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State of JavaScript 2021

2021.stateofjs.com

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Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#81

Post by somehnacct3757 »

davedx wrote: post #22

I read this report every year. This year it feels the most like it's driven by hype (and marketing, hi Vercel!). In my professional and personal experience, react has never been better to use (in terms of features, DX, maturity, community, productivity), yet if you look at the "popularity" (oh dear) graph, it's basically just describing how older tech slides down while newer shiny tech comes in and is instantly the m…

It's always driven by hype, or maybe groupthink. Every year I feel bad for the Ember contributors when this thing comes out cuz the respondents boldly claim Ember's bad while also admitting they've never used it and have no interest trying it. The clear mark of a popularity contest.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#82

Post by rk06 »

eterm wrote: post #12

The satisfaction vs usage of angular is astonishing, but I wonder how much of that usage is legacy angular? One way to read the graph would be that there's a lot of angular just quietly getting on with the job and it's a solid choice, but another would be that there's a large amount of legacy angular out there that people aren't very happy with.

Angular has its pros and cons. The biggest con would be slow builds. They also feel even slower if you try react/vue/svelte/solid on vite.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#83

Post by porker »

davedx wrote: post #22

I read this report every year. This year it feels the most like it's driven by hype (and marketing, hi Vercel!). In my professional and personal experience, react has never been better to use (in terms of features, DX, maturity, community, productivity), yet if you look at the "popularity" (oh dear) graph, it's basically just describing how older tech slides down while newer shiny tech comes in and is instantly the m…

I stopped filling in this survey last year because of the above, and the data breach [0]. It's a very skewed demographic filling it out.

0. https://dev.to/sachagreif/disclosing-a-state-of-javascriptst...

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#84

Post by rk06 »

sylens wrote: post #60

As someone new to front-end and who will probably only be building small hobbyist stuff by myself, is the mountain climb that is mastering React worth it? From my initial look into it, it seems incredibly complex.

No, it is not. Unless you are planning to use your experience for getting a job, it is not worth it.

I would advise you to use vue or svelte.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#85

Post by lucis »

davedx wrote: post #22

I read this report every year. This year it feels the most like it's driven by hype (and marketing, hi Vercel!). In my professional and personal experience, react has never been better to use (in terms of features, DX, maturity, community, productivity), yet if you look at the "popularity" (oh dear) graph, it's basically just describing how older tech slides down while newer shiny tech comes in and is instantly the m…

Initially I also had the impression that Next.JS/Remix/SvelteKit shouldn't be considered as backend frameworks but, after using it for a little while, noticed that it, indeed, replaces the use of something else even if you just want to create API routes.

Overall, I find the experience similar to something like Ruby-on-Rails/Django, which I usually also consider as "backend frameworks".

For me, these new frameworks are one of the reasons that, for me, React has never been better.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#86

Post by lucideer »

> While we know collecting and publishing diversity data can be a sensitive issue, we do think it's important to obtain this data to help measure and improve the survey's efforts in terms of inclusivity and representativeness.

What are the survey makers doing to improve these efforts?

Don't get me wrong, the stats are representative of a problem much broader than the remit of a small survey-maker, but still, without any follow-up referencing explicit efforts the wording seems off here.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#87

Post by arcosdev »

davedx wrote: post #22

I read this report every year. This year it feels the most like it's driven by hype (and marketing, hi Vercel!). In my professional and personal experience, react has never been better to use (in terms of features, DX, maturity, community, productivity), yet if you look at the "popularity" (oh dear) graph, it's basically just describing how older tech slides down while newer shiny tech comes in and is instantly the m…

Nah, Angular is that bad

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#88

Post by jillesvangurp »

cj wrote: post #48

Only 22% make above $100k? [0] Those salary demographics makes me doubt the entire data set. Over 40% of respondents make less than $50k [0] https://2021.stateofjs.com/en-US/demographics/#yearly_salary Edit: Only 14% of respondents are in the US, which probably explains the above.

Frontend development is not a great career path; it's mostly a young people's game. I know senior react developers in their thirties that are increasingly struggling to find well paying gigs because they are competing with young people at half their rate. A lot of frontend developers transition to full stack js and from there to doing more serious things using Go, Rust, or whatever. That's where the money is. It's a natural path for them.

Frontend projects have a few issues:

- They are mostly greenfield projects with relatively new and immature technology.

- They mostly have short shelf lives since UIs get replaced after a few years.

- A lot of the new and shiny stuff ends up moving the problem rather than solving it. So, there's a lot of change happening more or less continuously but a lot of the problems stay the same.

- And of course there is the notion that developer demographics dictate that there are about 4x more developers available who never worked with what was fashionable 10 years ago. The amount of developers keeps on doubling every five years, so most of the talent on the market will never have heard of or worked with stuff fashionable ten years ago.

So, hiring frontend developers to work on some old legacy code base built with whatever was fashionable 5-10 years ago is hard and expensive. First of all it's rare for projects to survive that long and usually they are not in a great shape if they do. So, you basically need people with lots of experience in completely outdated tech stacks that are willing to do that instead of using the new and shiny stuff that everybody else is doing. All of those people are now at an age where they would be charging senior rates with no guarantee that they are any good. It's a tough one. Paying more is a good strategy but you'd still need to find somebody willing to do it.

Of course, all the good developers will prefer greenfield projects because if they are that good, they will have the choice and they'll mostly choose for investing in learning new stuff rather than working on somebody else's shitty code base. That actually drives a lot of frontend projects to an early death. They'd be salvageable in principle except there's nobody around still willing to do it. It's literally cheaper to start from scratch than it is to hire to keep an old project going. You actually risk losing good frontend developers if you fail to do that. Because they'll have options elsewhere.

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#89

Post by elevader »

bryanrasmussen wrote: post #77
elevader wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I might be getting that question totally wrong, but faced with the question of "would you use gulp for a new project" my answer would also be "no", altough I think that gulp is a nice and totally workable tool. The thing is that gulp doesn't really have all that much to offer these days. If you need lots of complex build logic webpack is the way to go. If simple & fast is the desired goal then something like esbuild…

>If you need lots of complex build logic webpack is the way to go. I mean that is a weird thing to say it seems to me because whenever I have any sort of complex build logic that is when webpack becomes completely impenetrable or just does not support what I need - what do you mean by a complex logic that webpack supports that gulp doesn't?

Should have specified that more, sorry for that. Webpack, for better or worse, has most of the current dev mindshare and tons of plugins, stackoverflow questions & random blog posts. If you need some integration for , your chance of finding something working for webpack is far higher. You can build/support everything with gulp just fine if you don't want to use webpack, the question is: Why exactly would you specifically choose gulp and not, for example, esbuild?

Re: State of JavaScript 2021

#90

Post by sundarurfriend »

Even a slight zoom-in (110%) makes the labels on the axes overlap and become hard to read. I'm usually at 120%, and most of the text is practically unreadable at that point. Plotting is hard, let's go shopping! (Or maybe not, in a major survey like this that happens about the language the plots are implemented in?)
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