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Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

bestofjs.org

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Re: Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

#31

Post by armandososa »

grouseway wrote: post #24

I feel even a list of the 5 most impactful js projects should include Firebug. Firebug played a huge role in removing the shroud around javascript and making it approachable to a lot of people, helping them introspect others code, and improving their own code quality. After it, javascript became a beast you could tame rather than a source of endless frustration.

Yes! But I think you had to have lived through the process of developing javascript programs without any developer tools to really appreciate Firebug and how indebted we all are to Joe Hewitt. And also, we should mention Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar.

Re: Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

#32

Post by zachrose »

halfmatthalfcat wrote: post #5

Where's Backbone, Ember, Coffeescript (the OG transpiled lang), HTML5, CSS3, WASM, ect, etc. The road to today is paved with many influential projects.

Backbone especially because it seemed so obvious to so many people that there needed to be an object-oriented "MVC" framework in the browser, and only over 5-10 years of experiencing the sharp edges and missing pieces did unorthodox alternatives (Flux etc) seem interesting.

Re: Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

#33

Post by wwweston »

armandososa wrote: post #27
hardwaresofton wrote: post #6

For those that are disappointed at the omissions in the timeline: > Disclaimer > We could have mentioned a lot of other projects: > [lines omitted] > ...but we had to make choices to keep this timeline compact. > The 2 main constraints were: > We wanted 20 projects because we are in 2020 > We wanted at least one project for every year between 2010 and 2020. Reasoning kind of dumb, since this could have been a much mo…

I think Backbone is a really big omission, specially because it credits Angular for the popularity of the SPA and in doing so practically erases Jeremy Ashkenas and his awesome contributions from Javascript history. I would argue you can trace modern JS to Backbone, Underscore and CoffeeScript.

Not to mention that Angular is listed twice essentially, and that in terms of quality/philosophy it did more damage to the industry than good.

Re: Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

#34

Post by ogre_codes »

armandososa wrote: post #27
hardwaresofton wrote: post #6

For those that are disappointed at the omissions in the timeline: > Disclaimer > We could have mentioned a lot of other projects: > [lines omitted] > ...but we had to make choices to keep this timeline compact. > The 2 main constraints were: > We wanted 20 projects because we are in 2020 > We wanted at least one project for every year between 2010 and 2020. Reasoning kind of dumb, since this could have been a much mo…

I think Backbone is a really big omission, specially because it credits Angular for the popularity of the SPA and in doing so practically erases Jeremy Ashkenas and his awesome contributions from Javascript history. I would argue you can trace modern JS to Backbone, Underscore and CoffeeScript.

> I would argue you can trace modern JS to Backbone, Underscore and CoffeeScript.

Absolutely any list that omits these three technologies is fundamentally flawed. React was originally created to replace the "View" component of Backbone.

Re: Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

#36

Post by redsky17 »

andrew_ wrote: post #25

Ugh. Was the author of this article in the field since 2006? From the look of this list, I'd wager not. Almost resembles a cherry pick of Google results. Listing VSCode without listing it's precursor and source of inspiration (Atom) nor the platform which enabled VSCode to be a thing (Electron) is mind-bottling¹. We're going to list Snowpack (new last year) but omit Rollup (hey, Webpack made it and it drives three ot…

Electron is listed as #9 as the entry for 2013.

Re: Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

#37

Post by mikewhy »

captn3m0 wrote: post #26
vmception wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Rome is designed to replace Babel, ESLint, Webpack, Prettier, Jest, and others. Sure, why not. Cool, lets see if it works out

Rome has zero deps, which is big win over the alternatives imo.

Still though, it casts a very wide net. I'm super fond of simplifying things and having fewer dependencies (one reason why I prefer TypeScript over Babel), but I'm not sure why I would want my test runner to ever care about formatting code, or why I would want my Markdown formatter to ever worry about bundling JavaScript files.

Still, very excited to check it out!

Re: Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

#38

Post by andrew_ »

redsky17 wrote: post #36
andrew_ wrote: post #25

Ugh. Was the author of this article in the field since 2006? From the look of this list, I'd wager not. Almost resembles a cherry pick of Google results. Listing VSCode without listing it's precursor and source of inspiration (Atom) nor the platform which enabled VSCode to be a thing (Electron) is mind-bottling¹. We're going to list Snowpack (new last year) but omit Rollup (hey, Webpack made it and it drives three ot…

Electron is listed as #9 as the entry for 2013.

Bananas. I'm not seeing that on my end (Chrome). Opened Firefox and there it is. Might be time to nuke this Chrome install.

Re: Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

#39

Post by swyx »

emehrkay wrote: post #20
swyx wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i attempted a timeline too: https://www.swyx.io/writing/js-third-age/ but youre right that people are unhappy with whatever you eventually leave out

Yeah. Im surprised that both of these left out Prototype.js which, to me, seems to be the father of these client-side libs

i'll cop to the fact that its mainly bc i wasnt around for that time so i'm just reconstructing things from how they look to me today

Re: Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020

#40

Post by alxlaz »

grouseway wrote: post #24

I feel even a list of the 5 most impactful js projects should include Firebug. Firebug played a huge role in removing the shroud around javascript and making it approachable to a lot of people, helping them introspect others code, and improving their own code quality. After it, javascript became a beast you could tame rather than a source of endless frustration.

It didn't only remove the shroud that made it difficult to work with for beginners, it made an incredible difference in terms of being able to use JavaScript for serious application development. When Firebug showed up, the JavaScript development tools were basically where under 1,000-dollar, pre-Turbo C development tools were on the PC, except slower, too. That didn't stop anyone from writing complex JavaScript programs, of course, but it was extremely useful in getting people to take it seriously, and in making people in established organizations trust it for complex UI work.

I don't have words to say how dreadful JS development was before that. Debugging was extraordinarily limited by default, and we all had bits and pieces of debugging functionality pieced together from a variety of projects, most of which were glorified "debug by printf" hooks which sometimes interfered with the real application logic, and you ended up having to debug your debug code instead of whatever was actually broken.

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