Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

State of JavaScript 2020

2020.stateofjs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 189 posts

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#101

Post by samblr »

wildermuthn wrote: post #83

I’ve been doing web FE in various capacities for about a decade. First jQuery, then backbone, then Angular, then ClojureScript with React, now React and Apollo. While I get the criticism about what might seem like an anarchic state of JavaScript, at each transition point there have been clear, demonstrable, and worthwhile changes. Backbone addressed jQuery spaghetti code. Angular addressed backbone boilerplate. React…

This post from stateofjs has to be taken with a spoon of salt!

"Next.js is amongst the top backend framework" - Anybody can tell its popular for frontend!

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#102

Post by pjmlp »

worble wrote: post #20
Pfhreak wrote: 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.

Thankfully on my projects FE and BE are separate builds, so I only do FE builds when needed, I save so much minutes.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#103

Post by alephu5 »

erlich wrote: post #65
Pfhreak wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you ever wonder whether we cause the complexity ourselves. Did we need React? Flux? Graphql? Since we introduced these concepts we needed to rethink a huge amount of other stuff to keep it performant. Compare the simplicity of jQuery vs a modern tool chain. Like creating a form. It gets pretty insane with React. And jQuery would be dead simple. You have to stay on the bandwagon because it’s where the community is…

The main advantage of react in my opinion is the reusability of components. Most developers are not artists and can't design aesthetic and ergonomic interfaces from basic web elements, whereas with react you can install a component library (like material UI) and effectively just focus on business logic.

I'm mainly a backend developer so can't comment on how this tradeoff works out when you have the resources for artistic UI/UX folks and reduced development pace.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#104

Post by geonic »

Svelte is pretty cool. I‘ve only used it for a small app so far but it was very easy and quick to work with. I don‘t know how well it will scale for larger and more complex apps though.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#105

Post by austincheney »

wildermuthn wrote: post #83

I’ve been doing web FE in various capacities for about a decade. First jQuery, then backbone, then Angular, then ClojureScript with React, now React and Apollo. While I get the criticism about what might seem like an anarchic state of JavaScript, at each transition point there have been clear, demonstrable, and worthwhile changes. Backbone addressed jQuery spaghetti code. Angular addressed backbone boilerplate. React…

This is the biggest problem I have with being paid for front end development. In the corporate world the only focus is on the tools and how to write code. Thoughts of product development and product quality are almost exclusively absent.

That is so incredibly frustrating. As a paid professional you would hope your people know how to write code (do their jobs) and churn out original solutions to new problems. Instead it feels like being in a preschool learning to read and being ecstatic that anything gets released.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#106

Post by nathias »

I hate TypeScript so much. It feels so antithetical to the web, produces so much redundant bloat to solve a problem that maybe appears for some of the apps with huge codebases, and fails horribly with its obscure error messages.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#107

Post by AltruisticGapHN »

nathias wrote: post #106

I hate TypeScript so much. It feels so antithetical to the web, produces so much redundant bloat to solve a problem that maybe appears for some of the apps with huge codebases, and fails horribly with its obscure error messages.

Many many moons ago I wrote C and C++, typed languages right? I don’t remember typing my code being so abstract and complicated.

Take php 7+, has good typing features and is way, way easier to understand.

All I want is native js interfaces, namespaces and basic types, then F### typescript :)

Seriously somtimes as nerds we like something because its complicated and presses our dopamine buttons when we figure it out, but then what is the practical outcome?

Problem is there seems to be no middle point? I can’t write vanilla js now on new project, typing structures like json messages is bare minimum.

The problem with Ts is even if you don’t want to use it "like an expert" there is no beginner use, you will very quickly run into complicated abstractions and all kind of typescript errors due to fluidity of js language.

So I think native js typings is our only hope but when you see how crappy some vanilla js syntax is, what they did with classes, I’m not holding my hopes up.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#108

Post by mmmateo »

preommr wrote: post #69

It seems like the overall trend is that people are getting more and more unsatisfied with the current landscape now that a little bit of the sugar high from first wave of shiny new tech is starting to fade away. The jump from "whatever js was in 2014" -> angularjs junk -> react/vue/angular was pretty big. But now the glamour is gone and we're moving into the phase of actually having to maintain some of the things we…

I think you’ve misunderstood Svelte’s bundle size. Its bundle size is technically zero since it’s a compiler.

React can’t get any smaller because of the approach, not because they don’t want to. That’s why it doesn’t include so much out of the box (eg styling, animation, state management).

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#109

Post by erlich »

alephu5 wrote: post #103
erlich wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you ever wonder whether we cause the complexity ourselves. Did we need React? Flux? Graphql? Since we introduced these concepts we needed to rethink a huge amount of other stuff to keep it performant. Compare the simplicity of jQuery vs a modern tool chain. Like creating a form. It gets pretty insane with React. And jQuery would be dead simple. You have to stay on the bandwagon because it’s where the community is…

The main advantage of react in my opinion is the reusability of components. Most developers are not artists and can't design aesthetic and ergonomic interfaces from basic web elements, whereas with react you can install a component library (like material UI) and effectively just focus on business logic. I'm mainly a backend developer so can't comment on how this tradeoff works out when you have the resources for arti…

We had component libraries and reusability before React. I think a lot of FE best practices evolved at the same time as React.

A good example is React Native which is less about React but more about a js interop layer with Cocoa that happens to use React for the rendering.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#110

Post by inopinatus »

inopinatus wrote: post #79
cozuya wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you default to using the non long term support version? Would you do that for, say, ubuntu?

It’s an easy blind alley to blunder down on some platforms. If one’s package manager defaults to edge versions and you’re just getting standard with a new language/framework via a tutorial, for example, this is how you learn there’s an LTS release the hard way. Homebrew users on Mac are common victims, but similarly Arch Linux or FreeBSD may trap the unwary (and for more besides than merely Node)

s/standard/started/
Post reply on HN