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How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

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Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#51

Post by scottmf »

Funny, but it's not quite that complex.

How about "Here's a link to a CLI utility or git repo which will give you a working project in 2-3 hours"?

I took a break from web dev for some years and had barely used any JS frameworks besides jQuery, until June, when I began working on an ambitious project and quickly got up to speed with the state of JS.

I'm using React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/etc. for the client, and Express (with ES6 and what have you) for the API.

Developing with these new technologies has been a delight, especially compared to hacking bits of jQuery together.

Sure I've had to learn a lot of new concepts, particularly after being away from this world for so long, but this has always felt like a continual learning process to me.

We are the early adopters, the cutting-edge types. If you want to work with aging technologies there are plenty of companies invested in them.

Otherwise you can learn React in a few hours. What's the big deal?

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#52

Post by veeti »

raverbashing wrote: post #42
marrs wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and that's how you can use express.js to run a service that uses a different protocol to HTTP. Express is one of the easiest libraries to learn in any programming language. It's certainly much easier to learn than Django, at least in part because it doesn't include the kitchen sink

> and that's how you can use express.js to run a service that uses a different protocol to HTTP. Excuses, excuses. Good defaults are important. 99.99% of developers won't care about it. Getting form data is Web development 101

> Getting form data is Web development 101

Is it? Certainly the latest hipster microservice only deals with JSON bodies.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#53

Post by mattmanser »

scottmf wrote: post #51

Funny, but it's not quite that complex. How about "Here's a link to a CLI utility or git repo which will give you a working project in 2-3 hours"? I took a break from web dev for some years and had barely used any JS frameworks besides jQuery, until June, when I began working on an ambitious project and quickly got up to speed with the state of JS. I'm using React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/etc. for the client, and Express…

Funny, but it's not quite that complex.

I'm using React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/etc. for the client, and Express (with ES6 and what have you)

Funny, but that sounds like the very definition of complex.

I particularly love the "etc." and "what have you" because your stack is so complex you can't even be bothered to type them all out.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#54

Post by lucb1e »

scottmf wrote: post #51

Funny, but it's not quite that complex. How about "Here's a link to a CLI utility or git repo which will give you a working project in 2-3 hours"? I took a break from web dev for some years and had barely used any JS frameworks besides jQuery, until June, when I began working on an ambitious project and quickly got up to speed with the state of JS. I'm using React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/etc. for the client, and Express…

> which will give you a working project in 2-3 hours

> you can learn React in a few hours. What's the big deal?

Assuming we are still using the same example (filling a table with some data and filtering it), I think 2-3 hours is a good example of how long it takes to write that in plain Javascript and testing it on every browser back to IE6 while having lunch in between.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#55

Post by beardicus »

Holy shit these articles are truly tiresome.

I am learning Javascript in 2016. I also learned it in 1998. It was a simpler time back then, sure, BECAUSE YOU COULDN'T DO MUCH. Rollovers, alerts, scroll some annoying text in the status bar of a browser. This was about the extent of it.

I can do SO MUCH COOL STUFF with 2016 Javascript. Much of it comes with a complexity cost, but of course I'm free to code "raw" Javascript in the browser just like I used to. Instead, I choose to learn some new tooling, because the leverage it gives me to execute my ideas is worth the effort.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#56

Post by stoikerty »

scottmf wrote: post #51

Funny, but it's not quite that complex. How about "Here's a link to a CLI utility or git repo which will give you a working project in 2-3 hours"? I took a break from web dev for some years and had barely used any JS frameworks besides jQuery, until June, when I began working on an ambitious project and quickly got up to speed with the state of JS. I'm using React/Redux/Sagas/Webpack/etc. for the client, and Express…

Here's a link to a CLI utility which will give you a working project in a matter of minutes.

https://github.com/stoikerty/dev-toolkit

It does depend what perspective you're looking at it from. I appreciate it generates awareness about a current state of affairs for newcomers. But it's always easier to complain about something that to grind your teeth on it and learn, research and develop. The latter, although more painful, is a driving force forward.

Help > Complain

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#57

Post by pm215 »

pjc50 wrote: post #29
raverbashing wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :( Well, in some ways yes. But experience has a value Today people use an Arduino to flash a led, "in my time" it could be done with 2 transistors (you can do it with one + one "funny" component I guess - like a transformer)

The point of flashing an LED with an Arduino is not to flash the LED, it's to get the tools setup and workflow working while learning the basics. It's the "hello world" of microcontroller programming. I've heard this process called "flow flushing". With things like FPGAs it can take days to go from nothing to flashing an LED. Because the toolchain is large, complicated and opaque. It sounds like the Javascript world…

"Pipecleaning" is another term I've heard for that "get the tool workflow sorted" step, I think.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#58

Post by groovy2shoes »

TamDenholm wrote: post #6

I'm a web dev, been doing this 11 years. But i totally feel past it, granted i code less and less nowadays so i havent kept up with new technologies. I've hired people that are much better at web dev than me and let them accomplish a task with pretty much whatever tech they want to use, because i believe you shouldn't constrict a developer if you dont have to. Even for a simple app that it'd take me 20 - 30 hours for…

> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :(

You’re doing it wrong. You’re not the one who should feel bad, they are the ones who should feel bad! You’re in the right. Try doing what I do: wave your cane around and shout at them to get off your lawn. Be sure to really drive it home by telling them the same two or three stories over and over again, about how things were back in “your day”[0] :)

In all seriousness, I sympathized with every thing you said until that very last sentence. For whatever reason, I never feel bad —— I just “know” that my way is the better way, and that their ways are just fashionable fads and will pass. If I turn out to be wrong and any of those things happens to wind up sticking, well... I’ll cross that bridge when I get there ;)

--

[0]: E.g., how much more vivid color was, how much brighter the day was, how much tastier the food was, how it was the Golden Age of Television, Film, Literature, Music, Journalism, and Politics, how men were men and you could tell them from boys by whether or not they had correctly implemented call-by-name argument-passing semantics in their Algol-60 compilers, and how everything was just generally better.

“What’s that? Your Web page is 32MB minified and gzipped? Back in my day, we only had 32MB of RAM total, if we were lucky, and we could still listen to mp3s and browse the Web and send snarky messages instantly to one another even then. Sure, our displays were tiny, low-resolution CRTs, and we liked it! Now get off my lawn!!”

/me listlessly stares 1000 yards past his junior developers...

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#59

Post by nayuki »

buremba wrote: post #38

"-Ever heard of Python 3?" (go to top)

The article was pretty good as a JavaScript commentary, up until the last line that name-dropped Python 3. I don't think the Python community has anywhere near the problems that the JavaScript community is having.

For example, there aren't languages trying to transpile to Python, they aren't trying to translate new Python language features into old ones at runtime (at least not like 3.5 into 3.0, but there is some mess in 2 vs. 3 such as six), they aren't trying to shoehorn assembly language into it, and there aren't a dozen ways to do HTTP requests or manipulate DOM or make packages.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#60

Post by frigo_1337 »

I'm getting tired of these pointless non-specific rants. You could write an article about "How it feels to learn C++ in 2016" and make it all about the complexities of operating systems, linking, compilation, text editors and the QWERTY keyboard layout, and you'd still be as accurate.

All you need to "JavaScript in 2016" (as a beginner) is a config file and one or two commands. That's it. If that's too information or too hipstery for your taste, then follow the footsteps of other programming languages and use an IDE with a button that can hide that complexity for you.

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