Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
pragmaticpineapple.com
Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
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Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#2Agreed entirely. Now all you have to do is convince my team of this without being bombarded with the platitude of "don't reinvent the wheel."
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#3From a developer perspective, changes in frontend web development have been pretty dramatic: CSS Grid / Flexbox, React, WASM, extensions to the web API, lots of new JS features, countless frameworks, plugins and build tools more homogeneity between browsers. There is always lots of change and excitement.
I wonder how much of that "innovation" really makes a difference to users. As a programmer, I get a bit cynical about having 50 ways to do the exact same thing. What is possible today that was very hard to do 10 years ago in web dev land?
If we think about users first, maybe we can feel a bit less guilty of not having deployed React Hooks to prod yet?
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#4From a developer perspective, changes in frontend web development have been pretty dramatic: CSS Grid / Flexbox, React, WASM, extensions to the web API, lots of new JS features, countless frameworks, plugins and build tools more homogeneity between browsers. There is always lots of change and excitement. I wonder how much of that "innovation" really makes a difference to users. As a programmer, I get a bit cynical ab…
> I wonder how much of that "innovation" really makes a difference to users.
It makes a huge difference in terms of usability. Some sites are just plain awful to experience now. Not to mention battery hogs on mobile.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#5A good way to not be completely overwhelmed by all the new tooling and frameworks is to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals, here are three foundational resources:
"You don't know JS": https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS
"How browsers work": https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowser...
"High performance browser networking": https://hpbn.co/
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#6From a developer perspective, changes in frontend web development have been pretty dramatic: CSS Grid / Flexbox, React, WASM, extensions to the web API, lots of new JS features, countless frameworks, plugins and build tools more homogeneity between browsers. There is always lots of change and excitement. I wonder how much of that "innovation" really makes a difference to users. As a programmer, I get a bit cynical ab…
> I wonder how much of that "innovation" really makes a difference to users. It makes a huge difference in terms of usability. Some sites are just plain awful to experience now. Not to mention battery hogs on mobile.
in the negative, I agree. I see all the hype around React but when I use Facebook.com I am thoroughly underwhelmed.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#7Javascript has always gone through hype cycles.
Interestingly, it appears to be somewhat correlated with market manias and peaks near the tops of markets.
Generally, following industry trends appears to be good for individual careers but bad for code bases (on average, but with occasional big payoffs.)
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I wonder how much of that "innovation" really makes a difference to users. It makes a huge difference in terms of usability. Some sites are just plain awful to experience now. Not to mention battery hogs on mobile.
in the negative, I agree. I see all the hype around React but when I use Facebook.com I am thoroughly underwhelmed.
Eh? You can't "tell" what framework a site is using just by interacting with the site. What you see is what the designers decided. A better proxy, though weak, would be the number of UI bugs you encounter. The best metric would require you to have insider knowledge, to see how much work is saved by reusing components and writing them declaratively.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#9I'm a little lost on the examples.
There are reasons to use fetch and hooks, and the article seems to relegate them to being unnecessary 'trends' without doing what it suggests, actually evaluating what value they might have...
In React you can use hooks with a class heavy application and still be just fine / get the benefits of hooks in a given component(s).
If you want to use fetch, that also is hardly an ordeal to do / should not be a big cognitive load for anyone.
I get it, resume driven development bad, we get it, we hear it in opinion pieces all the time. Also you should think about it before rewriting an entire application. Yup, that makes sense.
But here we have examples of small changes that are pretty light weight... and no effort is made to do exactly what it suggests, evaluate those choices.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#10A good way to not be completely overwhelmed by all the new tooling and frameworks is to have a strong grasp of the fundamentals, here are three foundational resources: "You don't know JS": https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS "How browsers work": https://www.html5rocks.com/en/tutorials/internals/howbrowser... "High performance browser networking": https://hpbn.co/
Agreed. I think a lot of folks suffer from not understanding how web 1.0 worked and really groking REST/HATEOAS (which has since been hijacked for JSON APIs, which is complete nonsense.)
Sometimes I jokingly call htmx "web 1.1 tech", but increasingly I wonder if I'm really joking.