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How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

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Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#141

Post by johnnyb_61820 »

pbh101 wrote: post #26
gadrev wrote: post #6

This was actually a didactic piece. While criticizing the current state of affairs, it gives a nice overview of many of the emerging technologies and how they fit together, even if for some tasks it feels retarded to pull such an entangled mess of dependencies. You can then go insane diving into any particular one :)

Being primarily a Java dev, it felt to me like half of this was critiquing the churn rate of using different tools (warranted) and the other half was lamenting the fact that people built tools to solve the common problems they have when developing in large teams (largely unwarranted). Most of those tools have direct equivalents in the Java ecosystem (and there is tool-churn in Java too, just slower). Facebook, Google…

I have run into the problem discussed in the article multiple times. The first time was with Java, specifically J2EE. It isn't that these are non-existent problems, it is that all of the solutions require a full pull of the entire context. That is bad for both learning and software architecture. I was going to start moving in the J2EE direction (I knew Java itself fairly well), but I realized that getting the most basic program up and running would require knowledge about about 7-10 frameworks. That was ridiculous. Additionally, Java was terrible about framework installation at the time, so that made it even worse.

My preference, and I think it is born out by successful long-term projects, is to always keep everything to a minimum. A lot of people say things like, "that's not the optimal way" or "you could make the page load faster" or "you could integrate with xyz".

But, at the end of the day, you have to measure bang for the buck. Bootstrap - VERY high bang for the buck. Jquery, likewise. Pretty much everything else doesn't start yielding dividends until you are at a facebook-level application.

Which, frankly, is fine for Facebook-level applications. But the problem is that people are using these for everything, which is totally ridiculous. How they find people to pay for all of this is what really blows my mind.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#142

Post by johnnyb_61820 »

adamrezich wrote: post #73

Cross-posting my comment from reddit: I don't know about anyone else, but the problem I personally have with the crazy, messy JavaScript ecosystem is: - I am a relatively experienced amateur programmer (with limited [nine months] professional experience) - I can learn any new programming language, library, methodology, or whatever pretty easily - I don't have any formal experience using anything of this newfangled st…

We are not currently hiring, but we do 100% of our hiring based on our personal interactions. We are a Rails shop, and rarely if ever do our developers know Rails coming in. In fact, one of my best hires came straight out of high school.

I agree that the HR path is ridiculous. We can go another route because we are small. I don't know how you would balance the needs of large-scale hiring with the intricacies of tech at a big company.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#143

Post by 16bytes »

SadWebDeveloper wrote: post #137

> Oh, like Bower! > Oh, like Angular! IMHO if you know about those you pretty much most of the terminology the "js guy" is using, personally speaking i know Angular haven't used yet bower in any project.

If you used Bower and Angular in 2011 and disappeared for 5 years, then nearly all of the stuff that the "js guy" talks about would be new to you.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#145

Post by laacz »

As a person who has to build a relatively simple webapp from time to time, it's tiresome. I usually take a look around - what's trendy. It results into lost night, since I learn that everything requires two times more stuff than six months ago.

In the end I go with vanilla JavaScript and whatever new APIs I can use and polyfill.

No, wait. I made a webapp with React. While occasionally seeing Flux and friends mentioned, I was strong. I went with vanilla ReactJS.

I mean, those web stacks just get obsolete too soon. Your super tuned gulp setup will be obsolete in a year or two. What will you do then? Re-learn all new things?

It seems to me that there is a frontend development stack bubble coming. When I had to change bootstrap's base font size, I had to download and learn awful amounts of stuff. Which is on my machine. And I will never use it again.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#146

Post by pdimitar »

LaxisB wrote: post #103
Fuzzwah wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a content guy who knows enough web dev to be dangerous. I made 3 manual edits to a css file to fix a couple of incorrect background colours in our web content the other day. I was a good boy and made a pull request for those same changes in the git repo. Our developer explained that he doesn't actually edit the css file. He would have to work out the change in the hue (as a percent of the base colour) and update…

a big problem with npm is, that a lot of package authors don't use the .npmignore [0] which leads to EVERYONE downloading your source/, test/ and docs/ folder even if only that one file in build/ is needed. That, combined with the micromodule mindset, leads to insanity [0]: https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/developers#keeping-files-out-of-...

That's a very bad way of handling it. When will people learn that you can't rely on everyone being a good citizen? Is it really so hard to realize that you need to make your technology sane from the very beginning?

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#147

Post by pll33 »

adamrezich wrote: post #73

Cross-posting my comment from reddit: I don't know about anyone else, but the problem I personally have with the crazy, messy JavaScript ecosystem is: - I am a relatively experienced amateur programmer (with limited [nine months] professional experience) - I can learn any new programming language, library, methodology, or whatever pretty easily - I don't have any formal experience using anything of this newfangled st…

Same boat as you but I do have a CS degree.

I have almost 2 years of professional experience but technically it's like '6 months 4 times' considering they were internships/contractual employment.

I've done projects with several frameworks and libraries on my own but not professionally. Regardless, recruiters/HR will tell me they're looking for people with "more experience" without being specific even though they're hiring for a junior level position.

In reality it seems more like they want to hire a senior-level developer and pay them at a junior-level rate.

I've actually heard a headhunter say that an open position they're looking for people to fill would like someone who knows and has worked with Polymer for 1-2 years. smh

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#148

Post by rcarmo »

Wow. 140+ comments and nobody mentioned the Python 3 jab :)

Seriously now, I gave up front-end stuff when it began requiring me to use Node to bundle files together, and find it terrifying to see Yeoman used as a code generator for non-JS runtimes and frameworks... building software atop quicksand (be it frameworks or libraries) that shift every week is insane, and it feels like the modern day version of just-in-time job security.

My use of thumb these days is to not use more JavaScript than what I can read in one sitting, unless a) it's D3 or a similar single-purpose library and b) I get a Docker container to run npm and all its funk inside that I NEVER have to look inside of.

My dream is that JavaScript dies and that the industry moves to something like Elm, ClojureScript or TypeScript, with a functional and/or hard typed approach.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#149

Post by commentzorro »

carsongross wrote: post #90

If you are sick of javascript on the front end, but don't want to give up the fancy-pants UI, you could do worse than my library, intercooler, which lets you add AJAX to your app with a few HTML attributes. http://intercoolerjs.org Make REST work the way it was intended, supports CSS transitions, request indicators, etc. Good little library that eliminates a lot of complexity for web apps that don't need all this jun…

Just saw intercooler referenced in a post a couple days ago and took a look. It does look refreshingly simple to get started.

I've got a basic app with JSON end points already created. I was going to give VUE a go but after looking at intercooler I'm going to create an alternate set of /IC/* URLS and send out HTML instead. I'll soon see how it works for this task.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#150

Post by thatswrong0 »

andybak wrote: post #107
thatswrong0 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree - I think React is simple enough that there's no reason not to besides the overhead of JSX preprocessing (which I suppose isn't required but I would definitely recommend). It really is more of a library than a framework, which is great for starting out because there are fewer concepts to understand. Then when you start adding more people and your application gets more complicated and you need to manage your d…

React isn't that simple. You still have all the package manager/transpiler/build baggage. You still sacrifice pages that aren't blank if javascript is disabled of fails and all the potential SEO/accessibility costs of that. And you suddenly end up with great globs of javascript in a page that might not need it.

None of those things has anything to do with the inherent simplicity of the library itself.
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