Ember.js is driving me crazy

I always use local lightweight tag objects in git for this - if there's a commit that I'm not sure about somewhere along the line I'll tag it REVERTME or something like that.

I'm an experienced web developer (Backbone is my preferred framework) whose team is migrating to Ember. It has its high points, but on the whole, it's been driving me nuts.

Ember, like most modern frameworks, represents itself as MVC. But it's more like MVCLCTMRA (model-view-controller-layout-component-template-mixin-router-application, if you're following along at home). There are just so many moving pieces, and there's a lot of overlap between them. Should I be using a layout, a view or a component here? They're ALMOST the same, and they don't always vary in the places you'd expect them to. Also, the "model" portion, ember-data, is fairly immature and doesn't seem to be anywhere near production-ready.

There are also some design decisions that just leave me baffled. If templates are supposed to be the ideal place to declare stuff, why does a view's root element have to be declared in a bunch of JavaScript properties instead? Why do some of their camel-case names (e.g. RESTAdapter) violate the (fairly strict) naming conventions they enforce in user land?

I don't hate Ember, and I'm sure it perfectly fits the mental schema of at least one person on the planet, but it doesn't click all that well for me. And it's abstract enough that I don't think working through problems in it is making me better at anything except Ember.

It's also probably worth mentioning that about 80% of the documentation online seems to be in the form of StackExchange posts, and about 80% of those are obsolete, as Ember has gone through a lot of radical changes in the not-too-distant past.

This assumes that you knew that the code was once there, and where it was. Working on a team with partially implemented features with planned future hooks, it's just easier to keep the intent in the live code (hopefully with some good comments/docs)

I was just commiserating and sharing my own experience.

The problems posted in the article are really hard to judge because the author doesn't actually explain what happened.

In the first example, he doesn't try. Fair enough, it's a judgement call on whether to spend time understanding what happened. Personally, I would consider it high priority, because otherwise you have no assurance that the same problem isn't biting you elsewhere.

In the second, he says something that doesn't actually make sense: "Ember's set function has special behavior for values in the content field". I know Ember's source about as a well as anybody not in the core team, and that statement isn't even false. If I had to guess, I'd assume he's really saying something about how ObjectControllers behave as proxies for models.

I don't mean to write off whatever problems he encoutered -- they are clearly real problems, either bugs in Ember or failures of developer ergonomics. If he could point to the specific actual problems I would personally work on a patch to address them. But I don't have enough to go on.

Okay, so you had a problem with Ember.

But the whole leap to needing "strong static type system like Haskell" leap seems really random.

It seems more like a need to spend more time with JS (which can be weird and a pain, but eventually makes sense) than blame Ember, which is pretty complex on top of the various aspects of JS that are a bit unintuitive to start with.