State of JavaScript 2019 • Hacker News Board

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#221

Post by austincheney » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 1:37 PM UTC

woutr_be wrote: post #173

tsukurimashou wrote: post #139

Opinions: “JavaScript is over-used online” Strongly agree: 7.3% Agree: 16.9% How?

I think that for a lot of people, SPA + API is just the default, even though most of the time you can get away with a traditional MVC.

Even then MVC is almost always far more than needed to get the job done well... as are most frameworks.

I have noticed in the big corporate space many people writing this code are formally educated to write code in a very specific way that isn't quite JS-friendly and they need the extra boilerplate to make JS behave.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#222

Post by TomMarius » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 1:41 PM UTC

18.1% of respondents are working with TypeScript (released in 2013) for more than 10 years... Eh, sure

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#223

Post by lllr_finger » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 1:43 PM UTC

deckard1 wrote: post #136

azangru wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I could go on and on about the horror that is typescript In his talk Predicting the future of the web at the last ReactiveConf, Richard Feldman (not himself a typescript guy, but an Elm user) quoted an interesting statistic that most of developers who try typescript never go back to writing plain javascript. I do not remember where that statistic was from, but can attest that with me it is the case. So much for the…

> most of developers who try typescript never go back to writing plain javascript yes, most developers adhere to RDD. That is, resume driven development. You ever see developers going back to Ruby from Node? Or from any shiny new thing to the slightly older but perfectly fine thing? I predict people will move on from TypeScript within 5 years. Purely because everyone will know TS so the differentiating value of TS wi…

"Most" is a fairly strong quantifier, and some people would probably disagree.

Anything new could be termed as an example of RDD, but if that were always the case, we never would have had JavaScript in the first place. One (IMO) useful skill is determining when something new actually provides ROI or is actually a manifestation of RDD or similar.

Unless a language has really great first-class pattern matching (JavaScript does not), I don't ever want to work on a serious project in a dynamically-typed language. The guarantees provided with static-typing and the benefits when it comes to bugs, testing, and refactoring are huge.

Sure, devs that partake in RDD might move on, but there is a good use case for TS that has nothing to do with resumes, and everything to do with a preference in how to build software.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#224

Post by DavidPP » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

donkeyd wrote: post #89

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #21

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…

I interviews interns from a school where they all ask their students to rates themselves like that.

At first I was put off, but now I interpret it as their own personal scale, with 5 being what they the best at, and not as "I know everything about this".

But even then, the best candidates are usually the ones who rated themselves the lowest.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#225

Post by elwell » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 1:47 PM UTC

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #181

Already__Taken wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I've learnt anything from teaching kids it's the ones really good at it when we start are completely dwarfed by the kids who sucked at it. You can get kinda far without really understanding what's going on, but if you stop and have to learn something really fundamental the "good" kids just seems to manage. Once things pick up they can excel because the have truly moved on. the previously "good" ones are still copy…

It's not just the people, some topics leads to that. E.g you can get far with just a few git commands, but one day, you will encounter a situation that is like a brick wall because you have no idea what's going on inside. Today, most JS devs don't know how "this" works, most python devs never used pdb, most git users picture a branch like a diverging chain of commits and not a moving label, etc. Again it's not the pe…

> most git users picture a branch like a diverging chain of commits and not a moving label

Ok, I'll bite: can you explain that little more please?

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#226

Post by codegladiator » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

someexgamedev wrote: post #218

codegladiator wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The separations of Model, View, and Control really don't make sense anymore. It's outdated. What ? why ? care to elaborate please ? and what do you use instead ? MVVM ?

Ember uses MVVM

Fair enough, but I still think its a stretch to call MVC "outdated". And "outdated" kind of has a hint of "bad" and "should not be used", hence the question.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#227

Post by urban_alien » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

pastelsky wrote: post #210

I didn't see a section on CSS-in-JS libraries (or did I miss it?). That seems to be one of the more divided areas as far as opinion is concerned.

Check out the State of CSS survey.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#228

Post by ezzzzz » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 1:53 PM UTC

cstuder wrote: post #7

The most interesting data in my opinion are the conflicting opinions on the overall state of the ecosystem:: https://2019.stateofjs.com/opinions/ While there is a sharp downtick of people who think that JavaScript is moving in the right directin, most agree that the overall situation in terms of complexity and velocity is getting better. I don't have any explanation for this, but would agree: Developing in JavaScript…

I get Javascript fatigue, and all the criticisms aimed at the language, and while it's not totally ideal, I feel frameworks have helped tremendously by either being opinionated enough that you can do things in a predictable way (angular/vue) or are flexible enough to design complex flows and views as small, easy to reason about components (React/Redux).

I have seen some horrible stuff as an enterprise dev, from poorly constructed jQuery projects, to old frameworks like Struts/Stripes that just get out of hand. No real way to test, full of side-effects and bad choices, TONS of dependencies (outdated/unmaintained UI libraries etc). I often wonder if people complaining about JS and Frameworks have any experience developing or maintaining legacy web applications from the days of yore. Back when the web was young, there just wasn't a good blueprint for how complex web applications should be designed. We've come a long way, and for better or worse, the JS community has made improvements to the language, frameworks, etc, all of which make our jobs SO much easier.

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#229

Post by buu700 » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 1:59 PM UTC

donkeyd wrote: post #89

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #21

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…

I don't see that as terribly problematic. Unless a specific absolute scale is identified (as per another comment, e.g., the top of the scale meaning "I wrote the book on it"), I would assume the ratings were all relative to each other and the candidate's general skill/experience.

So 4 - 5 stars in an area just means "this is what I'm most comfortable working with and/or have the most experience with", not "if you rank yourself a 3 then I'm better than you at this" or "I'm a world-renowned expert at this". Otherwise, I'm not sure what you would expect from a fresh graduate who'd decided to use this format; 1 star for everything, or fractions of a star?

Re: State of JavaScript 2019

#230

Post by joekrill » Thu, Dec 19, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

WA wrote: post #174

Interesting. React is the thing. But some trends are weird: People ditch Cordova heavily, but also React Native and native apps. Electron rises to the top, although you can't build mobile apps with it that are distributed through the various stores. So, what's filling the void for app development, if everything just went down?

I think it's just because "Mobile & Desktop" are grouped together. React Native is still number two in the list, so if they were separated out, you'd have Electron rising to the top on desktop, and React Native staying at the top on mobile.