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State of JavaScript 2021

2021.stateofjs.com

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Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#141

Post by smrtinsert »

rob74 wrote: post #136
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...

I almost spit out my coffee. I had completely forgotten that's how we got here. It developed like pretty much everyone thought it would.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#143

Post by sylware »

The problem with javascript is not javascript, it is the system interface of the software where the javacript engine is: massive and beyond sanity heavy web renderers (blink|webkit/geeko) or very custom stuff like node-js.

I wonder if there is a "standard", simple enough (reasonable implementation cost for very few devs) and stable in time way to call C functions of a shared library (aka "libdl-ing" from javascript), and use their memory objects and primitive types. We can even think of extensions for direct syscalls of various kernels.

How to make this "generic" enough? If I recall properly, python has "ctype".

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#144

Post by synergy20 »

topicseed wrote: post #36

JS and TS brought so much happiness to me for years. But I found it extremely difficult to constantly have to "decide" between X and Y. In the backend, I went all in with Golang and oh my... Now I just code. In the frontend, Svelte is a godsend. No longer need to find "React-friendly" libraries. Simple JS works for the most part. Not ideal but great versus React for the types of admin panels I build.

same here, backend fully golang, no nodejs|expressjs|whatever-js

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#145

Post by smrtinsert »

searchableguy wrote: post #17
nindalf wrote: post #3

Not surprised to see satisfaction drop with increase in usage for React. People feeling like they’re forced to use something because of external constraints (coworkers choices etc) are rarely satisfied with that choice. That’s the fate of any tool that becomes popular enough.

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…

The difference compared to "Java inheritance hell" is that refactoring in Java takes minutes and is safe, going back as far as they have releases for. Good luck doing that on an old node project with any library frankly.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#146

Post by synergy20 »

pier25 wrote: post #124
neurotrace wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

if to replace jquery, I will use alpine.js instead, which, is a much simpler vuejs

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#147

Post by pjmlp »

rob74 wrote: post #136
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...

I miss the days when bundling was just dumping a couple of JS scripts into the scripts/lib directory and that was it.

Guess what is my approach when having side gigs.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#148

Post by _fat_santa »

krembanan wrote: post #107
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…

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…

> Complicated frontend projects needs good seniors, and they get paid their fair share.

My experience has largely been the same. I would say the biggest mistake some companies make is thinking that the frontend will be "trivial" and hire a bunch of cheap and inexperienced devs.

On the one hand yes, if your bar for the UI is just making it look like the mockups then go right ahead and hire the cheap inexperienced folks. But without proper oversight and experienced developers there, the app almost always devolves into a nighmare.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#149

Post by smrtinsert »

topicseed wrote: post #36

JS and TS brought so much happiness to me for years. But I found it extremely difficult to constantly have to "decide" between X and Y. In the backend, I went all in with Golang and oh my... Now I just code. In the frontend, Svelte is a godsend. No longer need to find "React-friendly" libraries. Simple JS works for the most part. Not ideal but great versus React for the types of admin panels I build.

Ignoring virtual dom, the number one thing that kept me in react was normalized event handling across every conceivable type of browser that the web could throw at you. Is that no longer a thing in 2021 or do all libraries handle it?

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#150

Post by synergy20 »

Spent one hour to wade through all these results, here are my take away:

    1. stay with Typescript
    2. embrace vite, pnpm
    3. keep using eslint and prettier
    4. svelte is below React but *above* vue now! what a momentum.
I'm going to checkout svelte one more time and see where it is better than vue.
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