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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?

#101

Post by ggregoire »

untog wrote: post #51
Jorge1o1 wrote: post #27

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.

> Configuring it is a giant time suck.

But Webpack is such a time saver once configured.

Same goes on when you have to setup a Docker and some chef/puppet/ansible scripts.

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

#102

Post by schwartzworld »

ungzd wrote: post #31

I have impression that other way round, changes in js are one of the slowest amongst programming languages. We have lots of js in our project, and it's mostly the same js as when I first learned it in early 2000s. No ES6, because it's completely unsupported in Android Browser and IE. Why bother with transpiling for just shorter syntax for functions? We had Sprockets and I'm not sure if there's adequate transpiling of…

Obviously if you are deliberately avoiding new language features, you're still going to be writing the same JS as you were in the early 2000s. I could write Python 2.7 and it would be pretty much the same thing.

However, a lot of ES6+ features offer more than just syntactic sugar. For example, arrow functions remove a lot of weirdness regarding 'this'.

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

#103

Post by ricardobeat »

mattbreeden wrote: post #75
untog wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

Looks like that particular issue was closed in July 2018? Also, anybody who considered that feature important enough could have fixed it. It's not rocket science. Certainly 10x easier than when that magical something in the webpack build chain breaks.

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

#104

Post by renlo »

rolleiflex wrote: post #11

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…

You went from "JS changes too much" to "If you use JS, use these hot new frameworks / libraries" (Vue, avoiding Webpack) ... which I think underscores the constantly changing nature of frontend.

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

#105

Post by souprock »

It's just with JS/frontend.

In 20 years, the change I've seen is very little. Pointers became 64-bit. C99 brought nicer initialization and the ability to declare variables after statements. Optimizers got cruel, particularly with aliasing. Vectorization and SMP can be put to use.

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

#106

Post by eitland »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #89
eitland wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ecosy…

Yep. And .Net had issues in the transition to Core.

We are still talking about an order of magnitude or more (5-10 years of stability vs months.)

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

#107

Post by mrguyorama »

airstrike wrote: post #46
rabidrat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's good to hear. I was worried that C++17 was a major revision to the language. At least Python hasn't had a major release since 2010 (Python 2, anyway).

> At least Python hasn't had a major release since 2010 (Python 2, anyway). I'd argue PEP 484 is possibly more transformative than the change from print 'foo' to print('foo') https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0484/

Aren't those entirely optional?

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

#108

Post by [deleted] »

Jorge1o1 wrote: post #27
rolleiflex wrote: post #11

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…

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.

[deleted]

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

#109

Post by guiomie »

I used to work in .net, and found that it moved really fast also few years ago. But I think the js world is indeed the craziest.

I've went from jquery, to angularjs, to angular2, to polymer and now for my latest project I'm going no-frameworks JS. I've had enough.

Using Custom Elements (HTMLElements) is good enought for me, the latest ECMA makes it easy to do string formatting in the render function. It's not perfect, but I dont have to deal with all the pains of npm or webpack or any other distraction.

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

#110

Post by citrusx »

You know, if you look at the current timeline, you'll see that much of the "JS churn" has basically stopped. I mean, yeah - people are trying new things, and products are being maintained. But, the landscape today is really very similar to what it was a year ago.

Yeah, there was a sort of "golden age" of innovation where we went from jQuery -> Angular 1 -> React, with Elm, Ember, and Angular 2+ as sidecars. And, the common libraries and tools have also slowed down in the same way.

We've finally solved a lot of the big problems, I think. Advancement will never end, but I think we'll be able to keep up with it from here on out.

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