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State of JavaScript 2020

2020.stateofjs.com

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Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#91

Post by preommr »

turtlebits wrote: post #86
preommr wrote: post #69

It seems like the overall trend is that people are getting more and more unsatisfied with the current landscape now that a little bit of the sugar high from first wave of shiny new tech is starting to fade away. The jump from "whatever js was in 2014" -> angularjs junk -> react/vue/angular was pretty big. But now the glamour is gone and we're moving into the phase of actually having to maintain some of the things we…

Svelte is a a breath of fresh air because of its simplicity, not because it's bundle size (which is a bonus). It's especially easy to get up and running and the documentation is great. React/Vue/Angular you have to learn the build system as well as the ins and outs of the framework, and there are too many opinionated ways of getting started.

How is this complicated:

```

" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/vue@2.6.12/dist/vue.js">

var app = new Vue({ el: '#app', template: "{{message}}" data: { message: 'Hello Vue!' } })

```

A lot of the build problems with react/vue also exist with svelte. In fact it's even worst with svelte because it's compiled only (which is it's unique selling point) whereas vue can be used in a much more progressive manner. React is a little bit harder because of jsx, but it's still not that much more complicated.

Build-wise, parcel supports jsx/vue files out of the box. Plus React/vue both have cli tools that I don't like and wouldn't recommend, but are super easy to get started with.

And this all comes with the giant caveat that react/vue make progress which can lead to confusing versions. Svelte is a lot younger (kind of, it came out a few years back, so idk) so it hasn't had to cross that bridge yet. And even then, there was the confusion with Sapper. I highly doubt that svelte is going to be immune from the fast-paced nature of these frameworks.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#92

Post by mattdesl »

Pfhreak wrote: post #8
milkers wrote: post #5

Some takeaways of mine; - Typescript keeps strengthening its position as industry standard. - Svelte is hyped, but is it battle tested enough? - Testing Library is quite new in the town but already the runner up testing tool. - In terms of data management, GraphQL holds its position on the top while good-ol Redux kept losing interest. What are yours?

I've seen Svelte used in a number of high impact tools, including in AAA videogame UI. In my experience, I've seen engineers very happy working with it, and it meets the performance needs for a videogame it should be good enough for the web.

I’m also working with Svelte for my (non-AAA) game, and enjoying it thoroughly. The only problem I find is that complex animations/transitions can get a little messy (compared to say GSAP timelines), and it tends to create a lot of garbage out of the box so some tuning is necessary to avoid GC thrashing.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#93

Post by hamandcheese »

trylist wrote: post #88

Am I missing something about graphql being in the same metric as redux? They're not remotely in the same domain, are they?

It makes a little more sense when you consider the wider graphql ecosystem, like Apollo or Relay, which normalize all data received and keep your UI up to date automatically. In that light, graphql-the-ecosystem has solved a big part of frontend state management. With graphql and react hooks, I have found no need for redux anymore for typical CRUD needs.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#94

Post by habosa »

It's pretty clear that we're in a period of relative stability. React and TypeScript have been the tools of choice for 2-3 years now. Webpack is the clear choice in bundler. Most people seem to be using the modern language features.

You can see that the number of extremely satisfied or dissatisfied people has gone down, people have moved towards the middle as the big tools have matured.

It's nice. I feel like I actually get the JS landscape right now (I'm a Vue person but still).

I'm sure in 2 more years everything will blow up again though!

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#95

Post by viraptor »

wildermuthn wrote: post #83

I’ve been doing web FE in various capacities for about a decade. First jQuery, then backbone, then Angular, then ClojureScript with React, now React and Apollo. While I get the criticism about what might seem like an anarchic state of JavaScript, at each transition point there have been clear, demonstrable, and worthwhile changes. Backbone addressed jQuery spaghetti code. Angular addressed backbone boilerplate. React…

> GraphQL finally forced backend engineering to coordinate with frontend engineering

I'm curious what do you mean here? The way I see it is the exact opposite - front-end making new kind of queries without having to coordinate with backend. With positive effects (faster results) and negative ones (so this new query takes a minute to resolve and it's in production - fix it now!)

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#96

Post by trylist »

hamandcheese wrote: post #93
trylist wrote: post #88

Am I missing something about graphql being in the same metric as redux? They're not remotely in the same domain, are they?

It makes a little more sense when you consider the wider graphql ecosystem, like Apollo or Relay, which normalize all data received and keep your UI up to date automatically. In that light, graphql-the-ecosystem has solved a big part of frontend state management. With graphql and react hooks, I have found no need for redux anymore for typical CRUD needs.

That's what I was kind of thinking, but Apollo is also in the same graph. Seems a bit odd to me.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#97

Post by noir_lord »

turtlebits wrote: post #86
preommr wrote: post #69

It seems like the overall trend is that people are getting more and more unsatisfied with the current landscape now that a little bit of the sugar high from first wave of shiny new tech is starting to fade away. The jump from "whatever js was in 2014" -> angularjs junk -> react/vue/angular was pretty big. But now the glamour is gone and we're moving into the phase of actually having to maintain some of the things we…

Svelte is a a breath of fresh air because of its simplicity, not because it's bundle size (which is a bonus). It's especially easy to get up and running and the documentation is great. React/Vue/Angular you have to learn the build system as well as the ins and outs of the framework, and there are too many opinionated ways of getting started.

Used vue for a few years then new place was svelte, I like it it but not because of the simplicity (or more because the simplicity that comes from it's killer feature), I like it because it's compiled.

So a lot of the abstractions that make life pleasant simply go away.

The in-browser dev tools (svelte tools) lag far behind vue dev tools but it's newer.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#98

Post by aidos »

wildermuthn wrote: post #83

I’ve been doing web FE in various capacities for about a decade. First jQuery, then backbone, then Angular, then ClojureScript with React, now React and Apollo. While I get the criticism about what might seem like an anarchic state of JavaScript, at each transition point there have been clear, demonstrable, and worthwhile changes. Backbone addressed jQuery spaghetti code. Angular addressed backbone boilerplate. React…

Agreed. It becomes really messy moving all that state around.

Still in its infancy but we’ve settled on a model where we use Hasura to sync the whole datastore to the frontend as a mobx graph. It’s relatively easy to then drive the frontend off layers of computations on that graph. We’ve also put a transaction layer on mutations of the models so they’re automatically batched and sent as a single request / dB transactions.

It’s liberating to get to a place where I can just update models in the frontend and have that reflected everywhere because, as you point out, there’s enough to coordinate in all the bits you have to mutate.

Edit: we borrowed the idea from how linear.app does it

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#99

Post by moltar »

bhauer wrote: post #9

As someone who is relatively outside of the JavaScript ecosystem, I had the following realization yesterday when I was reviewing this: JavaScript has what I would consider two distinct flavors of "back-end" frameworks. It has frameworks like Express and Koa, which I would consider traditional back-end frameworks. These are designed around handling HTTP requests and providing dynamic responses in myriad forms: rendere…

I wouldn’t call express a framework though. It’s just a web server with some middleware ecosystem.

Re: State of JavaScript 2020

#100

Post by bartread »

wildermuthn wrote: post #83

I’ve been doing web FE in various capacities for about a decade. First jQuery, then backbone, then Angular, then ClojureScript with React, now React and Apollo. While I get the criticism about what might seem like an anarchic state of JavaScript, at each transition point there have been clear, demonstrable, and worthwhile changes. Backbone addressed jQuery spaghetti code. Angular addressed backbone boilerplate. React…

> People don’t switch tooling and frameworks for fun (well, not primarily), but because the pain of learning something new is worth the benefit of reducing unnecessary complexity.

This is sometimes true, but not always.

For example, it's also sometimes true that teams switch to technology X because X has become popular, and without necessarily understanding the benefits and drawbacks. In some cases a choice is made to switch to X because whatever the team is currently using is "dead"/has gone unsupported.

I think these reasons, along with others such as significant breaking changes between major versions that we've seen with some frameworks and libraries, better hint at sources of frustration over "churn" in JavaScript.

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