Very accurate. The web is still highly immature and the rate of change is proof of that. Very much looking forward to WebAssembly (and its full adoption by web browsers) so then we can end this madness once and for all.
How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
11–20 of 236 posts
Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
#12As these rehashed JavaScript versions of http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/xml/soap/simple are on front page of Hacker News every other day, I can't even begin to imagine what kinds of rants we will see in the next 15 years or so.
Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
#13The worst is, if you don't keep up with this, good luck getting a web job five years from now, you'll be the equivalent of a Cobol programmer. Can't get off the train.
And the best is, if you have a fundamental understanding of plain, vanilla javascript all these new frameworks are pretty easy to pick up. I went from jQuery -> Angular 1.x -> Ember 1.6 -> Ember 2.0 -> React and Redux in basically no time. It really wasn't that hard.
Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
#14I know it's super fashionable to hate on javascript, but I'd be very interested to see a similar rant on another area of software. I'm pretty convinced this is just how the industry works.
Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
#15I have no trouble at all "keeping up" with the "insanity" that is front-end development. If you're confused learning new things, it means you're learning.
At my company, we have moved a lot of our front-end code to eslint-checked ES6 with some plugins, writing react/redux powered interfaces. New hires generally learn the codebase fast, you're well protected from shooting yourself in the foot thanks to type checking and linting and the absence of globals. Our team is many times more productive with this stack than with the es5 + knockoutjs code we built with before.
If you're building a hobby project, just start with a tag with inline ES5 and css, and refactor and iterate from there. Use server-side templates. "keep it simple". But when building client-side interfaces at a higher complexity level, React is king.
Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
#16I'm a web dev, been doing this 11 years. But i totally feel past it, granted i code less and less nowadays so i havent kept up with new technologies. I've hired people that are much better at web dev than me and let them accomplish a task with pretty much whatever tech they want to use, because i believe you shouldn't constrict a developer if you dont have to. Even for a simple app that it'd take me 20 - 30 hours for…
i am have programming in js for decade, these days i go with react unless the item requires few lines then its jquery.
Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
#17I have no trouble at all "keeping up" with the "insanity" that is front-end development. If you're confused learning new things, it means you're learning. At my company, we have moved a lot of our front-end code to eslint-checked ES6 with some plugins, writing react/redux powered interfaces. New hires generally learn the codebase fast, you're well protected from shooting yourself in the foot thanks to type checking a…
My main problem is the speed, and bad backwards compatability. Generally speaking if I take a 2 year old C,C++ or Java project, I can be sure I can update to recent libraries and everything will just work with minimal fixes.
In Javascript it seems every time I pick a project up from a couple of years ago, every library version I was using is past end-of-life, and updating requires a major rewrite.
Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
#18I know it's super fashionable to hate on javascript, but I'd be very interested to see a similar rant on another area of software. I'm pretty convinced this is just how the industry works.
It's considerably worse in Javascript.
This is because:
+ HTML/Dom limitations + Browser fragmentation + It's used on the backend as well + Nobody is in charge. When someone is in charge, they usually provide the basic tooling and libs - hopefully they do it well - and then you only need ancilliary stuff for special projects. Obviously this can have drawbacks as well, but I'd argue that 2/3 of frameworks are actually trying to solve the same, core problems, just in different ways. They aren't providing 'more' just 'different'.
Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
#19Very accurate And if you go for X instead of Y you're obviously a non-hipster loser that hasn't been up to this week's fad
The later part of your point is salient: the weird hipster 'magpie' culture in front-end programming has a lot of drawbacks.
Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016
#20It's easy to show how complex those systems are. It's easy because they are complex. And that's pretty normal. Let someone talk about Java Enterprise development, the symptoms of your body and their diagnoses or just try to explain how to build a pencil (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/I,_Pencil).
We're professionals, after all, and TypeScript and React were not build by some teenage hackers.
I think the problem is that everybody remembers how they build that one website using jQuery in the early 2000s and now wonders why everything's so complex now. The reason is that we started to build complex applications instead of enhancing grandma's blog using jQuery.animate, get over it.
And if a software developer talks about all of this tools in the same manner you've described, he has poor social skills, nothing related to the tooling.
He could also talk about the intricacies of scaling web services using k8s and OpenStack and you'll find another bunch of tools and concepts. If someone would actually talk like you've described it, he would play buzzword bingo in any domain of expertise like medicine students who want to sound smart using latin words.