Yooo lets go Svelte! I really love using it and I’m glad other people are discovering it. I’m even releasing my own SaaS boilerplate made around SvelteKit: https://sveltesaas.com
State of JavaScript 2021
121–130 of 245 posts
Re: State of JavaScript 2021
#122Interesting tidbits:
Most Adopted Features: Nullish Coalescing, Optional Chaining, Private Fields
Highest Satisfaction (backend frameworks): SvelteKit, Astro, Fastify
Highest Satisfaction (frontend frameworks): Solid, Svelte, React
Highest Satisfaction (mobile & desktop apps): Tauri, Capacitor, Electron
Highest Satisfaction (build tools): Vite, esbuild, SWC
Highest Satisfaction (monorepo): pnpm, Turborepo, Mx
Re: State of JavaScript 2021
#123The performance is really bad on my cheap android phone.
That's really the biggest indicator of the state of js.
Re: State of JavaScript 2021
#124Interested in the steady drop in satisfaction with Vue since 2018. I remember being positively impressed when I looked into it. Is it simply due to more usage in actual systems causing people to dislike tools they really work with, or is the framework developing in a direction people are unhappy with?
Unpopular opinion here: the more I use Vue, the more I realize that it started off doing things differently because it thought it was smarter than more established frameworks. Over time, you're seeing it copy a lot ideas from other systems because they're actually hard earned lessons. Vue is the manifestation of the frontend hype cycle. There's no reason to use it over something like React which is much better suppor…
I started using Vue back in 2015 and I agree. It's sort of a middle ground between React and Svelte with too many ways to do the same thing.
Imo the best use case for Vue is as a jQuery no build replacement. Preact is also another good option for this.
Re: State of JavaScript 2021
#125As someone new to front-end and who will probably only be building small hobbyist stuff by myself, is the mountain climb that is mastering React worth it? From my initial look into it, it seems incredibly complex.
Suggest going with Svelte. It’s been great.
Re: State of JavaScript 2021
#126As a react guy for 5 years solidjs was the only one which piqued my interest. I feel it has all the benefits of reactjs plus more.
Why create a throwaway to write this?
Re: State of JavaScript 2021
#127For testing, I've been exploring vitest which is missing from this list because jest looks unmaintained and has growing pain with typescript and esm support. https://vitest.dev/ It's a drop in replacement for jest. The only change you will need to make in most cases is adding an explicit import for expect, describe, and it. It works without any config with esm and typescript. It's also 5x faster in development. It in…
> has growing pain with typescript and esm support. I'm curious - what do you mean by this? Been using Jest in multiple codebases with typescript and ES Modules and never ran into an issue.
I remember having trouble with this recently. No specific examples to cite because I gave up and nuked the project, but support for ESM is experimental in Jest. I literally just couldn't get it to work with ES6. I remember thinking I would have to compile to CJS so jest would work.
edit: just found this, which seems to confirm my anecdotal xp of esm in jest being weird https://github.com/facebook/jest/pull/11529#issuecomment-102...
Re: State of JavaScript 2021
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Frontend development is not a great career path; it's mostly a young people's game. I know senior react developers in their thirties that are increasingly struggling to find well paying gigs because they are competing with young people at half their rate. A lot of frontend developers transition to full stack js and from there to doing more serious things using Go, Rust, or whatever. That's where the money is. It's a…
Do you have any data to back this up at all? My experience is opposite, many backend jobs have been replaced by different BaaS', while most of the programming is done on the frontend. If you hire a younger developer half your rate, you get what you pay for. Complicated frontend projects needs good seniors, and they get paid their fair share. IME demand for experienced and talented frontend seniors have never been hig…
All of the frontend stuff I've been involved with (mostly as a backend developer) has long been retired. There's not a single thing I can point at that lived for more than 2-3 years before getting shelved or replaced.
The stuff you mention I would classify as shiny new stuff. Easy to hire for now and in fact I know a few guys looking to hire exactly that kind of skills. It's going to be different in a few years because by then it will be unfashionably old stuff.
Angular, backbone, jquery were the fashionable stuff ten years go. Who even uses backbone at this point? Their last release was 3 years ago. That's the kind of now unfashionable thing that has probably been largely replaced or shelved by now. They had a pretty big community of users back in the day. Interesting data point if you are looking for one to figure out what happened to all those projects. There are still about 620K downloads per week so there clearly are some projects still pulling that in. But apparently they've not needed a new version since February 2019, which was when the last release was tagged. Good luck if you are hiring for such projects.
Re: State of JavaScript 2021
#129"Popularity contest" describes the front-end community in a nutshell. I've been in software development since before the web was a big deal. Never have I seen any language have more "high school popularity" style personalities hawking whatever the "best" library is... without any knowledge or wisdom. Any attempt to point out why some of these technologies or approaches are a "bad idea" leads to massive downvote trains. The saddest part is, I could be accused of "gatekeeping" when I say, "maybe we can learn from the past?". Nope. Yet somehow, folks with absolutely no pedigree are out there deciding what a "best practice" is... and immediately the "community" hops on board. It's almost cultish in that way. Don't you dare ask "who decided this was best?". What qualifications does that person have to decide a "best practice". You'll be met with the name of the company where that person works... as if that means something.
Even still, THIS is the state of the JavaScript. None of that has to do with the language.
Re: State of JavaScript 2021
#130I read this report every year. This year it feels the most like it's driven by hype (and marketing, hi Vercel!). In my professional and personal experience, react has never been better to use (in terms of features, DX, maturity, community, productivity), yet if you look at the "popularity" (oh dear) graph, it's basically just describing how older tech slides down while newer shiny tech comes in and is instantly the m…
I’ve got quite a lot of experience with non-IT enterprise, in Denmark, and almost nobody uses those fancy new technologies around here. Over the past few years everything has moved to typescript (typically with react, but some angular remains from older decisions), dotnet, Java, php or c++.
That’s basically it. The only job listing to even mention things like Rust in the region where I live in the past 5 years is Google, and they list it as “nice to have” on a recurrent phd position for c++ development.
Python is obviously a thing, but not so much for software development, but typically requires you to be a statistician first and then maybe capable of writing a little Python second.
So there is probably a bit of a disconnect between what is hip and what puts food on the table for a lot of us.
You’re probably on to a lot of it too. I recently got back into development, returning from a stint in management, project management and enterprise architecture and I’ve grown quite fond of typescript and the node environment.
It’s obviously a place where you can cause a lot of harm if you brute-force-program 100% or the time all of the time, but it’s also a place where you can create some great business value faster than I’ve ever experienced elsewhere. I mean, I can do things faster in Python but only until whatever I’m doing outgrows what I’m capable of keeping in my head.
That being said. Looking at the previous 20 years of getting to running office365 in your browser, sort of explains why people have been working so hard to come up with newer and smarter things, doesn’t it?
For the vast majority of us, however, the boring old languages are likely going to be around long after we retire, and as such, the “popularity” measures in these articles is probably not something to pay too much attention to.