Web Development: A Crazy World

This piece first appeared as a comment on this page in ENGLISH in July 2012: http://www.zemanta.com/blog/i-bet-you-over-engineered-your-s...

while the author claimed to have it translated from Chinese back to English, surprisingly almost exactly the same as the original English version. I guess English-Chinese-English translation has reached an amazing stage!

I used to develop with JavaScript, and JavaScript with Backbone before we switched to ClojureScript.

Backbone helped me to better structured my code but I found it also brings its own problems. There is a quite a lot of boilerplate code and views composed of other views were for me hard to manage.

I also wrote some macros to use Backbone from Clojure but the mismatch between object/mutable and functional/immutable is too high.

Finally the approach from http://clojurescriptone.com/ seems promising. It uses a simple yet flexible event dispatcher. Add that a templating engine and you are done.

Debugging ClojureScript within the browser is harder than normal JavaScript but it's easy nonetheless to find what generated JS functions corresponds to your ClojureScript code. If you compile in debug mode you can set a breakpoint as usual. Compiling ClojureScript adds a bit of overhead to the workflow but I compiled it continuously in the background via Emacs and forget about it, it just popups when an error occurs.

In general I found ClojureScript much cleaner than JavaScript and it's easier for me to write cleaner code with it when the data manipulation or the logic is not trivial.

Yes, this

The amount of 'meetoo.js' is amazing(ly bad)

Because of course everybody has to have "MVC responsive html5 cascading containers with chocolate covering"

Not to mention most of these are underdocumented, bug-ridden, too specific, etc

Need a js library? JQuery. period (and don't get me started with mootools, I need to ship, not swim around their docs figuring out how to do what in jquery is easy )

And focus on the backend, a competent backend development will eat your whatever.js "specialist" except for the most specific cases

I has nothing to do with being Chinese or not. I'm a "western dude" and I feel like it's my job to evaluate all of those things because picking the right tool IS my job. If I don't then I am doing a disservice to myself and clients.

I wouldn't want to get surgery by a doctor who said "well, I can do the operation in 5 minutes instead of 5 hours if I knew how to use Hyper Awesome Super Laser but sorry, I don't know how to use that technology".

I've found that a large subset of programmers share the same trait as a large subset of photographers: they become so obsessed with tools that they lose sight of the fact that the end product is what matters at the end of the day.

For example: there are many people who spend thousands on cameras and gear, and still take terrible photos. There are many developers who spend a lot of time keeping up with what they think is the latest trend, and yet they never finish any projects that get used.

Then you have the photographers who take great shots no matter what gear they use, and developers who write and ship great code and products using Java and other unsexy languages.

Can better tools help you be more productive? Absolutely. But if you spend all of your time worrying that you're not using the latest and great tools, you won't get much done, and you won't be satisfied with what you do get done. I have 15 cameras and unfinished projects in 10 languages that demonstrate that.

My advice? Sit back, pick technology a couple of steps behind the bleeding edge, and focus on results. Choosing Ember over Backbone isn't going to cause your project to fail; building the wrong thing or failing to finish, however, will.