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The same thing is happening all over the industry. Things are growing organically in all kinds of directions, new technologies appearing at a rate and order of

by meshko 11y ago

The same thing is happening all over the industry. Things are growing organically in all kinds of directions, new technologies appearing at a rate and order of magnitude higher that anything that was happening 10 years ago. It is making it much harder to say current and the net benefit (so far) appears to be negative (I still can't believe that node.js made this terrible untyped language take over the world). I am hoping something good comes out of this, but it is certainly not the nice and cozy industry we knew and loved 10-15-20 years ago. Oh well, it too will pass.

OmarIsmail 11y ago
Practical javascript can now be typed very easily (TypeScript or Facebook's flow). Any "serious" JS shop is going to be using typed-JS in the next 12 months.
- meshko 11y ago
  The problem is right there in your response. Do I do TypeScript or Facebook's flow (whatever that is, I don't know)? Or perhaps CoffeeScript? Or wait, that one is not typed. Or is it? Lots of people like it though! Except the ones that perfer EcmaScript 2015. Because it is the future. At least for the next 2 weeks when 2016 starts. But EcmaScript 2015 is not typed either. So much for your promise of all serious JS shops doing typed JS in next 12 months. Also, yeah, great, "serious" shops will be typed. What about "not serious" shops? They don't count? And their users who have to suffer through crappy products built using incomplete tools don't count? Oh, and you know what all these half a dozen most popular and legion of less popular solutions to the problem of "JavaScript sucks" have in common? They add yet another step into the toolchain making the developer's life so much harder. It is nobody's fault that we are were we are, but please, let's call it as it is and not pretend that this pathetic situation is somehow progress or even acceptable.
steven777400 11y ago
The net benefit and multiple direction things are what makes it particularly frustrating. I wouldn't mind as much a new technology/technique/framework/etc if it were a clear, direct, step and meaningfully better than what came before. It's especially hard to be considering what technology/stack to recommend as being easy to develop in and maintain for LOB enterprise developers who will be maintaining an app (without rewrites) for ten years or so. Right now we're using Knockout but it's feeling a bit grumpy in various respects so I've been looking into React. But still it is common to have breaking changes, and then there's the whole ES5/ES6/TS split. I need something that our devs can do a Google search "How do I do <X> in <Y>" and nearly copy-paste the result. Knockout has been particularly good for that because it's evolved very slowly and every example for it is in ES5. Microsoft has wedded themselves to Angular for ASP.NET 5, but it looks like it's Angular 1. Meanwhile Angular 2 looks much better but again splits across ES5, ES6, TS, and Dart... If someone searches "How do I do <X> in Angular?" who knows what combination of assumptions might be unlying that answer. As much as I'd prefer to use something like React, I think shops with the combination of lower skilled staff and longer term maintenance projects (like ours) will need to wait until, hopefully, the industry calms down and settles on a set of new standards. Microsoft seems to have gotten sucked into the "do everything a million different ways" spaz attack with ASP.NET 5, but meanwhile Apple seems to be doing it right with a narrow, opinionated set of technologies with a well understood evolutionary path and specific tools for specific jobs.

by meshko 11y ago

OmarIsmail 11y ago

Practical javascript can now be typed very easily (TypeScript or Facebook's flow). Any "serious" JS shop is going to be using typed-JS in the next 12 months.

meshko 11y ago
The problem is right there in your response. Do I do TypeScript or Facebook's flow (whatever that is, I don't know)? Or perhaps CoffeeScript? Or wait, that one is not typed. Or is it? Lots of people like it though! Except the ones that perfer EcmaScript 2015. Because it is the future. At least for the next 2 weeks when 2016 starts. But EcmaScript 2015 is not typed either. So much for your promise of all serious JS shops doing typed JS in next 12 months. Also, yeah, great, "serious" shops will be typed. What about "not serious" shops? They don't count? And their users who have to suffer through crappy products built using incomplete tools don't count? Oh, and you know what all these half a dozen most popular and legion of less popular solutions to the problem of "JavaScript sucks" have in common? They add yet another step into the toolchain making the developer's life so much harder. It is nobody's fault that we are were we are, but please, let's call it as it is and not pretend that this pathetic situation is somehow progress or even acceptable.

steven777400 11y ago

The net benefit and multiple direction things are what makes it particularly frustrating. I wouldn't mind as much a new technology/technique/framework/etc if it were a clear, direct, step and meaningfully better than what came before. It's especially hard to be considering what technology/stack to recommend as being easy to develop in and maintain for LOB enterprise developers who will be maintaining an app (without rewrites) for ten years or so. Right now we're using Knockout but it's feeling a bit grumpy in various respects so I've been looking into React. But still it is common to have breaking changes, and then there's the whole ES5/ES6/TS split. I need something that our devs can do a Google search "How do I do <X> in <Y>" and nearly copy-paste the result. Knockout has been particularly good for that because it's evolved very slowly and every example for it is in ES5. Microsoft has wedded themselves to Angular for ASP.NET 5, but it looks like it's Angular 1. Meanwhile Angular 2 looks much better but again splits across ES5, ES6, TS, and Dart... If someone searches "How do I do <X> in Angular?" who knows what combination of assumptions might be unlying that answer. As much as I'd prefer to use something like React, I think shops with the combination of lower skilled staff and longer term maintenance projects (like ours) will need to wait until, hopefully, the industry calms down and settles on a set of new standards. Microsoft seems to have gotten sucked into the "do everything a million different ways" spaz attack with ASP.NET 5, but meanwhile Apple seems to be doing it right with a narrow, opinionated set of technologies with a well understood evolutionary path and specific tools for specific jobs.