How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017 • Hacker News Board

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#101

Post by mercer » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 1:51 PM UTC

vturner wrote: post #87

mercer wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done stuff with Delphi back in the day, but I'm not too experienced. Would you mind explaining point by point how desktop UI 'does' this? For example, I can't really think of a desktop app where most of the crucial app/UI logic is reliant on async communication with a server. Most data is stored locally and permanently. I'd actually really like to hear because I have been eying native development lately!

Young developer here too, but I started about a decade ago with robotics/desktop development. Thus, I can sympathize with the comment earlier that desktop UI has done all this: clients that range from tiny phone screens to full desktop screens -- Desktop UI could support this if developers wanted to its just resizing a window. You just don't see it because devs assume the existence of a mouse which allows easing pann…

I think we're talking cross purposes. I'm not saying that there we never came up with better things; far from it!

Rather, disregarding how we got here, the situation we're in now provides challenges that sort of justify the complexity and confusion we're in now. Maybe this comment better expresses what I'm saying: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14218425

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#102

Post by dankohn1 » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 1:56 PM UTC

That's a very impressive demo. I did Javascript development full time from 2012-2014 (Node.js 0.8 and Angular 1.0) and it's amazing to me that essentially none of the constructs he mentions were available then. It wasn't that long ago!

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#103

Post by Silhouette » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 1:59 PM UTC

JimDabell wrote: post #97

Silhouette wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edge superseded Internet Explorer Microsoft might like to think so, but until all our business clients agree with them, the real IE is still a significant limiting factor in deploying with any JS feature you can't effectively polyfill.

Okay, but that's an upgrade issue, not a dead-end issue like a lot of people would assume from being told that there's no plans to add it to Internet Explorer. Features get added to new versions, not old versions. Organisations using old versions will need to upgrade to new versions to get the new features. That's true of anything. It just happens in this case that Microsoft decided to go from Internet Explorer 11 to…

It's not just an upgrade issue. Many organisations aren't running Windows 10 and so have no browser upgrade path to Edge at all. Many organisations still have an older version of IE, probably IE11 but sometimes earlier, as their standard desktop browser.

Experience tells us that those organisations aren't in a hurry to upgrade their standard desktop deployment just to get a new browser so web developers can play with the shiny new toys. Did we learn nothing from the XP and IE6 era?

So it's all very well talking about newer JS features, but pragmatically, you can't just wish away the need for compatibility with browsers more than a year or two old if your target audience is businesses, governments, or other large organisations.

There's an unhealthy complacency among parts of the web dev community, as if something being available in the latest Chrome canary now means it can be used everywhere. That's just not how a distributed system works when you don't fully control the client.

Even if it were, you're not just going to retrofit something as significant as multi-threaded architecture into most existing JS code bases. Outside the HN bubble, not everyone gets to start a greenfield JS project every six months.

I think aphextron's original comment was fair and realistic: as a practical matter, even with the rapid pace of change in the JS ecosystem, we still can't use a lot of day-to-day features in JS that would be routine in most other modern programming languages.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#104

Post by tomxor » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 2:00 PM UTC

I think a more appropriate title is what it's like to learn front end web development in 2017, not much of the discussion has anything to do with language details and everything to do with MVC and html.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#105

Post by cknoxrun » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 2:05 PM UTC

seanwilson wrote: post #27

revscat wrote: post #17

We have recently implemented Angular4 in our project, and have started to pick it up. Recently picked up a story that was adding a simple confirmation modal to a page: "Alert" text in the top, body with some warning text, and a yes/no button. This was my first experience with modern JavaScript frameworks and TypeScript. I wanted to do it right, so worked closely with team members who were more versed in this stuff, a…

> Recently picked up a story that was adding a simple confirmation modal to a page: "Alert" text in the top, body with some warning text, and a yes/no button. > By the time all was said and done the PR for this thing had 27 files in it. Can you not just use a library for this and do it in a few lines...? I found Angular 2 verbose but I don't see how the above is common. I just did something similar in Vue today and i…

Or, perhaps instead of a library, use the built in browser confirmation dialog?

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#106

Post by andybak » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 2:11 PM UTC

alayek wrote: post #78

A refreshing read. Was expecting a satirical negative take on the complexity. However, this only covers a small part of front-end development with VDOM based approach, and a few ES6 constructs (destructuring, arrow functions, let-const). The author misses out on mobile development, Node JS and NPM modules, server side, and Electron-based desktop apps. It's a good thing to take the positive approach, and get introduce…

I sense that the target audience is probably people who are already developers but have a negative view on the current js ecosystem.

They are likely to be fairly happy with their existing approaches to desktop and server development and want to learn to use javascript where it is currently unavoidable.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#107

Post by OtterCoder » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 2:14 PM UTC

lazyjones wrote: post #39

ktRolster wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UI is hard dude. It's been a solved (and re-solved) problem for decades.

UIs on the web suffer much more than UIs elsewhere from the disease of people designing their own UI elements in order to achieve a novel, unique style. Perhaps, some day, this will be considered pointless and unprofessional like on the desktop...

But web design philosophy has been creeping on to the desktop for quite a while now. Apps like Skype and Slack are ludicrously overstyled these days. Flash and chrome have always played teeter-totter with utility and functionality, in every field.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#108

Post by andybak » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 2:16 PM UTC

tangue wrote: post #20

vturner wrote: post #16

"I have to confess, the build setup is the most intimidating part of modern web development for me." Here here.

I feel sorry for the generation who didn't experienced the "drop file on ftp client, it's on the internet" experience. No setup, no build tools ...

Shhhh. Don't tell anybody - but that still works.

Even with an SPA - assuming you use a framework that doesn't force you through a build pipeline.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#109

Post by abledon » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 2:42 PM UTC

Love the babel include in the src at the top. Great strategy for introducing beginners to modern js.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#110

Post by seanwilson » Sun, Aug 27, 2017, 2:44 PM UTC

aphextron wrote: post #45

seanwilson wrote: post #29

It can be a pain getting the build system up and running but once you're writing typed JavaScript code with modern features like async/wait and ES6 modules along with live + hot reloading, it's impossible to go back. It's really trendy to complain about JavaScript changing too fast right now but the last few years have brought some great changes to JavaScript.

>It's really trendy to complain about JavaScript changing too fast right now but the last few years have brought some great changes to JavaScript. I'd say they've made JS development bearable , but great is really stretching it. We still don't have a type system, static analysis, multi-threading, first-class IDE support, or any of a myriad of other features that are standard in any modern programming language in 2017…

Do you actually code in JavaScript? TypeScript addresses many of these issues and even statically checks for null variable usage which puts it ahead of some mainstream type systems in my opinion. I don't hear people making fun of Python for example and that has a huge following.