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State of JavaScript 2021

2021.stateofjs.com

21–30 of 245 posts

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#21

For testing, I've been exploring vitest which is missing from this list because jest looks unmaintained and has growing pain with typescript and esm support. https://vitest.dev/ It's a drop in replacement for jest. The only change you will need to make in most cases is adding an explicit import for expect, describe, and it. It works without any config with esm and typescript. It's also 5x faster in development. It in…

Vitest is on the list with highest satisfaction after the testing library :)

Ah, I missed it on mobile.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#22
I read this report every year. This year it feels the most like it's driven by hype (and marketing, hi Vercel!).

In my professional and personal experience, react has never been better to use (in terms of features, DX, maturity, community, productivity), yet if you look at the "popularity" (oh dear) graph, it's basically just describing how older tech slides down while newer shiny tech comes in and is instantly the most "popular".

The "Back end frameworks" section is particularly bad. Sveltekit and Astro are not "back end frameworks" unless you define tech by what marketing copy people have written. Even express (which I still use daily for most of my back end projects) barely qualifies as a "framework" in my opinion. Again I have the feeling that choosing which techs go into this section is driven by something like "github star delta" rather than an evaluation of what the tech actually does.

Finally, jeez, angular isn't that bad. Plenty of enterprises use it successfully, and for companies with .NET or Java stacks, it's a great fit. I think almost certainly the devs at those kinds of companies are probably busy just doing their day job and not responding to "state of hype mixed in with some subtle marketing by commercial companies" surveys like this one has become.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#23
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…

There's also a lot of great improvements in tooling that just completely outclass what CRA does. Webpack is a dinosaur that is slow and painful to use compared to new stuff like vite that is blazing fast and isn't written in JavaScript. Nextjs comes with a lot of routing decisions already made so it becomes much easier to quickly build apps on top of it

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#24

For testing, I've been exploring vitest which is missing from this list because jest looks unmaintained and has growing pain with typescript and esm support. https://vitest.dev/ It's a drop in replacement for jest. The only change you will need to make in most cases is adding an explicit import for expect, describe, and it. It works without any config with esm and typescript. It's also 5x faster in development. It in…

>because jest looks unmaintained

Help me understand what you meant by this?

https://github.com/facebook/jest

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#26

Beginning of the end for Angular? Noticeable drop in relative satisfication but high usage numbers shows how hard it is to get rid of.

Satisfaction at 45% is the highest it's been since 2017. It's only lower on the chart because of all the new and shiny (and unused!) frameworks created later.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#27
post #12

The satisfaction vs usage of angular is astonishing, but I wonder how much of that usage is legacy angular? One way to read the graph would be that there's a lot of angular just quietly getting on with the job and it's a solid choice, but another would be that there's a large amount of legacy angular out there that people aren't very happy with.

Most likely the 2nd. Everyone I know that is on angular hates it.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#28
post #22

I read this report every year. This year it feels the most like it's driven by hype (and marketing, hi Vercel!). In my professional and personal experience, react has never been better to use (in terms of features, DX, maturity, community, productivity), yet if you look at the "popularity" (oh dear) graph, it's basically just describing how older tech slides down while newer shiny tech comes in and is instantly the m…

There is no "popularity" tab? There's a "satisfaction" tab which basically tells you nothing.

The "usage" tab tells us what really matters - that in the last 3 years essentially nothing has changed despite the hype. Angular/Vue/React/Express dominate.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#29
post #24

For testing, I've been exploring vitest which is missing from this list because jest looks unmaintained and has growing pain with typescript and esm support. https://vitest.dev/ It's a drop in replacement for jest. The only change you will need to make in most cases is adding an explicit import for expect, describe, and it. It works without any config with esm and typescript. It's also 5x faster in development. It in…

>because jest looks unmaintained Help me understand what you meant by this? https://github.com/facebook/jest

Recent commits are not an indicator for a healthy package. There are many unfixed issues and PRs sitting there because there is a single maintainer handling all of it (which is very understandable and I'm grateful for all the work)

https://github.com/facebook/jest/pull/11529#issuecomment-102...

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#30
post #7

Interested in the steady drop in satisfaction with Vue since 2018. I remember being positively impressed when I looked into it. Is it simply due to more usage in actual systems causing people to dislike tools they really work with, or is the framework developing in a direction people are unhappy with?

I still don’t understand what’s so interesting about it… why you wouldn’t just write js that you already know? Instead choosing to use strings to code… ugh
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