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

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#81

Post by coldtea » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:51 PM UTC

awestroke wrote: post #15

I have no trouble at all "keeping up" with the "insanity" that is front-end development. If you're confused learning new things, it means you're learning. At my company, we have moved a lot of our front-end code to eslint-checked ES6 with some plugins, writing react/redux powered interfaces. New hires generally learn the codebase fast, you're well protected from shooting yourself in the foot thanks to type checking a…

>I have no trouble at all "keeping up" with the "insanity" that is front-end development. If you're confused learning new things, it means you're learning.

This naive view though assumes that all learning and all stuff to learn is created equal and is all good.

That is, that the IT industry can't possibly produce junk for people to learn ("busywork", programming fads, over engineered platforms, oversold technologies, etc).

People who have been through the J2EE-hell of mid-noughties, which even its creators condemned and abandoned several years later, but which at the time was touted as "THE WAY" to build enterprise software, and you just had to "man up" and learn it, respectfully disagree.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#82

Post by enraged_camel » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:52 PM UTC

mehwoot wrote: post #22

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…

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?

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#83

Post by hemancuso » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:54 PM UTC

marrs wrote: post #65

In my experience, the developers who fall into this trap of despair almost always do so because they aren't consciously choosing what tools to use; instead they are letting the tools choose them. They see job descriptions demanding AngularJS or ReactJS and they think that they must learn it, or someone posts an article here and they don't want to feel left behind. Choose a library or tool because it improves your dev…

How would you suggest developers actually figure out what tools to use? It is next to impossible to make an informed decision without digesting a good portion of what the OP is talking about. You need to start somewhere.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#84

Post by throwawayReply » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:54 PM UTC

This misses the point.

It's about the unit test.

jQuery is easy to develop with but difficult to unit test.

React is slow to develop with but easier to unit test.

For small projects, jQuery is better.

For large projects where the all the persons writing it tomorrow might not be here today, pick the testable one so they have a chance of future refactoring.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#85

Post by enraged_camel » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:55 PM UTC

talmand wrote: post #72

jbrauer wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I still feel like a bad coder because i'm not doing it their way. :( I've only been at it for about 2-3 years, and I must say, I feel this exact same way. Started on the LAMP stack in school and now I know nothing because what I know is "uncool" and outdated since MEAN and all of the encompassing JS libraries have become popular. I caved and started to dabble in MEAN (even though I haven't perfected LAMP by a long…

>> now I know nothing because what I know is "uncool" You want to know what's "uncool" around here for me? Wanting to markup a table with table elements, mostly for the accessibility benefits. I've never seen such an odd pushback. Tables are so "old" I'm told.

Actually, what people frown upon is using tables for layout. Using them to display actual tabular data is quite fine. (I mean, everything is fine at the end of the day as long as the end-user is happy, but you know what I mean...)

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#86

Post by ryanSrich » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:56 PM UTC

mehwoot wrote: post #22

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…

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…

> migrated a 5 year old codebase from Rails to React

This statement doesn't make sense to me, and is one of the points of the article. React is a view layer. That's it. So you wouldn't migrate from Rails to React. You'd migrate Rails to React + Relay + Webpack + etc. On top of all of that you then have to decide if you're sticking with Rails for your API or if you're switching over your entire back end as well. The decision debt is just insane, and given how often these things change, that debt never goes away.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#87

Post by kingmanaz » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:56 PM UTC

tkubacki wrote: post #28

And that's way I feel much more comfortable in Dart ecosystem: - sane SDK and sane - not surprising - lang without this hell - jquery like functionality built in - one package manager and package repository - can be used on server as well - nice tooling (WebStorm-IntelliJ, VisualStudio Code)

Would have preferred that Google had put their resources behind something like GopherJS instead of yet another C#/Java-like, feature-creep prone language.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#88

Post by talmand » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

jomamaxx wrote: post #19

raverbashing wrote: post #5

Very accurate And if you go for X instead of Y you're obviously a non-hipster loser that hasn't been up to this week's fad

The later part of your point is salient: the weird hipster 'magpie' culture in front-end programming has a lot of drawbacks.

The part I find funny is considering how often the "latest great thing" changes so quickly is that it shows a decent developer can shift to another thing in the ecosystem quickly. Making the "if you aren't using Brand X, then you're behind" attitude seem kind of silly. Considering the response can easily be "give me a few hours and I'll be using Brand X". I've shifted through a dozen or so "latest thing" in my career without much trouble at all.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#89

Post by programminggeek » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:58 PM UTC

Sometimes jQuery is all you need. Sometimes you don't even need that.

Re: How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

#90

Post by talmand » Tue, Oct 04, 2016, 1:59 PM UTC

treehau5 wrote: post #13

Scarblac wrote: post #7

The worst is, if you don't keep up with this, good luck getting a web job five years from now, you'll be the equivalent of a Cobol programmer. Can't get off the train.

And the best is, if you have a fundamental understanding of plain, vanilla javascript all these new frameworks are pretty easy to pick up. I went from jQuery -> Angular 1.x -> Ember 1.6 -> Ember 2.0 -> React and Redux in basically no time. It really wasn't that hard.

Hah, I just posted elsewhere this exact sentiment. My first "framework" was Javascript. Every new fancy thing that comes along is just more Javascript to me.