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

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#221

Post by mehwoot » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 10:43 PM UTC

enraged_camel wrote: post #82

mehwoot wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even for a simple app that it'd take me 20 - 30 hours If your entire job is doing small apps that take a week of work, these tools are not much better than the previous generation (personally I'd use Rails but that's just one generation on from PHP/MySQL). Especially when you add in the cost of non uniformity if you let everyone choose their own slightly different flavour of the innumerable javascript tools available…

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?

Sorry I should have clarified. React + node.js. We need the option of HTML being sent to clients so React + Rails wasn't an option

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#222

Post by mehwoot » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 10:49 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.

The more technical details you include the more people pick up and discuss minute technical details instead of the point of what I was trying to say, which is that my experience with a large codebase was these modern javascript tools have solved a lot of problems we had.

If you want all the gory details here they are: it was a Rails 3 app using Postgres and Elasticsearch that we migrated to React + node.js + webpack + babel, elastic search as the data store and using Keystone.js for backend data manipulation (which uses mongodb). Rails was indexing its data in Elasticsearch already so we could start serving data through node.js immediately without having to migrate all the data backend, which is being slowly moved to keystone.js.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#223

Post by scottmf » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 12:02 AM 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…

>Why would you need to say you're using ActiveRecord or Ruby if you said you're using Rails?

Exactly. "Rails" implies all of those other components. That's my point.

And your stack is relevant. I'm curious what simple stack you use, and how much more simple it is.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#224

Post by lovich » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 1:56 AM UTC

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #211

lovich wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am saying that you demonstrate why the article wasnt exaggerating. Cloverich stated that using jQuery was fine and the article was exaggerating how far it has fallen out of favor, but you have stated that anyone using jQuery is out the door when interviewing with you. Therefore theres at least a group of people that article is accurately describing

> Cloverich stated that using jQuery was fine and the article was exaggerating how far it has fallen out of favor, but you have stated that anyone using jQuery is out the door when interviewing with you That isn't what I said in the slightest. My criticism had nothing to do with jQuery. Go back and replace jQuery with underscore, lodash, ramda... I'm not saying that I would turn away a jQuery developer when interview…

To add onto this, this was not an attack or criticism against your methods lloyd-christmas. This was more the fact that I was pointing out that the front end dev world is so fragmented that almost any view point is something you'll come across while interviewing. Your point that this is a simple task to solve without a library is a valid one, but you'd also be as likely to find a team who expects you to default to a library because any non trivial project would require it. The main problem that I think is at the heart of this conversation is that the expectations of what you know and how you work is far too fragmented for most people to keep up with

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#225

Post by lloyd-christmas » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 2:38 AM UTC

clifanatic wrote: post #167

lloyd-christmas wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Demonstrate you know fundamental javascript. I hire "I know javascript" over "I know angular".

Unfortunately for OP, you're in a very small minority.

I don't really agree. I think people make a lot of assumptions on the "losing" side of the interview table. If you don't get the position and feel like you aced the interview, you search for some justification that has nothing to do with your performance. The fact is, there are 10 people vying for a single position. All else equal, If we use angular, I'll take the angular person over the jQuery person (emphasis on all else equal). That person will likely chalk it up to jQuery instead of the simple fact that there was an equally qualified candidate with a more specific skill set.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#226

Post by Kequc » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:49 AM UTC

Ambroos wrote: post #187

Kequc wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

That's just it. If all your developers are familiar with at least the basics of React and Webpack, you aren't adding any complexity. Once you know how things work, a simple Webpack configuration with Babel and 2 presets isn't complex anymore. What would be complex, however, is introducing DOM logic in yet another way. We're all used how you just define the desired state in React and letting it figure out the transiti…

Webpack alone requires hundreds of dependencies. You are populating your node_modules directory with megabytes of code, any of which could stop working. If you plan to maintain your code for years into infinity then it's no problem. Otherwise the shop down the street doing the same thing without it will be much better off.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#227

Post by bobajeff » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 3:51 AM UTC

nbevans wrote: post #93

brunoc wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear this a lot, but I don't get it. How would this help make things simpler or stop "this madness"? If anything it opens up the possibility for even more crazyness. The only difference is you (maybe) get to pick your favourite language instead of learning new ones.

It's not so much about picking your "favourite" language. That's what drove NodeJS to exist. But more about picking a more appropriate language that has a well engineered base class library and third party libraries. They will come. This comes down to choosing the best tool for the job at hand. JavaScript developers have been able to, in recent years, benefit in some ways by being able to write their server-side in J…

People are hyping up webassembly way too much. Don't get me wrong it's going to be awesome being able to compile C++ and C programs that run on the Web runtime.

But it's not going to be without it's own issues. For one developers will likely have to wait for things like simd, pthreads or 64bit ints until later versions.

Also it won't magically make compiling your language of choice to the web less painful unless it's C++ or it fits into the C++ language model. Even when it gets the ability to hook into a garbage collector (I wouldn't count on it happening any time in the near future) it will likely have to fit in with the way js engines expect.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#228

Post by mattmanser » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 11:18 AM UTC

pauljaworski wrote: post #217

mattmanser wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Purposefully, as it's utterly irrelevant to the discussion on whether a stack is complex or not.

It is absolutely relevant, since you're criticising his stack. Even if it wasn't, you could still reply, but for some reason you won't. Hmm...

I'm sorry, but you seem to have misunderstood this discussion. I'm not saying mine is any better, we're simply discussing whether a stack is complex.

So what I use is irrelevant.

If you're so desperate to know what I've used, since 2004:

    - VB6
    - vb.net net webforms
    - old school vbscript + dynamic ajax
    - c# using xslt + ajax xml, without really using webforms
    - c# webforms
    - PHP wordpress
    - asp.net MVC
    - silverlight
    - rails
    - MVC + Web API with a jQuery/datatables/handlebars
    - MVC + Web API with a jQuery/jQuery-tmpl/jQuery-forms
    - Durandal with OData
    - knockout with a mix of MVC + WebAPI

Some playing with django and backbone and angular and laravel for my own projects too, but not particularly in anger.

To be frank, the worst one for unnecessary complexity, by a far, far, far, far way, was durandal. Pile of shit. React/angular definitely suffer from a similar over complexity.

Generally speaking, recently I haven't really chosen a stack, the last 4 projects I've worked on have all been past that phase when I joined.

When I have, it was 3 years ago and at the time I stuck with jQuery/datatables, at the time backbone was trendy and I hate any js framework which relies on methods for properties having been burnt by supporting a colleague's internally homebrewed jQuery-a-like with early template system that used that earlier in my career. Nightmare to debug.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#229

Post by marrs » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 11:23 AM UTC

clifanatic wrote: post #151

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…

> 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.

that depends a lot on how well they can work together. This is also where good team leaders add a lot of their value.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#230

Post by marrs » Wed, Oct 05, 2016, 11:31 AM UTC

vonmoltke wrote: post #169

wccrawford wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not the person you replied to, but I'd recommend learning them well enough to know their strengths, and then telling the interviewer that's what you did. If you have any experience in other front end frameworks, that'll usually be enough to get you through that part of the interview anyhow.

That's if you get the interview. This is my problem with most of this kind of advice. All the learning in the world won't help if they ignore your resume because your last job didn't us the same technologies they do.

You're presuming that's why they ignored your resume; it might not be. A good recruiter will help you improve your CV and will also ask the employer why you were rejected. It is also worth while including a covering letter that you can use to make some statements up front. Make it relevant to the job description and keep it to the point.

Finally, you may not be ready for the skill level you are targeting and you may need to work out what areas you need to improve in order to be able to progress.