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If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

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Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#31

Post by bad_user »

grey-area wrote: post #24
rimantas wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hide the difference between apps and web apps Frankly, this is only possible by web apps not being web apps. Do you have any experience working with eiterh native SDK? Because I cannot imagine any one having experience (not just cursory hello-world glance) thinking that web apps are somehow superrior. I also don't get how web apps are better (or will be better) discoveralbility-wise. Or why it matters.

Frankly, this is only possible by web apps not being web apps. I'm not sure I agree with that, though it might never happen because the owners of the major platforms have absolutely no interest in being turned into a dumb foundation by the web (or a badly debugged set of device drivers, as Andreesen put it in 1995). The reasons for the ascendance of mobile are political and corporate though, not technical. There's li…

> There's little reason webkit performance cannot approach that of native, particularly if it used something like nacl rather than js, and no reason APIs cannot be exposed to web apps too (Apple exposes quite a few).

While I agree with that sentiment, I disagree with the example provided ... if you talk about NaCL, you're not talking about web apps or "the web" anymore. It's not a standard, it has portability issues and it will probably never be implemented by anybody else other than Google. We can bitch and moan about how broken the W3C standardization process is, but the existence of this process is also why the web is open and why it's awesome.

The alternative asm.js, while not being an answer to all issues addressed by NaCL, is a much better approach, because it's still standard JS and even if the browser does not optimize for the asm.js instructions set, the app still works - and if it takes off for games (and I believe it will), then all browser vendors will be forced to optimize for it - because it's one thing to not support some plugin (e.g. NaCL) and quite another to have clear instances in which the browser is much slower than the competition and thus directly comparable.

For unbelievers that haven't seen asm.js in action, checkout this famous demo that works well in both Firefox and Chrome: http://www.unrealengine.com/html5/ - that's pure JS right there and I don't think the limits have been reached.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#32

Post by camus2 »

alkonaut wrote: post #10

I'd learn F# + C + Rust + TypeScript/ES6. Anything that lets me avoid learning C++ or JS.

You cant learn Typescript without learning how Javascript works.

Typescript doesnt fix javascript issues, it just extends it. It means you'll get some nasty bugs in your code if you think you can just ignore javascript.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#33

Post by w1ntermute »

bad_user wrote: post #22
gonehome wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's just discoverability though. I think the main question is if mobile web applications will be able to match native on both quality and performance. Facebook attempted this and failed badly, but that doesn't mean it can't happen or that native will always have an edge. If native does continue to have an edge though then I think web has an uphill battle.

On Facebook, I remember a time when the native app was horrible on Android. In many ways it still is - it requires too many permissions and the list is growing. Recently they're asking for access to my SMS messages and in Android 4.3 I had a bug with my Nexus 4 in regards to location services as the Wifi-network provider was draining my battery and so I had to disable it, so Facebook's app was still requiring it, act…

I use the app Tinfoil for Facebook instead of the official one. It's basically a site browser. Much faster and less intrusive.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#34

Post by idProQuo »

ilaksh wrote: post #29

My favorite things right now which I am happy to recommend are ToffeeScript https://github.com/jiangmiao/toffee-script with Node.js and Nimrod http://nimrod-lang.org/ . I also think LiveScript is awesome. AngularJS is great. Web Components are better I think though. Docker has redefined devops in my opinion http://docker.io GLSL is very cool and something you can even experiment with in your browser using Three.js et…

I've never heard anybody mention Angular and Web Components as solving the same problem. I'm pretty fuzzy on front end MVC stuff in general, but I know almost nothing about Web Components. Do you know of any good tutorials or resources?

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#35

Post by camus2 »

shadowmint wrote: post #27
duncanawoods wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I liked the idea of typescript but after frustration from fundamental issues I was very happy to bin it. i) Wrapper libraries - Sure you can download them from definitelytyped but in practice I quickly found all sort of incompatibilities and things not working when used on real versions of the wrapped libraries. I had to edit them based on suggestions from forums. They are unversioned community efforts - poor version…

I use pycharm with typescript, and either I have a new version or the pycharm plugin is far different to the webstorm one. All the refactoring options, jump-to-symbol, type hinting, type completion and inline-error checking work really well for me. There are some pain points to be sure (modules, generics that don't quite work), but: - Emits known good javascript patterns, preventing javascript's typical '50 ways of d…

> - coffee script Why do you think that ? Coffeescript is basically javascript without the bad parts.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#36

Post by sfjailbird »

cmdkeen wrote: post #3

I'd actually recommend a slight variation on the C# javascript combo - Typescript instead. There are all sorts of tools coming out that allow you to generate Typescript interfaces from your C# giving you really nice compile time safety through your entire stack. If you're writing C# then Typescript feels more natural, especially in Visual Studio it removes much of the painful context switching between a typed intelli…

GWT has been doing this for Java for years and works very well. In fact I'd jump ship to any technology that can do what GWT does, i.e. a solid server-side language that you can also write the client in, with a large mature ecosystem. Keeping an eye on Dart.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#37

Post by Spooky23 »

um304 wrote: post #4

I would really like to know other folks opinions on this point mentioned by the author: "The web will persist and the web will win."

It's not necessarily a conflict that has an end. Because web-based stuff is standards-based, you'll always have a lag between state of the art and what is available in a standard. IMO, that's a good thing -- it pressures the market to continue innovating.

People at Netscape were talking about the web displacing native applications twenty years ago. That hasn't happened yet!

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#38

Post by izolate »

um304 wrote: post #4

I would really like to know other folks opinions on this point mentioned by the author: "The web will persist and the web will win."

I want it to win, but I'm not knowledgeable enough to gauge the accuracy of such a claim. To me, it seems the largest of native mobile apps on any platform have a web component of some sort.

I'm in favor of application logic living on the web, with native apps used on the frontend for consumption.

Re: If you had to start over, what technologies would you learn in 2014?

#40

Post by ilaksh »

idProQuo wrote: post #34
ilaksh wrote: post #29

My favorite things right now which I am happy to recommend are ToffeeScript https://github.com/jiangmiao/toffee-script with Node.js and Nimrod http://nimrod-lang.org/ . I also think LiveScript is awesome. AngularJS is great. Web Components are better I think though. Docker has redefined devops in my opinion http://docker.io GLSL is very cool and something you can even experiment with in your browser using Three.js et…

I've never heard anybody mention Angular and Web Components as solving the same problem. I'm pretty fuzzy on front end MVC stuff in general, but I know almost nothing about Web Components. Do you know of any good tutorials or resources?

http://customelements.io/ http://www.polymer-project.org/ http://www.polymer-project.org/docs/polymer/databinding.html https://github.com/webcomponents/element-boilerplate

For comparison to Angular, see http://angularjs.org/ Create components section or http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/directive .

Reusable components along with two-way data binding are the most important features of Angular. Web Components does components in a more product neutral, standardized way with a nicer API. Creating custom directives for elements in AngularJS is a pain.

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