How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016 • Hacker News Board

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#151

Post by clifanatic » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:02 PM UTC

cloverich wrote: post #95

hemancuso wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you suggest developers actually figure out what tools to use? It is next to impossible to make an informed decision without digesting a good portion of what the OP is talking about. You need to start somewhere.

Where the OP falls off is with stuff like "OMG don't use jQuery" or "no one uses HTML anymore". There's nothing wrong with using those -- and frankly using plain old javascript and HTML is fine. Remember we reached for jQuery in the first place because the browser lacked features we wanted, and because it handled cross browser stuff for us. That is, it simplified things we were already doing manually . So the trap is…

> using plain old javascript and HTML is fine.

It's fine if it's a single-person's decision. If two or more people are involved in any sort of standardization process, you're going to go back and forth until you land on the most complicated possible approach like in the article.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#152

Post by badthingfactory » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:03 PM UTC

cloverich wrote: post #95

hemancuso wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you suggest developers actually figure out what tools to use? It is next to impossible to make an informed decision without digesting a good portion of what the OP is talking about. You need to start somewhere.

Where the OP falls off is with stuff like "OMG don't use jQuery" or "no one uses HTML anymore". There's nothing wrong with using those -- and frankly using plain old javascript and HTML is fine. Remember we reached for jQuery in the first place because the browser lacked features we wanted, and because it handled cross browser stuff for us. That is, it simplified things we were already doing manually . So the trap is…

This is where OP lost me as well. "Oh my god no, no one uses jQuery anymore. You should try learning React, it’s 2016."

The appropriate response is "Yeah, your problem seems simple enough. jQuery should do just fine."

But that article would be boring and not on the front page of HN.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#153

Post by scottmf » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:04 PM UTC

talmand wrote: post #97

enraged_camel wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, what people frown upon is using tables for layout. Using them to display actual tabular data is quite fine. (I mean, everything is fine at the end of the day as long as the end-user is happy, but you know what I mean...)

No, you don't understand. I don't want to use tables for layout, I want to use tables to display a good old-fashioned table. A table displayed in an otherwise normally marked up page. That is what's getting the pushback. I guess I could say I want to use table elements to layout a table, which would trigger the "don't use tables for layout" argument.

They're misunderstanding what people mean by "don't use tables". And they don't know what they're talking about.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#154

Post by scottmf » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:06 PM UTC

jbrauer wrote: post #48

TamDenholm wrote: post #6

I'm a web dev, been doing this 11 years. But i totally feel past it, granted i code less and less nowadays so i havent kept up with new technologies. I've hired people that are much better at web dev than me and let them accomplish a task with pretty much whatever tech they want to use, because i believe you shouldn't constrict a developer if you dont have to. Even for a simple app that it'd take me 20 - 30 hours for…

> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :( I've only been at it for about 2-3 years, and I must say, I feel this exact same way. Started on the LAMP stack in school and now I know nothing because what I know is "uncool" and outdated since MEAN and all of the encompassing JS libraries have become popular. I caved and started to dabble in MEAN (even though I haven't perfected LAMP by a long…

But LAMP hasn't become outdated in 2-3 years. It has been steadily dating for a long time.

If your school taught you LAMP as "current" then that is the issue here.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#155

Post by Kequc » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:06 PM UTC

Ambroos wrote: post #121

Kequc wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It gives you components. If your webpage is loaded and significantly complex with a need for different things all over the place then it's for you. It was built for Facebook, which has stuff everywhere on every page. If all you want is a normal webpage, like a blog, like all of the websites out there I'd say you do not need components. Just build your own object. That is a lot of stuff just to do something that has b…

I'm sorry, but once you feel comfortable using React there are very few things that React would not be a good fit for, however small the task. I started coding in JavaScript two years ago, right at the point React was gaining popularity. I made a gamble going for it 100%, and since then both the company I was working at back then and the one I started working at recently have fully switched to React for all new front…

I feel that you are marginalising the amount of complexity you are adding to projects which might not need it. There are multiple routes toward completing the same task in development. My concerns surrounding additional complexity I feel are well founded, there are costs associated with such a thing.

If all you are doing is DOM manipulation, without doing a huge amount of it, that isn't such a complex task that it should require an entire framework. If you're doing more than that it outscopes what React can do.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#156

Post by lloyd-christmas » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:08 PM UTC

lovich wrote: post #135

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interview question: "iterate over an array": angular.forEach([1,2,3] ... $.each([ 1, 2, 3 ], ... [1,2,3].forEach(... One of these things is not like the other. I hire people that know javascript, not ones that only know the tool we use. The tool we use today may not be the tool we use 6 months from now. I've never asked a javascript question that required framework knowledge unless it was explicitly about concepts of…

@cloverich I think this comment is showing exactly how the author of the article wasn't exaggerating

I don't follow. Are you saying _I_ demonstrate why the article isn't exaggerating, or that some of the people I've interviewed are?

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#157

Post by inputcoffee » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:09 PM UTC

Still laughing but if you want to know what:

1. people use

2. people are happy with

Try the results of this survey:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12627693

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#158

Post by paradite » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:12 PM UTC

In defense of JavaScript, there is an article that appeared here not long ago:

http://mrmrs.io/writing/2015/07/27/too-many-tools/

Basically all these new terms come out because people are constantly trying to improve the ecosystem and make it better according to their own standards, be it more modular, more robust, or more scalable.

Eventually winners will emerge and the losers will die out. Give it a few more years and it will stabilize.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#159

Post by ci5er » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:17 PM UTC

badthingfactory wrote: post #152

cloverich wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where the OP falls off is with stuff like "OMG don't use jQuery" or "no one uses HTML anymore". There's nothing wrong with using those -- and frankly using plain old javascript and HTML is fine. Remember we reached for jQuery in the first place because the browser lacked features we wanted, and because it handled cross browser stuff for us. That is, it simplified things we were already doing manually . So the trap is…

This is where OP lost me as well. "Oh my god no, no one uses jQuery anymore. You should try learning React, it’s 2016." The appropriate response is "Yeah, your problem seems simple enough. jQuery should do just fine." But that article would be boring and not on the front page of HN.

> "Oh my god no, no one uses jQuery anymore..."

I've been told that within the last month, almost in those exact words, here on HN.

I asked what one should use instead and the answer was React. It felt like one of those "no one goes there anymore, it's too crowded" kind of moments.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#160

Post by cocktailpeanuts » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:21 PM UTC

marrs wrote: post #65

In my experience, the developers who fall into this trap of despair almost always do so because they aren't consciously choosing what tools to use; instead they are letting the tools choose them. They see job descriptions demanding AngularJS or ReactJS and they think that they must learn it, or someone posts an article here and they don't want to feel left behind. Choose a library or tool because it improves your dev…

In my experience, it's not the developers who fall into this trap, it's the culture--nobody wants to learn some random technology that will probably be obsolete in a year (and I'm not even joking when I say this, this really is the reality)

The only situation where you are not affected is if you're a freelancer and you don't need to worry about what's going on around you.

I'm not going to mention where, but I worked at a well known company which you've heard of (you probably would know it as an innovative company), and everyone who worked there was very talented, there is absolutely no doubt about that. But I got sick of what's happening around me and quit recently.

Here's what happened: In the last couple of years a few people started talking about all this "cool new javascript testing/packaging/templating/single page app building" frameworks. Since it is indeed a "cool thing" to talk about these, and since they believe that potential new hires would be excited to learn that we use these hip new technologies to power our company, they started implementing EVERYTHING that the OP mentioned in the article. Of course, I'm sure it looks really cool from a recently graduated college kid's point of view when they interview. But anyway, suddenly the company culture started revolving around these hip technology advocates. I can understand why but at the same time it's really stupid because they keep switching out their stack and spend their money on useless crap instead of actually spending it on building the actual product. For example, they've transitioned from browserify to grunt to webpack in just last two years.

So when I read this article I totally sympathized with the guy.

If you're a web developer who works at a large company that wants to be seen as "innovative" (especially the ones that are already seen as being technically innovative), this is exactly what's going on. And you only have two choices: You either jump on the bandwagon and become one of the "in" crowd, or complain like the rest and be left behind and seen as a "laggard". When I saw these otherwise intelligent programmers moving like bunch of lemmings to adopt the latest new technology I couldn't help but feel pity for them. They grow old day by day thinking they're becoming a better programmer but all they're doing is learning some library that's designed so that the code monkeys can be managed better. They should be spending less time on those meta things and spend more time on building what a user wants instead. At least that's why I became a programmer.