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State of JavaScript 2019

2019.stateofjs.com

131–140 of 372 posts

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

TypeScript slows down a project. Nobody seems to ever point out what benefits it supposedly offers. My claim: TypeScript offers no benefit. Ever. That's 2 years of fulltime TS experience talking and 18 years of fulltime JavaScript experience, on top of a whole bunch of full stack (Java and .Net with C#) experience. I think the popularity of TS is going to decline. And I think it's only popular because of the influx o…

Slows down what?

Compile times? By a small amount sure, but with the incremental compilation we're talking maybe a few tens of seconds max. Any longer and you need to look at improving your build dependencies for better parallelism, and upgrading your hardware.

Development time? Types reduce mental overhead and abstraction for the developer, speeding up development.

Run time? Variables with types that stay static execute faster in JS engines.

Types keep code maintainable, and protect against any accidentally implicit conversions (rife in JS). Types still exist whether you define them or not, so being explicit gives the maintainer of your code much less mental overhead when working with your code. Knowing the contract that a function follows allows them to skip over any assumptions and know exactly what the code is meant to do. Break the contract, get a compile time error.

Anyone can write code, writing maintainable code is the real challenge. In my own 20 years experience this is always what separates the wheat from the chaff.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#132
post #71

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.

It surprises me too personally - the testing experience is worlds better, better built in modules than what you get in the React ecosystem (especially routing, http request layer, forms, testing, etc.), and opinionation that helps improve the overall experience of working with it. I miss my time with Angular sometimes - my only gripes is TypeScript being limiting with regard to function composition, and creating a co…

Basically this, I picked up angular 1 back in the day, for a while there was a lot of hype around it. The migration was very poorly handled and Angular 2 felt a bit alien when it was first released. React rose in popularity at exactly the right time and I think a lot of people felt a bit burnt by angular and didn't look back. Vue being released probably converted those still on the fence.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#133

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.

It takes 1 afternoon to learn React and it never requires you to open the doc again. Angular, on the other hand...

Until you need a router or state management ect, then you've got a few tabs of docs open and a case of anlysis paralisis and a bunch of glue code to write.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#134

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 was an expert on JS way before TypeScript. I was kind of slow to adopt it because "the type hints are optimized away and can't even be used to boost runtime performance", but when I did start using it, I loved it and wish I had earlier.

The linked article says the vast majority love TypeScript, too.

I think the real dividing line is probably that people who haven't had to maintain a large project hate TypeScript.

(Which is still weird to me, because you can just turn off `no-implicit-any` and get all the benefits without drawbacks.)

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#135
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So, I've worked with JavaScript since 2001. Up until two years ago I never used a strong typed flavour on top of JS. And I have never needed it. Not in big teams and not in small teams. At work we recently did a timed programming problem solving competition. 20 Teams got 1 hour each to solve multiple levels of the same problems. Some teams used TypeScript. None of the TypeScript teams got past level 5. All of the res…

Strongly typed programs tend to have less bugs. There's been a few systematic surveys of large open-source projects looking at the number of issues raised/bugs found and they all show the same results.

I recently joined a company that uses formal methods and Haskell for a globally distributed system and I can't imagine going back to JavaScript for something similar. Being able to reason about a system is important and it's almost impossible to reason about non-statically typed systems.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#136

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…

> most of developers who try typescript never go back to writing plain javascript

yes, most developers adhere to RDD. That is, resume driven development. You ever see developers going back to Ruby from Node? Or from any shiny new thing to the slightly older but perfectly fine thing? I predict people will move on from TypeScript within 5 years. Purely because everyone will know TS so the differentiating value of TS will plummet.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#137
post #9

Interesting that GraphQL is slowly gaining interest - I kind of thought the hype would fizzle out. Good to also see Typescript making a foothold - it's a great alternative to pure JS.

I've rarely seen a technology so eagerly embraced by both bleeding edge tech enthusiasts and also enterprise behemoths (granted, tech behemoths, but still) Having API documentation that is guaranteed not to go out of date with your code. Having a shared standard for describing your endpoints in a machine-consumable way. Being able to automatically generate typescript types from any schema (correct me if I'm wrong but…

You can write Swagger definitions to serve as contracts for your REST API. Swagger files are machine consumable and can be used to generate client SDK.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#138

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…

CSS is just key-value pairs. How hard can it be? /s There is absolutely an air of arrogance when people approach seemingly simple things such as styling. And then they implement all sorts of atrocities.

Yeah, I think it might be similar to a lot of things actually. Maybe painting is a good example. Like, the techniques of using a brush in different ways can't be that difficult to learn, but putting them to use to create something great is something else entirely.

You can imagine someone learning those brush techniques and becoming quite confident that they could, theoretically, paint a whole painting, without ever trying and learning the difference.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

• Go 2019 — https://blog.golang.org/survey2019 (survey only) • Go 2018 — https://blog.golang.org/survey2018-results • Go 2017 — https://blog.golang.org/survey2017-results • Go 2016 — https://blog.golang.org/survey2016-results • Rust 2018 — https://blog.rust-lang.org/2018/11/27/Rust-survey-2018.html • Rust 2017 — https://blog.rust-lang.org/2017/09/05/Rust-2017-Survey-Resul... • C++ Global Insights 2019 — https://isocp…

> What do you use Python for? 37% programming web parsers / scrapers / crawlers I had no idea that much people were scraping the web. What are the most common applications? Users data collection, prices comparison, news aggregation...?

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