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

I'm a scientific programmer (not a ton of experience but understand history). It's changed a lot over time but it feels like nothing was much better than writing Fortran / bindings to Fortran until very recently (of course, take my recency bias into account). Yet, still, significant amount of "critical code" are written in Fortran. It's a slow-moving world in part because there is a lot of corner case complexity / significant logic. Parallelism in the form of CUDA / transparent GPU via Python is changing that a bit, but some algorithms are still not parallelizable.

This is similar to my own experiences.

During the past decade the JavaScript ecosystem had to evolve and adapt to handle increasingly more advanced requirements. Multiple tools and libraries rose up to meet the challenge, and the best ones have slowly floated to the top. It's not like the winning tools are even that recent: I think Webpack was already around before 2012, TypeScript was released in 2012, and, if I remember correctly, React was released around 2013. Fun fact: babel was called 6to5 when it was initially released.

Webpack can sometimes be difficult to configure because the problems which it sets out to solve are also complicated. To be fair, their old docs were quite lackluster, and the creator's coding style was uncommon, which made reading through the source a bit challenging. I know a lot of people are critical of Webpack, but I was overjoyed when I first discovered it, as it enabled me to correctly solve a huge number of issues. Once adopted, it let me drastically simplify our build pipeline, as well as our development and testing environments.

I can sympathize with non-frontend developers because I also feel overwhelmed sometimes when I look at all the tooling related to backend / devops / infrastructure stuff. But I understand people build and use these tools because they're usually solving fairly complex real-world problems. I suspect that many people that complain about JavaScript don't care much about the frontend and they just want to get it out of the way as quickly as possible. They want to pick up whatever standard tools the community has centered around and hammer together something without having to dive in too deep. If the developer looks down on frontend development and they encounter a difficult problem which they're unable to solve, then they must deal with the cognitive dissonance.

To give a concrete example of something I've struggle with: I can barely make sense of the containers ecosystem. Using docker-compose during development to bring up an application's external dependencies is amazing. However, I generally haven't had much success configuring and using docker to run an app locally. There's always performance issues, or I can't get something to work correctly, or I can't figure out how to get a good workflow going. Since we're on the topic: if anyone knows a practical example of a regular web app (e.g. rails or node, but I'm not picky) which has a few workers and which depends on a few services (e.g. Postgres, RabbitMQ, Redis, MinIO), I'd love to check it out. Oh, and I haven't even mentioned deployments and Kubernetes, which seems like a whole nother dragon.

If you're not a fan of frontend development I'd suggest using server-side rendering with occasional scripts dropped in for extra functionality. Think carefully about your application and its requirements; not everything needs to be a Single Page App. Depending on the kind of application you're building, you might want to evaluate next.js [0] and create-react-app [1].

[0] https://nextjs.org/

[1] https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app

I wish programming was more like playing a musical instrument. I feel like there is too much tuning not enough playing.

I'm not sure, I just want functional programming to become widely adopted <3

Been doing back end for 13 years, and I try to visit a programming conference or two a year.

I think on average back end churns slower. Every year I'll hit a conference, and hear about the latest and greatest, but only a fraction of that stuff sticks around, and gets integrated.

I believe most company's won't swap language/framework/libraries until absolutely necessary. So the adoption of new things you might see at a company is much slower than someone who job hops every 3 years.

The company I am at now, had a C++, cout ..." version of the site for 6+ years. The version that replaced that is a younger language with a MVC, but it's already been 9+ years since that was implemented, and it'll probably be a few more years until anything else supplants that.

Another thing that I think affects front end is the browsers. I don't know the stats, but I believe that Chrome/FF/Edge release more features, experimental features, and bug fixes per year, than your average language, or OS. This cascade of releases in turn effect front end code, and libraries. It's a wave pool, not a ripple in the pond.