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State of JavaScript 2019

2019.stateofjs.com

21–30 of 372 posts

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#21
Wow, 39.9% of respondents mark themselves as "Expert" at CSS. I've been doing front-end in various guises for 12 years and I would only rank myself maybe 5 or 6 out of 10.

As I've gotten more experienced in my career I've become more aware of what I don't know as opposed to what I do know.

It's funny that "Advanced" is mastering animations and transitions whereas "Expert" is being able to develop a full-front end consistently. I know many people that can build a front end, myself included but are nowhere near mastering anything, especially animations and css transitions.

I write this in jest of course. As we all know, self-assessment is about as reliable as...

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#22

I find it kinda strange that Flow has been relegated to the write-in "Other Flavours" section so soon. I know that it has been trending downwards for a while (as TypeScript trends upwards), but it feels like that story's not quite over just yet even if the conclusion is foregone.

I think the name Facebook being attached to just about anything is a disadvantage, if there are other alternatives.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#23

Redux has the largest shift towards "negative opinion" out of all technologies. Did people just get fed up with the boilerplate or is there something else going on?

It's usage is probably being replaced with GraphQL + Apollo/Relay since the need for FE app state is reduced when you no longer need to make multiple round trip requests. Also Apollo (possibly Relay?) offer local state management too.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#24

Wow, 39.9% of respondents mark themselves as "Expert" at CSS. I've been doing front-end in various guises for 12 years and I would only rank myself maybe 5 or 6 out of 10. As I've gotten more experienced in my career I've become more aware of what I don't know as opposed to what I do know. It's funny that "Advanced" is mastering animations and transitions whereas "Expert" is being able to develop a full-front end con…

Probably because a lot of people have been working with it for a long time (like you). I think I started 20 years ago - but I just learned like 40% of css grid this past weekend. (I've been a happy flexbox user for a few years)

But I know what you're saying. I also noticed a few percentage points of people saying they have 20+ years or React experience at this point.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#25
post #5

Sad to see Ionic in the avoid category. Their latest release I thought was quite polished, and I've enjoyed using Capacitor rather than Cordova. I think the key to further success is breaking away from Cordova entirely, and expanding the native features supported in Capacitor. Right now I find myself having to use both due to some things not being implemented in Capacitor yet.

At this point with React Native (or even Flutter if we're considering things apart from JS) there really isn't a compelling reason to build anything in a Webview as far as I know. Also in my personal experience their support team members have been pretty impatient and passive aggressive in the Github issues tickets so I'm not entirely surprised that they're building something that the community has moved away from.

Not an expert, but the multiplatform story for ionic is pretty nice. One codebase to run on iOS/Android and Web is easiest with ionic and I see a lot of small-mid size businesses using it. It's usually not about top-of-their class apps though.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#26
post #24

Wow, 39.9% of respondents mark themselves as "Expert" at CSS. I've been doing front-end in various guises for 12 years and I would only rank myself maybe 5 or 6 out of 10. As I've gotten more experienced in my career I've become more aware of what I don't know as opposed to what I do know. It's funny that "Advanced" is mastering animations and transitions whereas "Expert" is being able to develop a full-front end con…

Probably because a lot of people have been working with it for a long time (like you). I think I started 20 years ago - but I just learned like 40% of css grid this past weekend. (I've been a happy flexbox user for a few years) But I know what you're saying. I also noticed a few percentage points of people saying they have 20+ years or React experience at this point.

The `20+ years` demographic refers to 20+ years of JavaScript experience, AFAICT.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#27

Redux has the largest shift towards "negative opinion" out of all technologies. Did people just get fed up with the boilerplate or is there something else going on?

I started to realize that it just doesn't make a lot of sense. It doesn't actually have a real concept of how to deal with asynchronous things (like, http requests). You have to use weird things like redux-thunk, or god forbid redux-saga.

The event system is basically synchronous, and just changes data which will be displayed in the UI. Why use the event abstraction and all the boilerplate that entails for synchronous code which doesn't really benefit from events? It feels like a cargo cult.

What it boils down to is any function which will at some point change the UI needs to be written weird, so that it takes the "dispatch" function and calls "dispatch(nextFunctionEvent)" instead of "nextFunction()".

Lots of developers always implemented their own half-ass systems to eliminate some boilerplate by automatically defining events from handlers and state or vice versa or some other combination of the above.

React hooks have basically eliminated it's niche, and none to soon!

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#28
So sad to see Meteor solidly in the avoid quadrant, but it seems deserved. Meteor is what I learned how to do web development with back in 2015, and it was fun. It didn't take much to make stuff happen, and the baked-in live sync was like magic. I'm still eager to whip Meteor out for proof of concept prototyping because of how convenient it is to have a schemaless database and a framework that abstracts away HTTP, but for one thing I feel Meteor's big bet on Mongo hasn't paid off.

Also surprised to see ClojureScript's satisfaction rate at 60%. In the past year or two it's become much easier to use NPM packages, which was IMO the last remaining huge missing piece. It's now a great language for web development, providing what JS couldn't: a rich standard library with, ahem, consistent API's, a strong FP flair with excellent immutable data structures built in, and maybe most critically of all, a somewhat constrained macro system that allows users to write and distribute third-party libraries for syntax that in other languages would have required an extension of the language standard.

All of that is (I think) desirable by anyone unless you're hardcore anti-FP (with the one exception, I guess, that macros can be and are abused, though I haven't seen it very often in the CLJS ecosystem). So why hasn't ClojureScript seen more adoption? It's the age-old curse of Lisp, I guess: those dang old parentheses which decades of CS curricula taught in ALGOL descendents have rendered foreign and horrifying.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#29
post #4
post #2

Something that jumps out to me in the demographics is how few respondents are from Japan (0.6% vs e.g. 5.1% from Germany). Does anyone have a good explanation?

I would be more interested as to why there is so little response from different demographics in the first place, even in Europe there’s little response, except for a few countries. It seems to me they mostly targeted English speaking countries, which would explain why Japan (and Asia in general) has such low response.

Except they excluded the country with the highest English language proficiency on the continent of Europe, the Netherlands. I suspect there’s another reason.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#30
post #23

Redux has the largest shift towards "negative opinion" out of all technologies. Did people just get fed up with the boilerplate or is there something else going on?

It's usage is probably being replaced with GraphQL + Apollo/Relay since the need for FE app state is reduced when you no longer need to make multiple round trip requests. Also Apollo (possibly Relay?) offer local state management too.

That would explain drop in use/popularity, but actually Redux is raising in usage, while sharply dropping in the other dimension towards "negative opinion".
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