Live data from Hacker News

State of JavaScript 2020

2020.stateofjs.com

11–20 of 189 posts

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#11

Cliche rant coming up: as a backend engineer, recently started working on frontend. Is this how yall do things? Everything so far feels less mature, thinly pieced together, barely holding up, fast moving, unnecessarily bloated, and no care for longevity, robustness and discipline. Seems like every thing is on Youtube, no real good books (yeah, go ahead and search for "React JS" books on Amazon and see if you find som…

As a backend engineer who has worked on frontend recently, yes, that's how they do things.

There is some hope though, recent standards like web components and ES imports help a bit.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#12

Cliche rant coming up: as a backend engineer, recently started working on frontend. Is this how yall do things? Everything so far feels less mature, thinly pieced together, barely holding up, fast moving, unnecessarily bloated, and no care for longevity, robustness and discipline. Seems like every thing is on Youtube, no real good books (yeah, go ahead and search for "React JS" books on Amazon and see if you find som…

I think it's about individual maturity than tech-stack. Frontenders are likely to be younger than backenders, and some of the traits you observed are a result of that.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#13

Cliche rant coming up: as a backend engineer, recently started working on frontend. Is this how yall do things? Everything so far feels less mature, thinly pieced together, barely holding up, fast moving, unnecessarily bloated, and no care for longevity, robustness and discipline. Seems like every thing is on Youtube, no real good books (yeah, go ahead and search for "React JS" books on Amazon and see if you find som…

Sound’s like a pretty accurate description. It’s been like this for several years now I’m afraid.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#14

Cliche rant coming up: as a backend engineer, recently started working on frontend. Is this how yall do things? Everything so far feels less mature, thinly pieced together, barely holding up, fast moving, unnecessarily bloated, and no care for longevity, robustness and discipline. Seems like every thing is on Youtube, no real good books (yeah, go ahead and search for "React JS" books on Amazon and see if you find som…

I've worked in front end and backend systems. I've worked with extremely high scale web services at FAANG. I've made videogames, and done data processing pipelines.

In general, I find that people will look at the domain outside of their area of expertise and say, "Holy shit, how do you work like this?" All the front end devs are like, "You have to wait how many minutes for compile times?" for instance.

I think the important thing to remember is that engineers are doing complex engineering at every layer of the stack. And that because of environment and targets they are building for, they've made some tradeoffs around their development.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#15

Cliche rant coming up: as a backend engineer, recently started working on frontend. Is this how yall do things? Everything so far feels less mature, thinly pieced together, barely holding up, fast moving, unnecessarily bloated, and no care for longevity, robustness and discipline. Seems like every thing is on Youtube, no real good books (yeah, go ahead and search for "React JS" books on Amazon and see if you find som…

[deleted]

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#16
post #8
post #5

Some takeaways of mine; - Typescript keeps strengthening its position as industry standard. - Svelte is hyped, but is it battle tested enough? - Testing Library is quite new in the town but already the runner up testing tool. - In terms of data management, GraphQL holds its position on the top while good-ol Redux kept losing interest. What are yours?

I've seen Svelte used in a number of high impact tools, including in AAA videogame UI. In my experience, I've seen engineers very happy working with it, and it meets the performance needs for a videogame it should be good enough for the web.

Do you have any info on that AAA game? I would be curious to read up on how/why they used svelte.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#17

Cliche rant coming up: as a backend engineer, recently started working on frontend. Is this how yall do things? Everything so far feels less mature, thinly pieced together, barely holding up, fast moving, unnecessarily bloated, and no care for longevity, robustness and discipline. Seems like every thing is on Youtube, no real good books (yeah, go ahead and search for "React JS" books on Amazon and see if you find som…

I think at its core, the issue is that the code has to run in many different types of hostile environments. At least now we can sort of assume what features of the language are available, but you still have no control over the browser, OS, memory, or bandwidth available. There's no getting out of it :)

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#18

First paragraph reads as follows: Crappy last year, blah, TypeScript. Nothing interessting about JavaScript... Did not read further.

yeah exactly, typescript is n1 enemy of javascript, but they praise it in the very first paragraph... this is the state... of javascript...

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#19

Cliche rant coming up: as a backend engineer, recently started working on frontend. Is this how yall do things? Everything so far feels less mature, thinly pieced together, barely holding up, fast moving, unnecessarily bloated, and no care for longevity, robustness and discipline. Seems like every thing is on Youtube, no real good books (yeah, go ahead and search for "React JS" books on Amazon and see if you find som…

How is JS and it’s ecosystem any less mature than Go or Rust? There’s a plethora of mature frameworks, build tooling and patterns on the frontend as well as a lot of cutting edge competition that creates a lot of noise.

The point is though that there’s just a lot going on in JS world. Doesn’t mean it’s any less than any other language and it’s ecosystem.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#20
post #14

Cliche rant coming up: as a backend engineer, recently started working on frontend. Is this how yall do things? Everything so far feels less mature, thinly pieced together, barely holding up, fast moving, unnecessarily bloated, and no care for longevity, robustness and discipline. Seems like every thing is on Youtube, no real good books (yeah, go ahead and search for "React JS" books on Amazon and see if you find som…

I've worked in front end and backend systems. I've worked with extremely high scale web services at FAANG. I've made videogames, and done data processing pipelines. In general, I find that people will look at the domain outside of their area of expertise and say, "Holy shit, how do you work like this?" All the front end devs are like, "You have to wait how many minutes for compile times?" for instance. I think the im…

>All the front end devs are like, "You have to wait how many minutes for compile times?" for instance.

This is funny because waiting for typescript to build is probably double or even triple waiting for my .NET project to compile at this point. I swear it gets slower every update.

Post reply on HN