State of JavaScript 2020 • Hacker News Board

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#121

Post by moron4hire » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 1:56 PM UTC

inopinatus wrote: post #81

moron4hire wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are there "not-LTS" versions are all?

So we can develop for them. A new version of, say, a programming language needs the ecosystem to come along with it.

C# doesn't have non-LTS versions. Java doesn't. C, C++, Haskell, OCaml don't. In OSes, Windows and Mac OS don't. I'm actually struggling to think of anything outside of Linux and Node that has this concept of "here's a major version that is marked LTS and here is a beta, but we're not going to call it beta, we're just going to call it an odd-numbered major version".

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#122

Post by paulryanrogers » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 1:57 PM UTC

aidos wrote: post #98

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…

Agreed. It becomes really messy moving all that state around. Still in its infancy but we’ve settled on a model where we use Hasura to sync the whole datastore to the frontend as a mobx graph. It’s relatively easy to then drive the frontend off layers of computations on that graph. We’ve also put a transaction layer on mutations of the models so they’re automatically batched and sent as a single request / dB transact…

Where and how does conflict resolution happen?

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#123

Post by Macha » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 2:04 PM UTC

preommr wrote: post #77

Pfhreak wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> including in AAA videogame UI elaborate, please, because this sounds so bizarre. Are they bundling an entire web view and then interfacing it with their game engine? Not only is the tech conceptually weird, I can't think of too many AAA games that have very complex UIs other than maybe the CK series.

It doesn't surprise me. 5 years ago the standard solution was Scaleform, which is pretty much the same thing but with Flash.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#124

Post by vbezhenar » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 2:06 PM UTC

preommr wrote: post #77

Pfhreak wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> including in AAA videogame UI elaborate, please, because this sounds so bizarre. Are they bundling an entire web view and then interfacing it with their game engine? Not only is the tech conceptually weird, I can't think of too many AAA games that have very complex UIs other than maybe the CK series.

It might be for main menu. I think that WC3 reforged used webview for its menu.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#125

Post by Macha » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 2:10 PM UTC

Pfhreak wrote: post #8

milkers wrote: 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.

I would wager that a middle of the road data-heavy web UI actually asks more of their framework performance wise than a video game UI. Compare the number of interactable elements in e.g. a Trello board to a FPS weapon loadout screen. Sure, the consequences of a sluggish UI in a video game can be worse than a sluggish UI in a web app if it's running on the main thread and blocking the game's execution, but plenty of games update their UI less than once a frame, or run it in a separate thread altogether.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#126

Post by astrod » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 2:13 PM UTC

robin21 wrote: post #60

worble wrote: post #20

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 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.

There has been some interesting tooling being written in Rust, swc[1] compiles very fast. Not quite production ready but getting there.

[1]https://swc.rs/

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#127

Post by nathias » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

AltruisticGapHN wrote: post #107

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, b…

For me it would make sense for it to be a plugin for your IDE, not a language, and now its something in-between. This trend also goes against the development and adoption of writing with languages that have actual types and their ecosystems.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#128

Post by Macha » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

jamesgeck0 wrote: post #37

systemvoltage wrote: post #6

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…

> There are "boring" frameworks like Ember and Angular

I honestly don't agree for Ember at least. Enterprise development is prone to having apps untouched for years and once an Ember application gets that out of date, the route to getting it in date again is... difficult. Have seen with with applications on 1betaX versions, 1.13, 2.14 and no route forward without significant rework, which means they're largely incompatible with the ecosystem now.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#129

Post by jtdev » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 2:21 PM UTC

milkers wrote: 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?

> “In terms of data management, GraphQL holds its position on the top while good-ol Redux kept losing interest.”

Not sure what you mean by “data management” here, but fetch/REST seem like to most predominant, simple, ubiquitous means of handling external data.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#130

Post by williamdclt » Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 2:22 PM UTC

rhacker wrote: post #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.

> Redux is like a global variable

This meme needs to die. You can argue that it's painful and clumsy, but not that it's "like a global variable". The _whole_ point of redux is to offer global state without the problems of global variables. Interacting with the global state through actions, selectors and subscribers prevents the problems of global variables.

Is it clumsy/verbose/confusing/whatever? There's definitely arguments for it. But people stop thinking when they see the word "global" and make terrible arguments against Redux.