I remember having a coworker who was "learning clojure". That guy did more damage than could even be imagined.
Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
151–160 of 275 posts
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
I want to break this list of things down a bit; CSS Grid / Flexbox - Flexbox was defined in 2009, and was added to browsers about 10 years ago and iterated since. It was literally in the first public version of Chrome. This is not some new tech that's blindsided everyone. Grid is a couple of years old. React - First released 7 years ago and iterated since. Reasonably mainstream for 5 years. That's not a very dramatic…
There is always some lag when it comes to being safe to use certain features, while it's true that flexbox is quite old, consider that at the time it was released many people still had to support browsers like IE6/7.
There was also a problem that the spec changed so at one point you had to support two versions, which put a lot of people off adopting it for a long time. The point is still that this stuff isn't new though. Browsers don't change very quickly, especially for the fundamental building blocks of how you get a website on a screen.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#153I vividly remember 2016. I was doing backend programming at the time, but no one I knew were using Angular.js at that time for new codebases. React emerged in 2013, by 2014 the hype was at full swing, and by 2015 React "won" the framework battle. It's been 5+ years since then, and React JavaScript world was remarkably stable. Fashion changes were largely superficial: React.createClass vs ES classes, Heavy use of Deco…
Yeah; I think your timeline is off. I don't remember React being the very clear choice until probably 2017. It was still up in the air in 2016, and certainly moreso in 2015. > by 2015 React "won" the framework battle. Things have calmed down now. Its better, and has been for a couple years (not 5+ years). But, this isn't a battle. Its not a war. Just because things are calm now, doesn't mean they won't go crazy again…
"I don't remember React being the very clear choice until probably 2017."
Maybe you werent paying attention then.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I doubt it was your age. Wish I could share your confidence, but I have run face-first into this phenomenon. [...removed some stuff that I don't feel like backing up...] We are an unpopular bunch. It used to get me quite upset, but I’ve learned to make it quite clear that I am no youngster; right up front. Avoids stuff like what I mentioned.
Really? Do you have specific examples. In my experience hacker news tends to be much more friendly and sympathetic towards older programmers.
I'll withdraw the post (rather than spend a bunch of time, hunting down comments that just get me depressed), but the tide may be turning.
Now that the VC money may not be as easy to get as it once was, there may be a bit of a demand for software that ships, as opposed to glossy slide decks.
Us old farts ain't so bad at that.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was initially kind of worried about TS. It has kind of a high barrier to entry with linter settings, typescript-specific setting, solving how to compile your code easily, learning the new syntax, etc. etc. I literally spent like an hour reading up on it and learning it, and I realized I never want to go back to a plain old JS. TS feels way closer to Java than to JavaScript, with its own quirks and way of functionin…
> TS feels way closer to Java than to JavaScript You and I clearly have different understandings of Java, JS, and/or TS. Typescript's structural typing feels like the opposite end of the spectrum from Java's nominal types.
> Typescript's structural typing feels like the opposite end of the spectrum from Java's nominal types.
Be that as it may, I said nothing about type systems. I said that TS feels closer to Java than it does to JS. Seeing as JS has no type system, I fail to see your argument.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
Rewrites only make sense if you get a multi-fold improvement. In the history of computing, that's rare. So they rarely make sense. Well, JavaScript was really horrible when it came out. It was just about the worst major programming language ever made. It sort of reminds me of an interpreter I threw together for a programming language I invented when I was in high school, when I really didn't get any aspect of program…
How about using Typescript? That still seems like a huge improvement, especially because you can implement it incrementally (aka for parts of code where type checking is vitally important). I'm using it now at my work and I'm surprised how much info I'm getting compared to whatever JS is throwing at me.
I would avoid doing state management in Typescript. It's still too early in my opinion.
Use as many hooks and context as possible and keep your redux store as simple as you possibly can because if you end up with a deprecated state management library (redux-thunk, sagas, easy-peasy) replacing that is like pulling gum out of hair.
If you add up the time spent working around typescript errors when dealing with state, it's possible for it to be more time than you need to rewrite the entire app.
For backend work then yes, I'd say doing a singleton or an abstract class in typescript makes more sense in hardening your API code and even making it more readable too.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#157I vividly remember 2016. I was doing backend programming at the time, but no one I knew were using Angular.js at that time for new codebases. React emerged in 2013, by 2014 the hype was at full swing, and by 2015 React "won" the framework battle. It's been 5+ years since then, and React JavaScript world was remarkably stable. Fashion changes were largely superficial: React.createClass vs ES classes, Heavy use of Deco…
People were still writing CoffeeScript in 2015.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really? Do you have specific examples. In my experience hacker news tends to be much more friendly and sympathetic towards older programmers.
I'll withdraw the post (rather than spend a bunch of time, hunting down comments that just get me depressed), but the tide may be turning. Now that the VC money may not be as easy to get as it once was, there may be a bit of a demand for software that ships , as opposed to glossy slide decks. Us old farts ain't so bad at that.
Indeed. Focus on fundamentals never hurts.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
In 1996-1998 as a teen I "made some websites" for local businesses. The one I made for my parents even had a search function (in PHP) in a CSV with their products (which were like 100). The CSV was generated by taking whatever Lotus Approach (their desktop DB) generated and transforming it with some custom Haskell code (I was a teen, what did I know). They clicked an icon to pull the data and another to run a FTP bat…
Same for me. I even got into CSS and Javascript. Just, you know, right as Ajax was becoming a thing, before SPAs, before Rails even, etc. It was very straightforward.
Now...I'm lost. Every time I poke at the frontend, I get lost again. >10 years as a backend developer of various stripes, three of those in Node even...still lost.
Re: Do Not Follow JavaScript Trends
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was initially kind of worried about TS. It has kind of a high barrier to entry with linter settings, typescript-specific setting, solving how to compile your code easily, learning the new syntax, etc. etc. I literally spent like an hour reading up on it and learning it, and I realized I never want to go back to a plain old JS. TS feels way closer to Java than to JavaScript, with its own quirks and way of functionin…
To me I sometimes get too obsesded with types and try to wrire clever ergonomic type inference. Usally I stop when I realize the types are double loc comparing to the actual implementation or what I was trying to do was impossible. It can be a drain on productivity if you're like me.
Coming from Java background, I personally have no such problem. Is JS your only/main language? Maybe JS + Python?