAssembly.

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

#82
post #42

From what I could see, the amount of churn in the Javascript world is unsurpassed by anything in software or product, almost to an order of magnitude. I ended up being a product designer (my main, academic education), a frontend, and a backend with varying levels of expertise in my lifetime, so I have some direct experience. My current advice as of April 2019 is to keep calm, if you can stay away from JS, do it, if y…

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...

Are you able to use vue components? I would love to see how you manage your app js code with this approach.

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

#83

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.

Django has a strong focus on backwards compatibility and has seen steady popularity for a long time.

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

#84

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.

Same here! Though I never truly felt comfortable in Angular. React was a game-changer for me though.

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

#85
> a ton of change to the very basics of how we work

I do data work on Python (20%) and R (80%). Of these,

- Both base Python itself (2 -> 3 -> 3.6) as well as the major data libraries (e.g. pandas) changed a lot.

- Not base R but the major libraries (e.g. dplyr, ggplot2, knitr) changed significantly.

So, for me, yes, a ton of change to the very basics of how I work happened when using Python and when using R's newer libraries.

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

#86
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice comment. I agree - I think innovation in backend development has really been subsumed by DevOps and data pipeline architectures, which have both really changed quite a bit.

Java and .Net is steadily improving. But unlike the JS world things are mostly backwards compatible and there exists stable (some have argued too stable) dependable frameworks. We are starting to see this in the frontend world as well with Angular. After throwing everything away between 1 and 2 it is now mostly smooth (until Google decides to ditch it for something else).

JS is not backwards compatible? Where?

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

#87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which production-ready options do you see for frontends without JavaScript?

None yet, unfortunately. I expect the first ones to come out of Go compiling down to WebAssembly.

We'll need a new toolchain -- wasm debugger support in the browser, especially. (I love your username.)

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

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which production-ready options do you see for frontends without JavaScript?

None yet, unfortunately. I expect the first ones to come out of Go compiling down to WebAssembly.

Why languages that compiles to JS won't apply? Let's say Elm for example?

Still I am too excited to see rise of traditional non-specialized languages to web game with webasm like Blazor (C#/.Net) but yep not production ready.

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

#89
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice comment. I agree - I think innovation in backend development has really been subsumed by DevOps and data pipeline architectures, which have both really changed quite a bit.

Java and .Net is steadily improving. But unlike the JS world things are mostly backwards compatible and there exists stable (some have argued too stable) dependable frameworks. We are starting to see this in the frontend world as well with Angular. After throwing everything away between 1 and 2 it is now mostly smooth (until Google decides to ditch it for something else).

> Java and .Net is steadily improving

Don't know about that. Java is IMHO about to enter a serious downward spiral as lots of stuff is being deprecated going to Java 9 such as ancient jetty/tomcat versions, JAXB 1, JAX-RS (which people used in the 2000's and early 2010's to create "RESTful" apps/microservices), and being force-obsoleted with incompatible newer versions having features no-one asked for. The Java ecosystem might have worked well under the illusion of multiple implementations for standard core interfaces, and with projects requiring high attention such as Hibernate, Spring, freaking Maven, etc. as long as it was the cool shit (it wasn't really cool IMHO) and had some money behind, but as Java is becoming legacy technology, it increasingly sucks to maintain pom.xml (aka pron.xml) files pointing to obsolete packages on a barren place like mvnrepository/maven central. My experience with younger devs having to maintain Java code: they secretly look for Go and entirely other career choices to get tf away from Java and Maven, and I can't blame them.

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

#90
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nice comment. I agree - I think innovation in backend development has really been subsumed by DevOps and data pipeline architectures, which have both really changed quite a bit.

Java and .Net is steadily improving. But unlike the JS world things are mostly backwards compatible and there exists stable (some have argued too stable) dependable frameworks. We are starting to see this in the frontend world as well with Angular. After throwing everything away between 1 and 2 it is now mostly smooth (until Google decides to ditch it for something else).

I would say JavaScript backward compatability is one of its biggest sellers? Babel transforms almost any new language feature to be backward comparable with much older specifications
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