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

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#171

Post by pauljaworski » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:35 PM UTC

scottmf wrote: post #51

Funny, but it's not quite that complex. How about "Here's a link to a CLI utility or git repo which will give you a working project in 2-3 hours"? I took a break from web dev for some years and had barely used any JS frameworks besides jQuery, until June, when I began working on an ambitious project and quickly got up to speed with the state of JS. I'm using React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/etc. for the client, and Express…

Agreed. I started a new project a few months ago, and if I had listened to the advice in the threads that have popped up around this whiny article, I would have had to refactor my codebase 6 times already by "adding the stuff I need."

I made a decision from the start to use React, Redux, and Webpack with ES6/Babel. There was a bit of a learning curve, but I couldn't be happier using those tools. Recently I started adding Immutable, and I wish I had done so from the start.

I've tried adding Flow and Typescript to the project, and it's a major pain in the ass to do it now. I would have done it from the start, but I made the mistake of listening to some of those voices going on about "unnecessary complexity" and left it out.

I'd like to invite all the people saying to start a project in Vanilla JS or jQuery to do so, and let me know how it's going when you've got 15k lines of code and you want to refactor your app to use some of those complex tools.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#172

Post by atoko » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:36 PM UTC

problems wrote: post #124

enraged_camel wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, I'm confused: what do you mean by "migrated a 5 year old codebase from Rails to React"? What are you using as your backend?

Just one of the many ways that modern Javascript baffles me - people pretend the client and server are equivalent.

You can still render placeholders from the server and fill these in with React

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#173

Post by pauljaworski » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:38 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #137

scottmf wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see it as too different from "I'm using Rails, ActiveRecord, Sprockets, Ruby 2, CoffeeScript, etc". Which stack do you prefer to use?

Why would you need to say you're using ActiveRecord or Ruby if you said you're using Rails? You've missed the point of the article. Also, will everyone decide in 6 months times that, hmmm, you know what Ruby sucks and we should all start using BooRuubie next year instead? Because I guarantee at the absolute minimum one of the technologies you mentioned will be out of favour this time next year. Also, I can practicall…

You didn't answer his question. What stack do you prefer to use?

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#174

Post by dasil003 » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:41 PM UTC

jdauriemma wrote: post #163

How it feels to learn parallel parking in 2016 "I want to parallel park in that parking space." You'll need a car first. "When I was a kid I just walked into the parking spaces." Yeah, but that's not really parallel parking, you were just walking into a parking space. "Oh ok. So I'll get a car then." Well, it's not that simple, you have to actually get inside the car in order to parallel park. "What? Can't I just pus…

Just because you put words in that format doesn't make this a good analogy. You can teach someone to drive, including parallel parking in a couple of hours and then they just have to practice. The javascript ecosystem is legitimately complex. You can't just hand wave that away with a rhetorical flourish.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#175

Post by vlunkr » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:45 PM UTC

I feel like everyone needs to be reminded that this post is probably more of a joke than anything. Not criticizing JS so much as a buzzword-iness surrounding it

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#176

Post by clifanatic » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:48 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…

> even though I haven't perfected LAMP by a long shot yet..

I've been doing this for 25 years, and I've felt the same way over and over - by the time I feel even a little bit comfortable with an approach, everybody else has already seemed to dip their toe in it, pronounced it unusable, and moved on to the next shiny thing, and wondered why I'm still over here banging rocks together.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#177

Post by raverbashing » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:50 PM UTC

sangnoir wrote: post #134

mathgeek wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been to more than one interview where I defaulted to jQuery and was immediately disqualified, based on the looks on the interviewers' faces. As a ruby developer, it certainly feels like keeping up-to-date on JS takes more work than the other 90% of languages that I'm familiar with.

> I've been to more than one interview where I defaulted to jQuery and was immediately disqualified Was the role more biased to front end development? Speaking as someone who has been on the other side of the interviewing table, you won't believe the number of people who can use jQuery but are otherwise unfamiliar with vanilla Javascript. I suspect the question itself could have been solved by via plain JS, and you d…

Oh I'm sure that's not what they mean. 100% sure

While knowing how to use vanilla js is important, nobody uses getElementByID anymore, unless you're doing something very, very simple (or building a library yourself)

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#178

Post by talmand » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

chris_wot wrote: post #112

talmand wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So... ignore them? If you want to use a table for tabular data, then please - use a table! If someone whines you've used a table, then ignore their whining and keep using table markup for tabular data.

Well, ignoring the situation is not a solution to this particular problem.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#179

Post by raverbashing » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:52 PM UTC

tomatsu wrote: post #164

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…

> Interview question: "iterate over an array": for(let thing of things) {...} forEach only obfuscates the imperative nature of your loop.

Good, but that's more modern

for in, on the other hand is wrong

https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/JavaScript/Referen...

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/500504/why-is-using-for-...

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#180

Post by talmand » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 3:53 PM UTC

scottmf wrote: post #153

talmand wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When I was informed of it, I responded with "they are wrong". We'll see how it goes.