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State of JavaScript 2020

2020.stateofjs.com

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Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#51

Vue is the 3rd in framework ranks... and like the 16th ranked? "Testing Library" is the top testing library apparently? Had to check that this was an actual library, I'm sure many people just left it as a 'whatever' choice. Someones data is dirty dirty dirty

Testing Library is an excellent library from Kent Dodds, it's also one of the testing tools recommended by the React team

https://reactjs.org/docs/testing.html

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#52

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 work front and back end, I've seen frontend done the "simple" way but not often. The syndrome I'm observing is that guys are chasing the next thing so they can bump up to a better paying job, and nobody is ever worried about maintaining their flaming pile of garbage long-term. When new guys come in to find someone else's trash code, they always need to rewrite it in the new thing. It's really no that hard to use modern tools tastefully and with restraint, but it's so rare to see.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#53

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…

Javascript tooling is crazy. A couple years ago I tried to build an older Ionic app that nobody had touched for six months, and the build had just bitrotted. Something somewhere in the dependencies hadn't been screwed down tightly enough, and everything was broken. I feel like the Yarn 2 package manager is a good move towards in making frontend development more stable (The "Plug'n'Play" feature allows you to store yo…

> having an extremely stable platform that never breaks backwards compatibility is exactly what the web needs to be. Frontend development tooling would be so much better if it was more like browsers.

This is precisely my fear [1]. I need something robust and will continue to work for a good foreseeable future.

Do you recommend Angular for frontend? I've just tried React and Svelte, but I am told to stay away from Angular as a giant beast.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25798573

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the front end devs are like, "You have to wait how many minutes for compile times?" for instance. This is a shocking argument coming from any front end dev. Since when is static type checking, working on serious big repositories that take time to compile, have proper architecture with hundreds if not thousands of programmers working on it comparable to 3 frontend folks working on a web application? There is so…

That's an odd comment to make, you just inadvertently proved their point. Most large web products are serious (?), have 'proper architecture' and hundreds of frontend developers working on them. Google products, Spotify, AirBnB, JIRA/Atlassian, Booking.com, Trello, GitHub.. you name it. You may also notice TypeScript in the first paragraph of the report, which is a type checker and has been enjoying massive adoption.

Not 'his', 'their', but yes, I agree that the projects being done on the web are hugely complex these days and have a rich set of building, linting, releasing, testing, etc. tools.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#55

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

#56
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think you have a fairly dated understanding of what front end is Certainly, as I am finding out. Can you suggest some solid, robust frontend framework that doesn't break in 3 months when I update the dependencies?

Svelte and React would meet the criteria you described. So would Mithril. Give Svelte a try online, their tutorial page is pretty slick: https://svelte.dev/tutorial/basics

I've gone through those. It looks clean. My biggest worry is the npm package manager and all the crud it brings into the repo.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#57
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> All the front end devs are like, "You have to wait how many minutes for compile times?" for instance. This is a shocking argument coming from any front end dev. Since when is static type checking, working on serious big repositories that take time to compile, have proper architecture with hundreds if not thousands of programmers working on it comparable to 3 frontend folks working on a web application? There is so…

I think you have a fairly dated understanding of what front end is, it's scale, and the complexity of delivering an experience that's fast and well optimized. These days front end engineering can be every bit as rigorous and complex as back end engineering. The constraints are a bit different, and the environments are very different, but the scale and complexity of engineering is not.

The reality is that most front-ends at most companies don't require that level of engineering. Sure if you work at Netflix or Facebook, there may be a lot of "real engineering" going on but most people don't work at those companies. But the guys at these small companies want to feel special, so they reach for whatever the big guys are doing and try to implement it, regardless of need. The same thing happens with (insert your domain here). Like, we have a single webstore with 10k customers, we need a Kubernetes cluster etc etc because Google does it.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#58
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?

> - Svelte is hyped, but is it battle tested enough?

Try asking the NYTimes how it's working out for them

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#59
post #9

As someone who is relatively outside of the JavaScript ecosystem, I had the following realization yesterday when I was reviewing this: JavaScript has what I would consider two distinct flavors of "back-end" frameworks. It has frameworks like Express and Koa, which I would consider traditional back-end frameworks. These are designed around handling HTTP requests and providing dynamic responses in myriad forms: rendere…

Next.js is mostly about server side rendering. If you look at something like nest.js it offers a more familiar backend with more structure. Because you can write your backend these days as serverless functions which just make api calls to other hosted services - the traditional backend framework (orm + routing) becomes less relevant.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#60
post #20
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeh Babel and webpack blow out compile times to epic proportions.

Any app that grows to a certain size will slow down to a crawl on incremental builds.

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