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State of JavaScript 2019

2019.stateofjs.com

161–170 of 372 posts

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#161
post #89

Wow, 39.9% of respondents mark themselves as "Expert" at CSS. I've been doing front-end in various guises for 12 years and I would only rank myself maybe 5 or 6 out of 10. As I've gotten more experienced in my career I've become more aware of what I don't know as opposed to what I do know. It's funny that "Advanced" is mastering animations and transitions whereas "Expert" is being able to develop a full-front end con…

I got a resume a while ago where the applicant rated their skills 1-5 stars. They has rated themselves either 3 or 4 out of 5 in Node.js. When asking what they actually did with node, they explained they built some proof of concept once. I got to see the code and it was maybe 4 weeks of work for a beginner... At that time I was leading a small Node.js dev team and I would maybe rate myself 3/5 in Node. We didn't end…

My lesson from that experience would be to throw away that useless 1-5 star rating scheme and skip to the interesting question immediately: "Tell us what you actually did with NodeJS."

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#162
i'm conflicted about this, but happy to see typescript overtaking the space. looking forward to the day we can all forget javascript the language as a bad dream and move on with javascript the vm.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#163

So sad to see Meteor solidly in the avoid quadrant, but it seems deserved. Meteor is what I learned how to do web development with back in 2015, and it was fun . It didn't take much to make stuff happen, and the baked-in live sync was like magic. I'm still eager to whip Meteor out for proof of concept prototyping because of how convenient it is to have a schemaless database and a framework that abstracts away HTTP, b…

I don't think it's deserved. If you don't need the kind of reactive queries Meteor offers (and IMO is still unbeaten in terms of developer productivity in case you do need them), then you can safely ignore that part. In the end Meteor is mainly a layer on top of nodejs. So you can do all your regular nodejs stuff and you can run Meteor without any of the mongo stuff these days. Then it still offers you a zero-config build tool which has been absolutely unbeaten (at least in the JS world) in terms of backwards compatibility over the years. I think Meteor mostly suffers from not being the cool new thing anymore and being released in a period of a heavily changing JS ecosystem. I'd still pick it over any webpack config-clusterfuck project any day of the week.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#164
post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't you describing exactly the problems types help with? Must be a reason why typed backend developers allegedly don't pay so much mind to: - "proper" naming conventions - JSDOC comments - unit tests - peer review

So, I've worked with JavaScript since 2001. Up until two years ago I never used a strong typed flavour on top of JS. And I have never needed it. Not in big teams and not in small teams. At work we recently did a timed programming problem solving competition. 20 Teams got 1 hour each to solve multiple levels of the same problems. Some teams used TypeScript. None of the TypeScript teams got past level 5. All of the res…

At work we recently did a timed programming problem solving competition. 20 Teams got 1 hour each to solve multiple levels of the same problems.

If you're looking at the kind of requirements that can be implemented in under an hour, of course a stronger, more static type system isn't likely to gain you much. It's highly unlikely that such a program is going to have lots of different people working on it over a period of possibly years, or that it's going to use lots of different but possibly related data structures, or that it's going to develop libraries with hundreds or thousands of little utility functions for working with those data structures.

However, drawing conclusions about the merits of a stronger, more static type system based on this sort of challenge is like arguing that a language where all code has to be in defined modules and functions is much less efficient than a scripting language like Python because in the latter you can write a "Hello, world!" program in literally one line.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#166

So sad to see Meteor solidly in the avoid quadrant, but it seems deserved. Meteor is what I learned how to do web development with back in 2015, and it was fun . It didn't take much to make stuff happen, and the baked-in live sync was like magic. I'm still eager to whip Meteor out for proof of concept prototyping because of how convenient it is to have a schemaless database and a framework that abstracts away HTTP, b…

I continue to be involved in development of a Meteor app that started in the 0.8 days, and has been actively maintained up to current versions. I'm a little sad, too, that "Meteor" as a technology all its own hasn't developed legs, but honestly, at this point it's a build stack and little more. Once you use React over Blaze, all it really offers you is a build process and a lack of need to set up your own GraphQL API…

Meteor 0.8 was released in 2014, and I'm sure your app would still work on the latest Meteor release without much changes, while in the meantime offering all the latest JS features (JS in 2014 was a completely different world).

How many other JS build tools & frameworks from 2014 can say the same?

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#167

Wow, just learned of Svelte from this. After reading their explanatory blog post and coming upon this blurb: That all changed with the advent of hooks [React and Vue], which handle state in a very different fashion. Many frameworks started experimenting with their own implementations of hooks, but we quickly concluded it wasn't a direction we wanted to go in ... We can just use the language. Updating some count value…

FWIW, MobX lets you mutate state in the same way. It does require you to make use of its observer/observable functions to make things reactive, but in general it works amazingly well. I strongly urge everyone to try it!

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#168

Wow, 39.9% of respondents mark themselves as "Expert" at CSS. I've been doing front-end in various guises for 12 years and I would only rank myself maybe 5 or 6 out of 10. As I've gotten more experienced in my career I've become more aware of what I don't know as opposed to what I do know. It's funny that "Advanced" is mastering animations and transitions whereas "Expert" is being able to develop a full-front end con…

Second this - I'd have put the requirements of "expert" to be "advanced", skipped the rather small part of "know how to animation" as it doesn't constitute such a "level" for itself as much as beeing "one of the tools you'd probably know if you think you can write a frontend from scratch in css".

The "expert" category would rather be "having a deep understanding of what the browser does with styles and how the concepts of display etc actually work" for me.

But it's really hard to draw a line, css allows for awful hacky solutions that end up looking like they work, and many people "able to write a full frontend project" will produce rather bad CSS irl.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Typescript doesn't make things easier, and react is intuitive? You know April fool's is still a few months away right?

TypeScript slows down a project. Nobody seems to ever point out what benefits it supposedly offers. My claim: TypeScript offers no benefit. Ever. That's 2 years of fulltime TS experience talking and 18 years of fulltime JavaScript experience, on top of a whole bunch of full stack (Java and .Net with C#) experience. I think the popularity of TS is going to decline. And I think it's only popular because of the influx o…

I do think it offers benefits. I'm not a big believer that it will prevent many bugs as is often claimed from typed languages, but IDE's can help you develop much faster (when everything is in TS already) and refactorings become way easier. If that outweighs the benefits is another question. (I still prefer regular JS myself)

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#170

Wow, 39.9% of respondents mark themselves as "Expert" at CSS. I've been doing front-end in various guises for 12 years and I would only rank myself maybe 5 or 6 out of 10. As I've gotten more experienced in my career I've become more aware of what I don't know as opposed to what I do know. It's funny that "Advanced" is mastering animations and transitions whereas "Expert" is being able to develop a full-front end con…

It is almost 2020, and browsers still trip on simplest CSS "tricks."

I think the best CSS compatibility across the board was during the time of ACID series tests, and has declined since.

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