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JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

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Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#81

Post by heisenbit »

amiraliakbari wrote: post #50
sametmax wrote: post #13

But JS dev has never been fun. Web dev is fun because the browser is a freaking awesome plateform. However, it is _despite_ of JS. There's not a single characteristic of this language that makes it better than any other mainstream high level language out there. We use it because we have no reasonable alternative on the browser. It has always been a pain to use, requiring: - avoiding part of the language that is badly…

JS, and the web platform in general, is solving problems that are hard in nature. Considering the constraints imposed by these problems, quite a few features of JS are superior to many other languages. Consider the wide range of devices that a JS code must support. There is some pain in supporting all of them, but compared with Android development, the transpilers and shims available in JS seems like magic. Cross pla…

> while many C programmers never need to think about it

usually do not have to think about it anymore.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#82

Post by Klathmon »

OtterCoder wrote: post #57
cormacrelf wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That metaphor doesn't help with the default thinking behind a large proportion of engineering decisions. It goes like this: This is hard => I want to do one or two slightly different things => Building custom things feels like valuable work => Use the CNC machine! This is exactly the thinking that created the Juicero[1] (which actually uses many CNC parts), and we all make fun of them even though the same process is…

But Angular isn't simply "a router/nav, a wrapper around XHR/an API, some rendering to HTML, and some buttons to do things". That's JQuery you're describing. Angular determines the shape of the extensions you can build for it, and general, standard components don't fit its philosophy out of the box. With the cnc, you can pick parts and modules from a much bigger pool, then cut your enclosure to match. A widgetized, s…

I can't say I agree that a library any easier to use within or outside of a framework.

No matter what if you are using 3rd party libraries you will be writing some "glue". You will need to hook into their API and have it work in your application. Yes frameworks tend to enforce a structure on what that API has to look like (at least from a macro view), but that's a pro of them, not a con, and it's almost never "required" (you could just as easily use the library directly. If you can build a "connector", then you can use it directly whenever needed if it's not much code).

Yes, you may need to write more adapter code than you would if you weren't using a restrictive framework, but once written that "adapter" can be treated like a widgetized self-contained module. And it's instantly understandable to the rest of your dev team because it acts just like the other components/widgets in your codebase, using the same data flow, using the same UI system, etc...

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#83

Post by jancsika »

> So that’s why I’m now learning to be a Web Animator and UX Designer.

Has anyone played around with the Web Animations API?

I noticed that Chromium now lets you use elem.animate to animate SVG elements-- even properties like "width" which aren't technically presentation attributes in the 1.1 spec.

Anyway, it's a very handy interface and easy to play around with inside about:blank to prototype things.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#84

Post by morgancmartin »

sixsence wrote: post #62
gtsteve wrote: post #7

I don't think there's that big a problem with how many front-end frameworks there are, and the pace of development. I think the problem is people who feel they have to use the latest and greatest feature and they have to know all the frameworks. At my company we picked a stack and stuck with it. That happened to be React and Redux. I hear Angular 2 and Vue are really great frameworks but I feel under no pressure to r…

With all due respect, React and Redux are still "in" and one of those buzz word frameworks right now. Your sentiment would mean a lot more if you were still having success with something like Angular 1. You aren't proving you are resilient to changes by using one of the most current buzz-word filled frameworks out there for two years. The real test happens when your framework of choice truly becomes obsolete, like wi…

I completely agree. We are using Angular 1.x at my day job and my team and I are feeling the pain. Manual DOM manipulation compared to React's virtual DOM feels like what it must have used to feel like comparing jQuery to Angular 1.

Perhaps frameworks don't rust in the sense that they deteriorate in terms of capabilities over time. But that doesn't mean that they don't become obsolete. Especially when you're building a product and trying to stay competitive, all the while all the the innovation surrounding a framework has packed up and left for a nicer camp.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#85

Post by douche »

Was it ever fun? I lament the death of fat-client applications developed in real programming languages. Somehow we've decided that building our livelihoods on top of a scripting language that was whipped together in a week and branded to catch the tailwinds of another product is an acceptable way to do things.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#86

Post by jonny_eh »

gtsteve wrote: post #77
sixsence wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, React and Redux are still "in" and one of those buzz word frameworks right now. Your sentiment would mean a lot more if you were still having success with something like Angular 1. You aren't proving you are resilient to changes by using one of the most current buzz-word filled frameworks out there for two years. The real test happens when your framework of choice truly becomes obsolete, like wi…

Is React still "in"? I thought the recent BSD+Patents furore had made it uncool, but perhaps this doesn't bother developers as much as I originally thought.

A lot of that was overblown, I haven't seen a change in sentiment in the projects I work on. It's not like the patents clause was new, it was just Apache Foundation deciding to ban it that way. So as long as you're not working on an Apache project, you're unaffected.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#87

Post by gtsteve »

StavrosK wrote: post #28
gtsteve wrote: post #7

I don't think there's that big a problem with how many front-end frameworks there are, and the pace of development. I think the problem is people who feel they have to use the latest and greatest feature and they have to know all the frameworks. At my company we picked a stack and stuck with it. That happened to be React and Redux. I hear Angular 2 and Vue are really great frameworks but I feel under no pressure to r…

> Frameworks don't rust. Ah, the optimism of youth. Frameworks don't rust if you don't mind sticking with the security bugs of 10-year-old kernels. If you need to upgrade your OS, you need to upgrade your programming languages, which means you need to upgrade your frameworks. Everything rusts pretty quickly. Maybe you don't need the new features, but you definitely need the new bugfixes.

You make a good point, although I was exclusively referring to front-end JS frameworks. Of course you'd want to update Spring, .NET and whatever else you're using due to vulnerabilities.

But to the point you were making - it's not impossible that browsers could evolve to the point where our current version of React is unusable and it's been long relegated to the buzzword graveyard. Of course in that situation we'd have to maintain our own React branch or rewrite in whatever was a popular front-end framework at the time.

My point is that getting stressed out about the front-end JS framework churn isn't helpful to anyone. Pick a stack and stick with it, and only move when it's simply not productive to stay.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#88

Post by mring33621 »

alexfl wrote: post #63
cc81 wrote: post #18

React + (early flux and later mobx) made web development fun again for me. I was burned out at the end of the jquery era with all the different homemade structures and the limitations of browsers. Then I came back to React and babel/gulp (later webpack). Suddently there was structure in the front end that was easy to get into a project and contribute. Building components just felt right. Also js was almost a modern l…

I feel the same way... web development was hard, until I've learned about es6/babel, webpack, redux and react (I'm using morphdom as react replacement, but idea is the same). Now web dev is easy and fun. I have state, components, events and routes. That's it. Update the state and stay calm. The idea to concisely manage the state together with dom diffing, are my personal favorite game changers.

Can you provide some guidance/links to a backend Java developer who wants to learn & use a quality long-term, front-end tech stack? Is there a kickstart example project for your preferred stack? Note that I prefer to avoid nodeJS for any back-end production use but am ok with it as part of the dev toolchain, if required. Thank you.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#89

Post by jonny_eh »

sametmax wrote: post #13

But JS dev has never been fun. Web dev is fun because the browser is a freaking awesome plateform. However, it is _despite_ of JS. There's not a single characteristic of this language that makes it better than any other mainstream high level language out there. We use it because we have no reasonable alternative on the browser. It has always been a pain to use, requiring: - avoiding part of the language that is badly…

First-class functions are the star feature of JS. It's what makes it a great language for making UIs (like on the web) and single-threaded web servers (like with Node).

If you don't like the language, that's fine. There's no shortage of languages out there.

Re: JavaScript development is not fun for me anymore

#90

Post by [deleted] »

gtsteve wrote: post #77
sixsence wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With all due respect, React and Redux are still "in" and one of those buzz word frameworks right now. Your sentiment would mean a lot more if you were still having success with something like Angular 1. You aren't proving you are resilient to changes by using one of the most current buzz-word filled frameworks out there for two years. The real test happens when your framework of choice truly becomes obsolete, like wi…

Is React still "in"? I thought the recent BSD+Patents furore had made it uncool, but perhaps this doesn't bother developers as much as I originally thought.

[deleted]
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