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State of JavaScript 2019

2019.stateofjs.com

111–120 of 372 posts

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#111

Wow, just learned of Svelte from this. After reading their explanatory blog post and coming upon this blurb: That all changed with the advent of hooks [React and Vue], which handle state in a very different fashion. Many frameworks started experimenting with their own implementations of hooks, but we quickly concluded it wasn't a direction we wanted to go in ... We can just use the language. Updating some count value…

Sounds good until you see the $: syntax

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#112
post #63

The state of Javascript in 2019 is that it should be deprecated. I have never had more problems, undefined behavior, mysterious errors and malfunctions, dependency hell and generally shitty syntax as when dealing with Javascript. God, please, just destroy this language. The web needs something different, something not broken and flawed.

A friend of mine worked on JavaScript at Netscape. He says he's sorry.

Thanks, I appreciate it as I go on to the third day of trying to find why Javascript cannot get the correct width of an image but only under some circumstances unconnected to the JS code.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#113

The state of Javascript in 2019 is that it should be deprecated. I have never had more problems, undefined behavior, mysterious errors and malfunctions, dependency hell and generally shitty syntax as when dealing with Javascript. God, please, just destroy this language. The web needs something different, something not broken and flawed.

Tell me about it. I have tried my darndest to use types and tests to make things predictable. But there is always something that comes up.

It might be Javascript itself. It could also be the endless permutations of environments(browsers, resolutions, devices, etc) that we have to cater to.

Front End Web Development is hard.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#114
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest the problem here is the question not the answer. It’s a bad question and shouldn’t be asked.

Why is it bad to ask about the actual experience someone had with something that I will be hiring them for? That makes no sense to me.

I'd say that the topic of "node.js" skill covers such a wide range of skills, experience and scenarios, that you'd need to be an expert already to judge how little you know. Someone who'd applied it to a single domain successfully can reasonably feel like they've got a good handle on it.

Your question is essentially a proxy for server-side architectures and applications, not nodejs itself. It invites misrepresentation.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#115

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.

I think the comments in this thread captures it pretty well. If someone doesn't see the benefits of typed languages, TypeScript will just be something that slows them down for no apparent reason.

Same goes with RxJs, dependency injection, unit testing, and modules.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been taking job applications from other frontend developers in the Silicon Valley fortune 500 area of work. Most resumes that get past the initial recruiter interview and make it to a tech review and claim expert knowledge of CSS... They don't. They don't know shit. They can often not answer basic flexbox questions. Not to mention CSS grid questions. And if you start questioning them about CSS animation performa…

> I could go on and on about the horror that is typescript In his talk Predicting the future of the web at the last ReactiveConf, Richard Feldman (not himself a typescript guy, but an Elm user) quoted an interesting statistic that most of developers who try typescript never go back to writing plain javascript. I do not remember where that statistic was from, but can attest that with me it is the case. So much for the…

> In his talk Predicting the future of the web at the last ReactiveConf, Richard Feldman (not himself a typescript guy, but an Elm user) quoted an interesting statistic that most of developers who try typescript never go back to writing plain javascript. I do not remember where that statistic was from, but can attest that with me it is the case.

Same applies to me, but on the flip side: Typescript (by its very name) is probably only going attract the kind of users who appreciate the kind of things that Typescript provides.

People who insist that dynamic typing is best, that compile-time checks of code is wasted effort etc etc are probably never going to try Typescript (and then go back to JS later on, and thus ruining the "never going back"-statistic).

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#117

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…

Just the other day I had a look at a friend's customer Angular project. My eyes! I knew Angular from past experiences, but once again it stuck out to me that Angular devs tastelessly found it necessary to equip HTML with additional meta-syntax such as parens and asterisk as part of attribute names. Now I can get that some people dislike markup languages (SGML/XML), but going in there and invent a whole new syntax on top when SGML already has plenty (arguably even too much already, to the point that W3C found it necessary to invent the XML subset of SGML) just tells me Angular is made by people full of Java-ish MVC world-views but complete lack of awareness of prior art and established practices in the field. A similar thing is happening with HypeScript: bending a weakly-typed language to fit an outdated and obsolete OOP mindset when JavaScript has eg closures for modularizing event handling.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#118

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've been taking job applications from other frontend developers in the Silicon Valley fortune 500 area of work. Most resumes that get past the initial recruiter interview and make it to a tech review and claim expert knowledge of CSS... They don't. They don't know shit. They can often not answer basic flexbox questions. Not to mention CSS grid questions. And if you start questioning them about CSS animation performa…

I'm not sure it's worth addressing this rant because it conflates so many things, but...

> "Oh, look, typescript! Finally JS looks like Java!"

TypeScript's structural typing is vastly different from Java. With Java, every type must be declared somewhere. TypeScript types can be declared, defined as classes, or just based on whatever you typed.

At its core, the TS compiler is just paying attention to what you do and making sure you don't forget what you did elsewhere. It's like having bumper lanes on a bowling alley.

It's arrogant to think you'd get no use out of it when Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have all decided they need static typing on the back and front ends. If you think the cost is too high, that's a different argument, but I'd wager it's because of a poor IDE setup.

> Which means that silly HTML and CSS is going to be easy!

What does this have to do with TypeScript?

> Buzz off back to the backend, you strong-typed clown who doesn't understand what UX and a11y mean.

This is bizarre gatekeeping. TypeScript was adopted by Angular and, early on, seemed focused on browsers rather than Node.

> I know most people love it. I fucking hate it. I'm using it, because I have to, but I never needed it. It literally offers me nothing of value.

That's fine. You may believe it offers no value to you (although better auto-complete and errors are objectively valuable), but it does offer value to anyone who works on your code. TypeScript is like machine-readable self-documenting code.

If you document your code, it might as well be in a format the compiler can enforce and your coworkers can use without having to look back and forth between files.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#119

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, b…

I continue to be involved in development of a Meteor app that started in the 0.8 days, and has been actively maintained up to current versions. I'm a little sad, too, that "Meteor" as a technology all its own hasn't developed legs, but honestly, at this point it's a build stack and little more. Once you use React over Blaze, all it really offers you is a build process and a lack of need to set up your own GraphQL API; in exchange, you get exploding build times because of the uglification library, and something that you know is nothing more than a nodejs app under the hood, but with just enough special sauce mixed in that you don't want to look under the hood, hoping the vendor that's reduced the dev staff to 1 will keep in good shape.

It's a missed opportunity, but the mistake was the Meteor Development Group's in betting on the JS community being satisfied with an "opinionated curation of the stack". The JS community has the attention span of rabid squirrel, and this was obvious back in the 0.8 days. They were never going to love a single bundle of choices for long.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s with all the TS hate?

In my experience, people who have been experts on JS before TypeScript became a thing hate it. - It doesn't give them any advantages, while severely limiting their options and workflow. For newer developers with background in other languages it is quite nice though.

I understand “limiting options and workflow” as “limiting the stupid amounts of yolo that JS allows”.

TS shows you just how bad JS can be without very, very diligent processes to keep it in check.

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