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Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

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Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#371

Post by jasonfarnon »

armchairhacker wrote: post #280
dlandis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. Maybe it's just me but with all the rampant age discrimination nowadays in tech, I really don't like to see the continued propagation of this stereotype. All sorts of people of all ages are unwilling or unable to update their knowledge of new tech, there is no reason to link this characteristic to someones advanced age…

I sympathize with older devs, my dad is an older software dev. But you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge: nobody young is going to learn assembly tricks which worked on MIPS and other past architectures. Older devs and companies not constantly learning new things and updating to best practices is a real phenomenon. On the other hand, anecdotally most older developers actually do keep up to…

anecdotally most older developers actually do keep up to date with the latest best practices.

As an old guy I would find it very hard to keep up to date with the "latest best practices" because I tend to think of "latest" and "best practices" as antithetical. JQuery is a good example: I never invested time in it since I figured it would pass. I could smell it from the way kids were raving about it. So this type of article foreshadowing its demise is nice to see. Like when you drag your feet on some looming deadline at work and some force majeure makes it completely irrelevant.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#372

Post by mr_toad »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #335
megous wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating an array, populating it with however many elements just to be able to call some methods and destroying it immediately afterwards. And doing it all over the app, just because it's syntactically convenient. (all while you already have an iterable collection in the form of NodeList)

It is a bit weird to consume an iterator into an array when a NodeList is already iterable. Not sure why it caught on.

Usually it’s because you want to use an array function like .filter() that isn’t implemented by the iterable itself.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#373

Post by mikepurvis »

prohobo wrote: post #276
namdnay wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see a lot of age discrimination it tech? What I have seen is awkward situations where you have two developers of roughly equal competence. One happens to be 45 and the other 28. Fine, nobody would care about that. Except that due to automatic annual raises, job switches, seniority bumps etc, the 45 year old developer is paid twice as much as the junior. The rational response to this would be to say to align th…

Really? I see 40+ people as diversity hires for the most part. They're there so no one can say the company is ageist. The "good" devs become managers or magically disappear. Magically as in they get banished to some other realm I've never been able to see. That, to me, says there's plenty of ageism. If it was as simple as "they ask for too much", then someone would snap them out of it and we'd see plenty of older dev…

I thought it connected well to the staff-vs-line article from the other day— that the later you are in your career, the more it makes sense to be in a "staff"-type role, since a staff person is likely to have a lot of autonomy, long term ownership, more access to senior management, less dependence on mentorship, etc.

Following from that, it's easy to imagine that a bunch of the older engineers that you don't see at software/tech companies have in fact graduated into extremely well-paid, long-term roles working on software for banks, insurers, utilities, resource companies, whatever.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#374

Post by recursive »

yakshaving_jgt wrote: post #359
atoav wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As somwone who constantly replaces jquey with vanilla js the difference is more like two lines of jquery against 3 lines of vannila js. One line more. But you have one dependency less, which is quite beneficial

JavaScript: var xs = document.querySelectorAll('.x'); for (var i = 0; i jQuery: $('.x').on('click', function() { $(this).hide() }); ಠ_ಠ

Also javascript

    document.body.addEventListener("click", ev => ev.target.classList.contains('x') && ev.target.hidden = true);

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#375

Post by JKCalhoun »

armchairhacker wrote: post #280
dlandis wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. Maybe it's just me but with all the rampant age discrimination nowadays in tech, I really don't like to see the continued propagation of this stereotype. All sorts of people of all ages are unwilling or unable to update their knowledge of new tech, there is no reason to link this characteristic to someones advanced age…

I sympathize with older devs, my dad is an older software dev. But you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge: nobody young is going to learn assembly tricks which worked on MIPS and other past architectures. Older devs and companies not constantly learning new things and updating to best practices is a real phenomenon. On the other hand, anecdotally most older developers actually do keep up to…

I'm an old software dev.

To be sure, when I began a good dev was good at memory management (ha, ha).

More recently, a good dev is one that is good at concurrency.

New devs might not understand memory management, should they though? Has everyone come across (at least once) where a junior dev creating an "integer object"? Or perhaps an object to represent a character?

When I began I rarely even saw a single secondary thread in code, very rarely saw the need to create one. Then again, one core machines so.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#376

Post by adrusi »

lhorie wrote: post #340
reggieband wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a fair criticism of how I chose to tell the story. The line you quoted was supposed to refer to the character introduced in the second paragraph and not to a generic stereotype of aged man. I can see how my choice of wording created an implication that people who have grey beards are old and that it is this oldness that contributes to their unwillingness to learn. The familiar cliche of "you can't teach an ol…

IMHO this analogy doesn't really click, on multiple levels. Any old timer who uses jQuery surely is also aware of querySelectorAll and friends. There's even an entire website dedicated to catering to exactly that transition[0]. I don't think anyone defending jQuery is doing so out of a sense of hubris towards outdated knowledge, but rather because it ironically is more lightweight than a lot of the modern SPA craze,…

I think you're trying to draw too much of an analogy here. The point is just that advertising jQuery expertise on your resume today is evidence (though not especially strong evidence) that you might be someone whose skills are of diminishing relevance. Myself, I'm not convinced there's much harm in using jQuery, it's not exactly heavyweight. But if in fact fewer and fewer pages include it, then your expertise is relevant on fewer and fewer pages. It doesn't make sense to add a dependency on jQuery to satisfy a single dev's preference.

If your expertise is in low-level browser performance but you lack deep knowledge of React/etc, your skills aren't of diminishing relevance, and probably won't be for a long time.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#377

Post by JKCalhoun »

jasonfarnon wrote: post #371
armchairhacker wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sympathize with older devs, my dad is an older software dev. But you kind of do have to be old in order to have outdated knowledge: nobody young is going to learn assembly tricks which worked on MIPS and other past architectures. Older devs and companies not constantly learning new things and updating to best practices is a real phenomenon. On the other hand, anecdotally most older developers actually do keep up to…

anecdotally most older developers actually do keep up to date with the latest best practices. As an old guy I would find it very hard to keep up to date with the "latest best practices" because I tend to think of "latest" and "best practices" as antithetical. JQuery is a good example: I never invested time in it since I figured it would pass. I could smell it from the way kids were raving about it. So this type of ar…

I sat out of jQuery as well but more because I dislike (distrust?) layers, prefer to be closer to the stack as it were.

Either that's wisdom from an older dev that has been burned in the past or that's just an old dev set in his ways. Take your pick. ;-)

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#378

Post by JKCalhoun »

prohobo wrote: post #276
namdnay wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you see a lot of age discrimination it tech? What I have seen is awkward situations where you have two developers of roughly equal competence. One happens to be 45 and the other 28. Fine, nobody would care about that. Except that due to automatic annual raises, job switches, seniority bumps etc, the 45 year old developer is paid twice as much as the junior. The rational response to this would be to say to align th…

Really? I see 40+ people as diversity hires for the most part. They're there so no one can say the company is ageist. The "good" devs become managers or magically disappear. Magically as in they get banished to some other realm I've never been able to see. That, to me, says there's plenty of ageism. If it was as simple as "they ask for too much", then someone would snap them out of it and we'd see plenty of older dev…

I tried to mentor in the last few years of my career. The young'ns didn't seem to want to be mentored though.

Re: Gov.uk drops jQuery from their front end

#380

Post by Apofis »

dlandis wrote: post #234
reggieband wrote: post #137

When I first started programming I was pretty lucky to get a job at a games company. My first lead was a veteran who had shipped a lot of AAA titles and he loved his war stories. He was personally interested in performance and he would often cite hardware timings for specific cpu instructions. One story he told a couple of times was about some grey beard who was before his time. The grey beard was once a legend in th…

> But to me, they are like the old grey beard who didn't update his knowledge as the times changed. Maybe it's just me but with all the rampant age discrimination nowadays in tech, I really don't like to see the continued propagation of this stereotype. All sorts of people of all ages are unwilling or unable to update their knowledge of new tech, there is no reason to link this characteristic to someones advanced age…

The problem is that a lot of old school website devs can write jQuery and very very little actual JavaScript.
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