JavaScript 2017 Rising Stars • Hacker News Board

Re: JavaScript 2017 Rising Stars

#21

Post by rushabh » Sun, Mar 18, 2018, 5:02 AM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #5

edem wrote: post #2

The article only talks about quantity, not quality and that is the main problem with javascript. Not so long ago I had to work with graphs in javascript and none of the graph libraries I found explained the implementation details or the complexities of the algorithms. It turned out that the implementations were ad-hoc and the time complexities were bad so I had to implement my own because they did not work for real l…

It appears to me that due the Github-CV-driven startups, everyone is publishing stuff just to show to such companies. The end result are piles of unmaintained libraries, with dubious quality, making quite hard to find battle tested useful libraries.

That is very cynical comment. Libraries are made to fill a gap. The reason they come up so fast is that the underlying technology keeps changing. It is so easy to forget that these are open sourced libs with permissible licenses that you can hop in and fix if you you want them better.

Re: JavaScript 2017 Rising Stars

#22

Post by pjmlp » Sun, Mar 18, 2018, 8:55 AM UTC

rushabh wrote: post #21

pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to me that due the Github-CV-driven startups, everyone is publishing stuff just to show to such companies. The end result are piles of unmaintained libraries, with dubious quality, making quite hard to find battle tested useful libraries.

That is very cynical comment. Libraries are made to fill a gap. The reason they come up so fast is that the underlying technology keeps changing. It is so easy to forget that these are open sourced libs with permissible licenses that you can hop in and fix if you you want them better.

Rather a comment based on a few decades of work experience.

We have libraries since programming is a thing, only now we have a Github-CV-driven portfolio fashion going on, not even with Sourceforge in its golden days did it happen.

Re: JavaScript 2017 Rising Stars

#23

Post by edem » Sun, Mar 18, 2018, 12:54 PM UTC

rushabh wrote: post #21

pjmlp wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to me that due the Github-CV-driven startups, everyone is publishing stuff just to show to such companies. The end result are piles of unmaintained libraries, with dubious quality, making quite hard to find battle tested useful libraries.

That is very cynical comment. Libraries are made to fill a gap. The reason they come up so fast is that the underlying technology keeps changing. It is so easy to forget that these are open sourced libs with permissible licenses that you can hop in and fix if you you want them better.

It is not that easy to hop in and fix stuff especially if you are not versed in that technology or if the code is crap. There are a lot of very good libraries which are quite easy to maintain and a lot of horrible monstrosities which you'd rather not touch.

I also think that there are a lot of libraries which are experiments and don't try to fill the gap. A lot of folks write something to learn a tech and put it on GitHub to show off. This is a win-win and I don't have any problems with that.

In case of Java there is a hard barrier: putting things on Maven Central. If you pull something from there you can be sure that the author went through the hoops to be able to publish stuff there and he/she is serious about his stuff.

With Javascript the barrier is so low that npm/yarn is flooded with crap.

Re: JavaScript 2017 Rising Stars

#24

Post by edem » Sun, Mar 18, 2018, 12:55 PM UTC

tomxor wrote: post #6

edem wrote: post #2

The article only talks about quantity, not quality and that is the main problem with javascript. Not so long ago I had to work with graphs in javascript and none of the graph libraries I found explained the implementation details or the complexities of the algorithms. It turned out that the implementations were ad-hoc and the time complexities were bad so I had to implement my own because they did not work for real l…

Javascript graphing libraries are a pain in the arse, whenever graphing comes up at work we all cringe at the prospect of having yet another go at picking a library out of the millions that is: not painfully slow, not terribly written and not poorly designed even though they are all written on top of D3. I've also submitted PRs so some that I will not name in an attempt to optimise them semi successfully, but you sta…

I was referring to graphs in the mathematical sense, not visualizing data. Sorry for the confusion.

Re: JavaScript 2017 Rising Stars

#25

Post by edem » Sun, Mar 18, 2018, 12:58 PM UTC

franciscop wrote: post #4

edem wrote: post #2

The article only talks about quantity, not quality and that is the main problem with javascript. Not so long ago I had to work with graphs in javascript and none of the graph libraries I found explained the implementation details or the complexities of the algorithms. It turned out that the implementations were ad-hoc and the time complexities were bad so I had to implement my own because they did not work for real l…

But Javascript is mostly open source! Why not publish your library [1], make a PR with improvements to the existing ones or donate to the authors so they can dedicate more time on those? [1] https://xkcd.com/927/

Two reasons:

- I only use javascript if I really have to

- Most javascript libraries are so horrible that I'd rather write something from scratch than touching existing code

I donate to the Java/Kotlin ecosystem though.