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

State of JavaScript 2021

2021.stateofjs.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 245 posts

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#131

Post by jillesvangurp »

cageface wrote: post #95
jillesvangurp wrote: post #88

Earlier 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…

This hasn't been my experience at all. People are building increasingly complicated apps like Figma in the browser and are happy to hire senior developers and pay them well. If anything I see the number of back end roles diminishing as people increasingly delegate that stuff to various cloud services.

Figma has been great new thing that simply did not exist ten year ago. I know a co-founder of a competitor to Figma called fluid UI. That was working on that around that time. Shiny new stuff in other words.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#132

Post by nobleach »

doteka wrote: post #99
searchableguy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People inheriting old react codebases now have to deal with way more complexity. For example, everyone was using styled components 2-3 years ago and now they are moving away. The complexity styled components introduced has to be managed alongside the current trend (tailwind?). Old styled components codebase looks horrible. They end up with Java inheritance hell. You create a button, then create another button inherit…

Bad developers will write bad code no matter the pattern - styled components has never been a source of issues for us. Why would we move to a new “trend”? I think this is unique to the JS ecosystem.

> Why would we move to a new “trend”?

Because if you dare question if TailwindCSS might not be a good idea, you'll be shouted down by an angry mob?

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#133

Post by rorymalcolm »

sylens wrote: post #60

As 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.

I think with React the core functionality / idea is much more simple than you'd imagine. The complexity evolves out of the add-ons and library situation, some do simplify the situation though, I find Next.js React apps incredibly powerful and easy to build on top of.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#134

Post by wvh »

anton-107 wrote: post #78
badsectoracula wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People aren't born knowledge of the programming languages at their time of birth, 65 year olds can do JavaScript just fine, it isn't even anything weird as a language :-P. I think it is more likely that, largely, there are way more 25-34 programmers than 65+ programmers out there.

Correct, but people are more likely to learn a new skill or a tech stack in their 20s than in their 40s. And when current 65+s were in their 20s javascript wasn't a thing yet.

Not sure people over 40 don't want to learn new things; they're likely just more interested in stable long-term technologies and investing their time wisely rather than hopping onto the newest fad all the time. With age comes understanding that the more things change, the more they stay the same. Emperor's new clothes and all that.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#135

Post by coding123 »

somehnacct3757 wrote: post #81
davedx wrote: post #22

I 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…

It's always driven by hype, or maybe groupthink. Every year I feel bad for the Ember contributors when this thing comes out cuz the respondents boldly claim Ember's bad while also admitting they've never used it and have no interest trying it. The clear mark of a popularity contest.

I think it makes most sense to look at the "I've used it, wouldn't use it again" rather than "I haven't used it, not interested in using it". Those breakdowns are quite revealing in fact for both React and Vue.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#136

Post by rob74 »

nobleach wrote: post #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 train…

Well, if developers would approach their task with knowledge and wisdom, then the abomination that is Node.js would never have been unleashed on the developer community. But here we are: "yay, Google has written a blazingly fast JS engine, so now we can use JS in the backend!" - never once stopping to question if this is really a good idea...

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#137

Post by thrower123 »

tmstieff wrote: post #47
searchableguy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People inheriting old react codebases now have to deal with way more complexity. For example, everyone was using styled components 2-3 years ago and now they are moving away. The complexity styled components introduced has to be managed alongside the current trend (tailwind?). Old styled components codebase looks horrible. They end up with Java inheritance hell. You create a button, then create another button inherit…

I'm working on a codebase that evolved at the same pace as React, but without any thought for idiomatic principals. As a result, you have class-based components, purely functional components, hook based components, HOCs, Redux state passed in through the older functional way, Redux state passed in through an HOC, styled components, traditional CSS styled components, and anything else you can think of that was in vogu…

Classic Lava-layer development anti-pattern

http://mikehadlow.blogspot.com/2014/12/the-lava-layer-anti-p...

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#138

Post by thrower123 »

aniforprez wrote: post #23
searchableguy wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People inheriting old react codebases now have to deal with way more complexity. For example, everyone was using styled components 2-3 years ago and now they are moving away. The complexity styled components introduced has to be managed alongside the current trend (tailwind?). Old styled components codebase looks horrible. They end up with Java inheritance hell. You create a button, then create another button inherit…

There's also a lot of great improvements in tooling that just completely outclass what CRA does. Webpack is a dinosaur that is slow and painful to use compared to new stuff like vite that is blazing fast and isn't written in JavaScript. Nextjs comes with a lot of routing decisions already made so it becomes much easier to quickly build apps on top of it

I am always amazed at how slow any build process that involves webpack always becomes.

Webpack runtime is well over 50% of the total time on our CI server builds, and that includes an installshield installer build and thousands of dotnet unit tests that are more complex than they ought to be in that pipeline.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#139

Post by 5350-uiop-1130 »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #128
krembanan wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

I don't think it's so much about fashion/trends as it is about ever increasing user expectations, and frankly JS/HTML/Web is the best of the worst solutions. It's not ideal but its the fastest and most accessible.

Everything started going to shit in front-end after the iPhone was released. You had the emergence of web apps, web as a platform, pervasive social media, so many horrible things....

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#140

Post by thrower123 »

jve wrote: post #4

Gulp build tool not receiving much love lately with a very strong "Would not use again". Why so? https://2021.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/build-tools/#buil...

"Would not use again" feels entirely apt for gulp/grunt/whatever.

I'd rather write makefiles or even Powershell scripts.

Post reply on HN