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How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

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Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#31

Post by ng12 »

seanwilson wrote: post #29

It can be a pain getting the build system up and running but once you're writing typed JavaScript code with modern features like async/wait and ES6 modules along with live + hot reloading, it's impossible to go back. It's really trendy to complain about JavaScript changing too fast right now but the last few years have brought some great changes to JavaScript.

Agreed. I think the perception comes from lots of people who are using heavy frameworks for simple, mostly-static webpages. Yes, they add complexity to my life, but the experience of working with React/We pack/Typescript is unparalleled -- especially considering what I was working with only five years ago.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#32

Post by fasquoika »

0xFACEFEED wrote: post #22
revscat wrote: post #17

We have recently implemented Angular4 in our project, and have started to pick it up. Recently picked up a story that was adding a simple confirmation modal to a page: "Alert" text in the top, body with some warning text, and a yes/no button. This was my first experience with modern JavaScript frameworks and TypeScript. I wanted to do it right, so worked closely with team members who were more versed in this stuff, a…

> This seems ludicrous to me. Why? UI is hard dude. UI on the web is especially hard because the technology has been growing progressively for over two decades.

>Why?

Probably because it's one line in Vanilla.js:

  confirm("Message")

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#33

Post by mediumdeviation »

mjevans wrote: post #13
cabaalis wrote: post #11

I had a dev write some "modern" Javascript in a project. We neglected to test in slightly out-of-date safari on Mac. Took forever to figure out that "let" keyword was not supported.

Obligatory links: https://caniuse.com/let https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe... It's amazing how recently some things arrive and how late competitors skip some elements.

Wow, Safari Mobile only gained support in iOS 10. That's September 2016, and leaves out iPhone 4S, iPad 2 and iPad 3, devices from 2011 and 2012.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#34

Post by seanwilson »

ng12 wrote: post #31
seanwilson wrote: post #29

It can be a pain getting the build system up and running but once you're writing typed JavaScript code with modern features like async/wait and ES6 modules along with live + hot reloading, it's impossible to go back. It's really trendy to complain about JavaScript changing too fast right now but the last few years have brought some great changes to JavaScript.

Agreed. I think the perception comes from lots of people who are using heavy frameworks for simple, mostly-static webpages. Yes, they add complexity to my life, but the experience of working with React/We pack/Typescript is unparalleled -- especially considering what I was working with only five years ago.

Yup. Converting old promise based code to using async/await and fixing all the places that give "variable could be undefined" type errors is so satisfying. Recently I did a huge refactor of some TypeScript code without running the app and just being guided by the type checker errors for several hours and it worked almost first time.

We pack = Webpack?

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#36

Post by d--b »

I was expecting another rant about how painful it is to navigate the hundreds of framework out there.

Nice to see that people who dropped JavaScript a while get to find that things are actually better today than they were.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#37

Post by concede_pluto »

ktRolster wrote: post #30
ng12 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's been a pervasive meme that JavaScript is terrible jQuery is a spaghetti factory. Which is it?

With the way callbacks work in Javascript and jQuery, you lose some flexibility in organizing your code. It is true the types in Javascript make it difficult to build large projects. These drawbacks can be overcome, of course, but this is all orthogonal to the main point...... If Javascript and jQuery truly are bad (though I would claim they are not, they are mediocre but workable), it's because their creators didn't…

Eich wasn't ignorant of history, he just had marching orders to deliver something that resembled Java for marketing reasons, and only a week to finish or be displaced by something worse. The trouble is nobody ever got to fix it until ECMA.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#38

Post by zoul »

seanwilson wrote: post #29

It can be a pain getting the build system up and running but once you're writing typed JavaScript code with modern features like async/wait and ES6 modules along with live + hot reloading, it's impossible to go back. It's really trendy to complain about JavaScript changing too fast right now but the last few years have brought some great changes to JavaScript.

But didn’t we say the same thing about JS almost every year in the past? Only for the status quo to be obsoleted in a few months? Is the breakneck change curve slowing down finally?

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#39

Post by lazyjones »

ktRolster wrote: post #25
0xFACEFEED wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This seems ludicrous to me. Why? UI is hard dude. UI on the web is especially hard because the technology has been growing progressively for over two decades.

UI is hard dude. It's been a solved (and re-solved) problem for decades.

UIs on the web suffer much more than UIs elsewhere from the disease of people designing their own UI elements in order to achieve a novel, unique style. Perhaps, some day, this will be considered pointless and unprofessional like on the desktop...

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2017

#40

Post by bartread »

brlewis wrote: post #10
aaron-lebo wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know a lot of people are terrified of change and new stuff because it might mean their skillset is obsolete. That's a lot of what this backlash against JS is. Some of the criticism is warranted, but a lot of it isn't, it comes from people who have never done anything other than sneer at the language, and for every issue JS has, you can find a matching issue in another language that either a) isn't a problem becau…

Cool story of what you've been able to do by investing in modern web technologies like Mithril. The part where you say a lot of people are terrified of heir skillset becoming obsolete -- I'm not sure I see that in web developers. Everybody I talk to is happy that their knowledge is now obsolete of which array methods don't work in IE8, for example. Possibly a lot of the backlash against JS comes from conversations th…

Agree: for me it's nothing to do with fundamental obsolescence. JS as a language is doing fine and I welcome the new additions in the various ECMA standards.

What I'm not so welcoming of is, for example, the Angular 1.x -> Angular 2, 4, whatever transition. I don't want to have to keep thrashing my projects due to incompatible upgrades.

And I'm tired of the hype cycles. Not so very long ago everyone and their dog was banging on about how React was the next big thing, and now a lot of them are running scared over the patents issue. It seems like almost overnight all I read about now is Vue.js, but I know that in another few months, or maybe a year, everyone will have moved on again.

Fundamentally there's just no incentive to invest, especially not if you have other things you also need to focus on in your work and life.

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