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State of JavaScript 2019

2019.stateofjs.com

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Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#81

Post by AdrienLemaire »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #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 con…

Probably the Dunning-Kruger effect in action :)

Wikipedia puts it well:

> It's a cognitive bias in which people assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#82

Post by aidos »

sgdesign wrote: post #51
5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #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 con…

(Survey author) yes, it seems like I made a mistake with the different level descriptions. For me knowing how to do things like transitions and animations is comparatively "simpler" than being able to architecture an entire CSS front-end including managing a design systems, naming, specificity, etc. but I guess many respondents didn't see things that way.

I don’t think you’re wrong on that front. Because I seldom use animations, for example, I tend to have to look up the syntax, but that’s no big deal.

Knowing how to actually build things from scratch in a way that survives the beating of time is something else. It’s much harder to quantify though. Also, these days you have the css in js solutions, which means you can build the app by dropping in the css where you need it, so you get to tick that box, but if you tried to do it the “traditional” way you might not even know where to start.

EDIT two of my more common phrases at work are “you could just use css for that” and “you don’t need to use flex box to do that”. I’ve found that there’s a lot more using css to style things in isolation without understanding the power and performance it brings to the table. I spend more time trying to stop react renders from happening because css should have just been used than I do on the micro detail of ordering things a certain way to avoid repaints.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#83

Post by gherkinnn »

734129837261 wrote: post #70
samspenc wrote: post #61

I'm surprised to see Angular drop in ratings and rank so poorly compared to React. I personally prefer Angular myself because it's (a) opiniated and (b) has everything included (HTTP REST calls, Material UI, etc). Just curious why so many people prefer React and mark it so positively.

Angular ng-is ng-very ng-opinionated and requires a ton of boilerplate knowledge. It requires typescript knowledge, and I've noticed that (finally!) a lot of developers are realising that typescript actually doesn't make life easier at all. React, on the other hand, is a very intuitive library instead of an all-encompassing framework. You can easily setup a React application in a few seconds and get started, adding w…

What’s with all the TS hate?

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#84

Post by hacker_9 »

734129837261 wrote: post #70
samspenc wrote: post #61

I'm surprised to see Angular drop in ratings and rank so poorly compared to React. I personally prefer Angular myself because it's (a) opiniated and (b) has everything included (HTTP REST calls, Material UI, etc). Just curious why so many people prefer React and mark it so positively.

Angular ng-is ng-very ng-opinionated and requires a ton of boilerplate knowledge. It requires typescript knowledge, and I've noticed that (finally!) a lot of developers are realising that typescript actually doesn't make life easier at all. React, on the other hand, is a very intuitive library instead of an all-encompassing framework. You can easily setup a React application in a few seconds and get started, adding w…

Typescript doesn't make things easier, and react is intuitive? You know April fool's is still a few months away right?

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#85

Post by 734129837261 »

woah wrote: post #27
HenriNext wrote: post #18

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 synchronou…

Oh, please. The projects I've recently worked on used only Hooks instead of Redux. It was a nightmare to deal with. Files with endless amounts of `useSomething`, you'd need to dive through 4 levels of files to get to something useful.

Redux offers a ton of tooling and developer comfort if you get it right. And getting it right means having proper pull request reviews.

There's a lot of developer tooling (debugging tools), too, and a lot of middleware available to plug and play and GO.

If you're just using Hooks and the Reducer and Context APIs you're setting yourself up for a lot of headaches down the road.

Redux already makes use of those technologies, but wraps it in something easy to consume with a LARGE community for support.

Not using Redux is setting yourself up for failure, in my opinion. I've seen it happen too many times in the past year...

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#86

Post by jevgeni »

734129837261 wrote: post #75
toastal wrote: post #12

It looks like more people need to learn about PureScript. I was happy to see it included this year though.

I really don't see the point of strong typed programming. JavaScript is fine without it. I've been working with TypeScript for a while now and I never think "this solves a problem I had!" On the contrary, I constantly think "why..." I feel strong typing JS is just a result of backend developers not questioning their upbringings and failing to use proper naming conventions, progressive enhancement in the form of JSDOC…

Aren't you describing exactly the problems types help with? Must be a reason why typed backend developers allegedly don't pay so much mind to:

- "proper" naming conventions

- JSDOC comments

- unit tests

- peer review

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#87

Post by 734129837261 »

m_ke wrote: post #54
HenriNext wrote: post #18

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 don't know how any sane person could have picked to use it in their project over MobX.

MobX adds a weird new syntax to JavaScript. I don't see why anyone would want that.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#88

Post by gherkinnn »

spankalee wrote: post #33
durnygbur wrote: post #19

What a holy mess is the landscape of the testing frameworks, even worse than that of the front end frameworks itself.

This is incredibly true. Testing libraries have not kept up with changes to JavaScript and web dev in general. I long for a test runner that does as little magic as possible, doesn't try to be a build system and module loader, doesn't inject random libraries into the environment, it just loads URLs and reports back test results. Test runners and assert libraries can massively slim down too if they because simple impo…

I’ve used TAP and nodeTAP and always ran in to some problems. Then I gave AVA a try. Makes a pretty decent impression, though I have never used it in production.

It’s simple enough, fast, and I have yet to run head-first in to some problem.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#89

Post by donkeyd »

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #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 con…

I got a resume a while ago where the applicant rated their skills 1-5 stars. They has rated themselves either 3 or 4 out of 5 in Node.js. When asking what they actually did with node, they explained they built some proof of concept once. I got to see the code and it was maybe 4 weeks of work for a beginner...

At that time I was leading a small Node.js dev team and I would maybe rate myself 3/5 in Node. We didn't end up hiring them.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#90

Post by Griever »

Gene_Parmesan wrote: post #55
HenriNext wrote: post #18

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?

We were tasked with bringing an Angular/NgRx application up to date at work, and it was quite out of date. As the only person on the team with prior NgRx experience (it was quite minor though), I was volunteered to take responsibility for that portion of the project. I quickly learned the previous devs had no idea what they were doing. They used the libraries but appeared to have no conception of what the actual patt…

I was in a similar situation, and ultimately decided to reimplement the state management using NGXS. Fortunately the app was relatively small at that point, but I found that it held the developers hands a bit more, which lead to significantly more readable code.

Things can still get tangled up once you start using "ofActionDispatched" lifecycle handlers, but overall I found them to be far more manageable over time than NGXS.

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