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State of JavaScript 2020

2020.stateofjs.com

111–120 of 189 posts

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#112
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…

if it helps, i wrote down my reasons for adopting Svelte, as a pretty heavily involved React user previously: https://www.swyx.io/svelte-why/

TLDR:

- it comes with batteries included

- mutable syntax is the simplest possible mental model

- sugar syntax for very common tasks is a norm, including for state management

- docs are fast and good

- internals are simple to understand (i can genuinely fork it if i ever disagree with decisions - good luck doing that for react)

- and other smaller items.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#114
A large mistake in React's history is definitely it's history with redux and any API like it. You can see that it's very quickly being shed away from React in these charts which I'm very happy about. Redux is like a global variable and it's painful and clumsy.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#116
Every year I see these reports come out and every year I'm more jealous of JavaScript/front end developers. I know the landscape is complicated and hard to keep up with, but damn it's just so cool the possibilities you guys have.

I am comfortable with c/c++/python/sql/java in an enterprise context. Might some folks help me get back into the JS world? Do I need to sit down with a JavaScript 1.0 book and go from there?

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#117
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…

> react is 2.6kb

react is used with react-dom [1] which is a 121kb minified[2]

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/react-dom [2] https://unpkg.com/browse/react-dom@17.0.1/cjs/

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#118
post #94

It's pretty clear that we're in a period of relative stability. React and TypeScript have been the tools of choice for 2-3 years now. Webpack is the clear choice in bundler. Most people seem to be using the modern language features. You can see that the number of extremely satisfied or dissatisfied people has gone down, people have moved towards the middle as the big tools have matured. It's nice. I feel like I actua…

I would like to think that the next big change will be the slow but steady replacement of JS/TS by one or more much better languages. Even with the current relative calm in front end web development, JS is still a terrible language for almost everything that matters. TS is a noble effort to put lipstick on a pig that achieves some useful benefits, but only at the expense of adding even more complexity, a sometimes clumsy syntax because of the JS legacy, and an illusion of being safer than it actually is again because the decision to favour JS compatibility means you can break the type system.

Momentum is a huge factor in programming language popularity, which unfortunately tends to hold back real progress, sometimes for decades. That's why we still write front end code in JS, and why we still write systems code in C. But with the progress of WASM, I think there is a genuine opportunity to create something so much better than JS (or anything that compiles to JS) that it might eventually take over, even if it takes more like 2 decades than 2 years to achieve success.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#119

A large mistake in React's history is definitely it's history with redux and any API like it. You can see that it's very quickly being shed away from React in these charts which I'm very happy about. Redux is like a global variable and it's painful and clumsy.

The big problem with traditional global variables is the way any code can change them arbitrarily, making it near impossible to understand the state management in a large program. I would argue that a library like Redux on the front end is more like a database, in that while it can be accessed from anywhere, in reality there is a structure to interacting with it and there has to be an explicit intention to modify the current state, which can been found via tools or even just a grep of the source code.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#120

Every year I see these reports come out and every year I'm more jealous of JavaScript/front end developers. I know the landscape is complicated and hard to keep up with, but damn it's just so cool the possibilities you guys have. I am comfortable with c/c++/python/sql/java in an enterprise context. Might some folks help me get back into the JS world? Do I need to sit down with a JavaScript 1.0 book and go from there?

JS is now old enough to have evolved significantly from its origins. So just like you should be cautious with learning c++ "from scratch", so should you be with JS. Other than that, given your skillset it should be fairly trivial to get the language basics down. Diving into the libraries and frameworks will probably be where you will spend your time :-)
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