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Popularity-driven development

ferrante.pl

31–36 of 36 posts

Re: Popularity-driven development

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

jQuery is beautiful and meticulously engineered (and also modularized) to a level far beyond other DOM manipulation/cross-browser compatibility/animation/promise/wart abstraction/whatever else libraries. It may not be the best at everything, and it's certainly not minimalist (though its components are now designed to be independent and customizable) but it is the meeting of many good practices and informed design acr…

What do you do with these sort of extremely specific selectors?

Just a very common use case for jQuery selectors is the :even and :odd extension, used to apply classes to table rows in order to alternate shading to make them easier to read.

Re: Popularity-driven development

#32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you do with these sort of extremely specific selectors?

Just a very common use case for jQuery selectors is the :even and :odd extension, used to apply classes to table rows in order to alternate shading to make them easier to read.

That's pretty simple. You mentioned much, much more complex stuff.

Re: Popularity-driven development

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just a very common use case for jQuery selectors is the :even and :odd extension, used to apply classes to table rows in order to alternate shading to make them easier to read.

That's pretty simple. You mentioned much, much more complex stuff.

There are many capabilities sizzle.js provides that go beyond CSS specifications (and also in some cases that are in the specification, but not yet implemented by browsers). Selectors can get pretty nasty, and having more flexibility available can help to make them more manageable. A lot of times you wouldn't want to use the more complex selectors, but it's certainly nice to have them.

Re: Popularity-driven development

#34

Indeed, popularity does not directly correlate with quality (which is not to say that popular libraries and tools are never high quality.) That said, the reasons most projects fail have less to do with the imperfections of the tools used than with the approach taken to the project as a whole. And especially if you're running a business there are good reasons to choose tools that are reasonably well known and widely u…

if you're running a business there are good reasons to choose tools that are reasonably well known and widely used, regardless of whether they're the absolute best available on the market. The biggest reason being that it's a lot easier to find developers who know or are interested in learning a popular tool than an obscure one. Recently, I've been questioning the exact value of using popular tools because it's easie…

It's not just about screening people for already knowing the tools. It's also about finding people interested in learning or using them. For instance, I'd imagine it's really difficult to recruit developers willing to work on software built in Cold Fusion if it's not already their preferred language. The same goes for anything new and sufficiently obscure. That limits your hiring pool significantly. And for the newer ones means you're unlikely to be able to find anyone with a deep understanding of your language or framework (or DBMS)'s internals.

Re: Popularity-driven development

#35
post #25

Here's my experience, being an author of an "underdog" js framework. My project (Mithril.js) has ~2600 stars on github, a relatively lively mailing list, and it's on the front page of todomvc, so it's definitely more popular than many "competitor" projects, although not nearly as popular as Angular or Ember. My general impression of the landscape is that affiliation w/ a famous brand helps a lot in driving adoption.…

Why I'm coding with Mithril...

I have experience creating a very complex React app to organize a conference. It included registration, authentication, personalized schedules and calendars, news articles, up-to-the-minute updates, a store, physical pass(ID) verification, and a few dashboards for use by clients of my client. Honestly, it was a lovely experience. Once in the React rhythm, the coding became an exercise in pattern application. This was before Flux came along.

Presently, 58% of users of my current client's site arrive via mobile and minified React tops 145kb, which takes a lot of time to deliver and unpack. I serve 1000 new users per week who can't rely on finding React in their browser cache. This is too much overhead. I am a little obsessed with under-one-second loading and 3 second attention spans. Non-minified React is 642kb and that's too much code for me to grok if I want to understand what my application is doing. I did some work converting Bootstrap to React and ramping up took too much of my time.

Then I found Mithril. It's faster than anything. It's tiny. It does only what it needs to do, no bloat. And it does most of the good stuff that React does. It's also FRP friendly, another current obsession of mine.

It's in the early stages, but it is so small and focused that it can be used anywhere. TODAY. Consider it code you would have written on your own if you'd had the time (and were a VERY talented js coder). mithril.js is small enough to understand in detail. It's so well designed that even an intermediate dev like me can grasp it. Beyond the basic documentation is a blog and API docs written as precisely and as focused as the code. The API is so small you can master it in an hour or two. It's a testament to its quality that the earliest blog entries are applicable today. I recommend reading them from oldest to newest. They read more like a tutorial than a blog. Post a question to the Google Group and Leo will likely refer you back to a blog post because he's already covered your question.

Another sign that Mithril is of great quality: most public discussion about Mithril revolves around the philosophy and logic of app design, not code errors. When errors are discovered, Leo patches them within hours if not minutes.

Leo got so much right. Most things right. More than any other framework I know.

Re: Popularity-driven development

#36
post #25

Here's my experience, being an author of an "underdog" js framework. My project (Mithril.js) has ~2600 stars on github, a relatively lively mailing list, and it's on the front page of todomvc, so it's definitely more popular than many "competitor" projects, although not nearly as popular as Angular or Ember. My general impression of the landscape is that affiliation w/ a famous brand helps a lot in driving adoption.…

Oops. My comment [below] grew into a post, although shorter due to character limits.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8973867

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