Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

hackernoon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 236 posts

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#101

Post by mathgeek »

cloverich wrote: post #95
hemancuso wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you suggest developers actually figure out what tools to use? It is next to impossible to make an informed decision without digesting a good portion of what the OP is talking about. You need to start somewhere.

Where the OP falls off is with stuff like "OMG don't use jQuery" or "no one uses HTML anymore". There's nothing wrong with using those -- and frankly using plain old javascript and HTML is fine. Remember we reached for jQuery in the first place because the browser lacked features we wanted, and because it handled cross browser stuff for us. That is, it simplified things we were already doing manually . So the trap is…

I've been to more than one interview where I defaulted to jQuery and was immediately disqualified, based on the looks on the interviewers' faces. As a ruby developer, it certainly feels like keeping up-to-date on JS takes more work than the other 90% of languages that I'm familiar with.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#102

Post by enraged_camel »

ryanSrich wrote: post #69
lucb1e wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> React is very popular but it suits one very specific use case, it should be used almost nowhere else. Which use case? I've never worked with React but from yesterday's stateofjs.com I got the impression it's currently the go-to framework for everything.

> Which use case? If you're building Facebook.

Come on, your response is pretty shallow, don't you think? Or do you genuinely believe a Facebook-like application is the only one that could benefit from organizing into modular, reusable components?

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#103

Post by k__ »

JavaScript is a very special language, I think.

When I learned it in 2011 it was already strange to me, coming from years of work with PHP. Also, Java and C in university.

It was nerver meant to build big applications and had a few issues that many people tried to assert.

Old implementations which needed stuff like jQuery to normalize the APIs, no native module system so everyone implemented their own stuff (ExtJS, CommonJS, AMD, etc.), strange scoping rules forcing variable aliases and wrapper functions all over the place, functions as first class objects intruducing people to a new world of possibilities with ideas from FP, prototype based OO which comes with a different set of problems than class based OO.

The whole "we want new stuff now" movement forced many tools onto us to build our software, which before could simply be run in a browser without compilation. So we got rid of a few problems with a whole set of new problems.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#105

Post by cjhanks »

I spend my time in C++ and Python land the majority of the time. I have had to jump in to fix front end bugs a few times... This page reflects my experience fairly well. I spend hours trying to find the magic incantation of bower, grunt, less, npm and/or make, shell, versions to make one line of JS change. And I sincerely hope it gets better. I want to develop web sometimes, but every time I approach a new code base, I feel like I am starting from ground zero.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#106

Post by nkassis »

throwawayReply wrote: post #84

This misses the point. It's about the unit test. jQuery is easy to develop with but difficult to unit test. React is slow to develop with but easier to unit test. For small projects, jQuery is better. For large projects where the all the persons writing it tomorrow might not be here today, pick the testable one so they have a chance of future refactoring.

Unit tests is not the primary way to choose one frontend framework or another. It's one aspect to look at but i don't think this boils down to unit tests at all.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#107

Post by scottmf »

lucb1e wrote: post #54
scottmf wrote: post #51

Funny, but it's not quite that complex. How about "Here's a link to a CLI utility or git repo which will give you a working project in 2-3 hours"? I took a break from web dev for some years and had barely used any JS frameworks besides jQuery, until June, when I began working on an ambitious project and quickly got up to speed with the state of JS. I'm using React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/etc. for the client, and Express…

> which will give you a working project in 2-3 hours > you can learn React in a few hours. What's the big deal? Assuming we are still using the same example (filling a table with some data and filtering it), I think 2-3 hours is a good example of how long it takes to write that in plain Javascript and testing it on every browser back to IE6 while having lunch in between.

For sure, but the time spent learning React would provide value for all his future projects too.

I'd probably use React for a project that simple, particularly if it needed to be maintained and expanded by others.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#108

Post by bandrami »

frigo_1337 wrote: post #60

I'm getting tired of these pointless non-specific rants. You could write an article about "How it feels to learn C++ in 2016" and make it all about the complexities of operating systems, linking, compilation, text editors and the QWERTY keyboard layout, and you'd still be as accurate. All you need to "JavaScript in 2016" (as a beginner) is a config file and one or two commands. That's it. If that's too information or…

The number of libraries is too high, but the bigger issue is the speed at which each one is replaced. I thought the ruby ecosystem was bad 10 years ago, and the python ecosystem bad 5 years ago, but these are like sloths on Vicodin compared to the absurd rate at which the JS community seems to adopt and deprecate libraries and frameworks and whatever else they're calling them today.

The worst thing is, every single thing these frameworks are trying to address are solved problems, and have been for decades. But people love reinventing wheels.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#109

Post by k__ »

wccrawford wrote: post #79
kraftman wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what do you do about jobs asking for Angular/React experience? Just tell them you have none because you haven't needed to use them yet? Or avoid those jobs? (There are a lot)

I'm not the person you replied to, but I'd recommend learning them well enough to know their strengths, and then telling the interviewer that's what you did. If you have any experience in other front end frameworks, that'll usually be enough to get you through that part of the interview anyhow.

Also, after learning a few frameworks, it simply isn't hard.

I mean, if you get the right mind-set of wanting to understand "what is the intention of the framework devs" you can pretty much learn any framework.

Problems mostly come if you try to force your React/Ember/Backbone knowledge into another framework.

I got all my jobs without prior knowledge of the used frameworks.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#110

Post by Waterluvian »

marrs wrote: post #65

In my experience, the developers who fall into this trap of despair almost always do so because they aren't consciously choosing what tools to use; instead they are letting the tools choose them. They see job descriptions demanding AngularJS or ReactJS and they think that they must learn it, or someone posts an article here and they don't want to feel left behind. Choose a library or tool because it improves your dev…

When I had no experience I was asked to define the next few years for my company's single page app.

I researched all the major tools and committed to django, react, fluxxor, leaflet. As the major parts. All but leaflet (now OpenLayers) are still around and growing well.

The most important thing is that I got to pick which tools felt most resilient to rapid development and lots of rookie mistakes. Even if they may have been overkill or not ideal or some thing I cant possibly know as a newcomer.

In the past I did chase the dream of the one toolset to end them all and it had me never committing for any meaningful duration.

Post reply on HN