11 ms·

The open-source-JavaScript community right now is just the largest, most active open source community that has ever existed. Check out the stats that GitHub rec

by lacker 10y ago

The open-source-JavaScript community right now is just the largest, most active open source community that has ever existed. Check out the stats that GitHub recently announced: https://octoverse.github.com/ https://octoverse.github.com/ Open source JavaScript activity as measured by pull requests has doubled (!!) in the past year. It's more than the next two languages (Java and Python) combined. Most of the top repositories on GitHub are JavaScript too: https://github.com/search?q=stars:%3E1&s=stars&type=Repositories https://github.com/search?q=stars:%3E1&s=stars&type=Reposito... Demand for JS developers is growing too, as websites become more complex, Node.js becomes more popular on the backend, and frameworks like React Native (more popular than any other iOS or Android library on github) start to pick up mobile developers. JavaScript performance is also starting to be significantly better than the other scripting languages, e.g. https://www.quora.com/Is-JavaScript-v8-faster-than-Python https://www.quora.com/Is-JavaScript-v8-faster-than-Python . Not because of anything inherent about JavaScript, more that it's worth a lot of investment from big companies in JS performance. Basically, it's not just the number of frameworks. Everything about JavaScript is taking off right now, and leading to a network effect where all the other aspects get boosted too. Sort of funny to have this happen twenty years after its invention.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
jacquesm 10y ago
To a large extent this is true because the javascript community is busy with the re-invention of all of computer history, only without applying all of the lessons learned. Activity does not equate quality.
- infinity0 10y ago
  Not only are they doing that, but they are insanely arrogant about rejecting criticism that they're doing this too.
  - cjfont 10y ago
    You don't drop an incendiary statement like that without at least citing an example of where that has been the case.
  - adbachman 10y ago
    You just summed up "the largest, most active open source community that has ever existed" with "they" and suggested that "they" are all thinking the same thing with one mind. That seems like a bit of a reach.
  - tempodox 10y ago
    With some of the comments around here being a demonstration of this very phenomenon. But then, “what I cannot build, I do not understand”. The kids may be rewriting the universe in JS, but hopefully they will learn something from it, too. When we did it, in the bad old days, it was Basic and Assembler. Those environments were about as shitty and unstable as JS is today, but otoh that may foster an appreciation for proper tools once you get your hands on them. It worked like that for me. And, besides, arrogance is the privilege of youth. It would be very strange indeed if we didn't encounter it in this space.
- civilian 10y ago
  Dude, comeon. The browser has evolved a lot as a platform, as has the hardware power of computers running them. Maybe we're re-writing computer history, but if that's the case then it's because we have to migrate everything to javascript and the wiser old timers want nothing to do with it. * Do you really want to write CSS without a pre-processor? * Do you really want to control a webpage's state without JS models in the browser? * Do you really want to update html with individual jquery calls? * Do you really want to write websites _without_ using jquery? Keep in mind that jquery is only 10 years old. I'm glad that we have an open market to exchange people's ideas. Yes, a lot of it is crap, and even among the highly adopted packages there will be problems. But that's the beauty of the market-- people can vote with their feet. This article sums up how I feel: http://mrmrs.io/writing/2015/07/27/too-many-tools/ http://mrmrs.io/writing/2015/07/27/too-many-tools/ > "Four–fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake." - Rudyard Kipling in 1890
  - rer 10y ago
    > we have to migrate everything to javascript Why? What I really want is the whole browser to go away.
    - civilian 10y ago
      Okay. I guess you're welcome to do that? We browser coders will just continue to go to market faster. It's pretty cool that, if you put your work in, you can make a GUI on the browser that is accessible to all desktops and phones. That's 2 billion users. The obvious question is: what would you replace it with? Do you want to replace it all with native apps? Or do you think that this whole internet thing is overrated?
      - adrianN 10y ago
        He probably agrees with this http://web.archive.org/web/20120509105723/http://teddziuba.com/2008/09/a-web-os-are-you-dense.html http://web.archive.org/web/20120509105723/http://teddziuba.c...
      - 10y ago
- hoorayimhelping 10y ago
  Give me a break. The entire internet and software landscape is changing and everyone is in a constant rush to stay current. You make it seem like it's some kind of concerted effort to insult the sensibilities of good, proper software engineers who know the right way to do things. Everyone is just trying to do the best they can with the incredibly complex stack of technologies in play today.
  - shawn-butler 10y ago
    "The entire internet and software landscape is changing" Really? Is it Web 4.0 now? People are changing the stack because they don't know any better and trying to justify their salary. That's the bottom line. The rush to stay current is just bandwagon-hype.
    - smonff 10y ago
      I love you.
- jameskegel 10y ago
  I'll admit, you got a laugh and a smirk out of me, but this still seems like an unfair statement. The JS community at large isn't reinventing the wheel, just iterating on a wheel as it moves, if that makes sense.
  - datavirtue 10y ago
    It's wheels within wheels. Eat a mushroom.
- cdata 10y ago
  It's easy to sit back and critisize JavaScript and the web with dismissive comments like this. I have heard variations on these same memes for many years. But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum for delivering features / products / tools to users. It's always fair to criticize so that we ask ourselves the hard questions. So, it's also worth asking ourselves if we are staring too close to the wall when we try to paint other languages as backwards and therefore bad (or at least a bad choice). Just maybe, the language feature bullet list in your head (and corresponding subtleties of implementation) isn't the thing that matters most. Maybe the thing that really matters is something not as easy to codify as a language tool chain, like human consensus. Also, it is false association to suggest that quantity != quality is somehow particular to JavaScript. Infinite monkeys will produce infinite crap no matter what brand typewriter you give them.
  - collyw 10y ago
    In my experience working with Perl and Python most external libraries work and are well documented. Whenever I have tried JavaScript its a vastly poorer experience. Admittedly I have far more experience with the first two languages, but that would likely find more problems with Perl or Python, no? (I don't really do PHP, but I have a feeling that I would find the experience closer to JavaScript from talking to colleagues and reading about it).
    - roblabla 10y ago
      I've never had problems with docs in JS, both node and browser. The MDN is a limitless ressource of information for the base language, and for libraries, well you're going to get undocumented libraries in any language. It might be more "obvious" in JS because of the sheer amount of libraries, but I've found python libs that were very poorly documented too. This is a problem we should be HAPPY to have. Having libraries doing EXACTLY what we want, that's just missing docs, is better than the alternative I've found in many other languages : no libraries, so we have to do everything ourselves.
- robmccoll 10y ago
  Things re-invented in JS (and by most language communities as they evolve): - Build systems - Dependency management - Some form of code modularity and references between modules - Preprocessing/macros/templating - Source to source - DSL embedding - Compartmentalization of state (globals bad) - More advanced type systems - OO-ish systems - Forms of data flow - Message passing - Functional style (including limiting mutability) - Forms of control flow - Frameworks providing more magic - Calls for less magic and more explicit control flow - Exception handling good - Explicit errors better - Event loops ...
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    On the one hand, I really miss simply being able to use "Make" for builds (Damn you to HELL, Microsoft!). On the other hand, I loathe the spam code that checked exceptions causes (alas MS/Anders/C# gets this right, and Java got it wrong)
- rpeden 10y ago
  I remember you writing something similar 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5415585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5415585 It's definitely frustrating to see. And it's also frustrating to see the vitriolic reactions to anyone who criticizes the current culture of the JavaScript community. I use React and all of its associated tools and ecosystem, and while I find them productive and useful, the whole situation is a bigger mess than it needs to be. I don't think it's necessarily anyone's fault; I don't see a willful desire to ignore the hard-won computing knowledge we'e accumulated. It just seems as though the JS community's enthusiasm has, at least recently, has exceeded the rate at which good tooling can be developed. I think that's changing, though. From what I've seen, in the past year there has been more of a push toward building mature, reliable, maintainable JS applications. I've also seen more interest in optimization. The Closure Compiler has been around for a long time, and at least in the Angular 2 community I've noticed jump in the number of people looking to use Closure and other tools like Rollup to optimize everything and deliver the smallest possible code bundle to the browser. And ES2015's statically analyzable modules go a long way toward making more optimization possible. So I agree, things are a bit crazy. And I agree that activity does not equal quality. But there's a lot of activity, and some of it is of high quality. I can't guarantee that the high quality work that brings more of those lessons learned to the JS world will become popular, but I'm at least seeing a positive trend in that direction.
smonff 10y ago
It is not because something is larger that it is better. These stats prove the hype, not that it is good quality code, with good quality documentation, with a friendly and safe community, and a reliable archiving system for it's dependencies. I have nothing against JS in particular, but there is a bit too much hype about it.
dwaltrip 10y ago
You have to be careful with the GitHub stats. I have a few Python/Ruby projects that GitHub categorizes as JavaScript because I have a few 3rd party JavaScript dependencies that ended up being larger than my actual project. These libraries were checked into Git because it was more convenient at the time and I hadn't set up a good build system, as they were non-critical side projects. I know I'm not the only one who has done this in the past. I'd be curious to see GitHub stats that tried to account for this.

by lacker 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

jacquesm 10y ago

To a large extent this is true because the javascript community is busy with the re-invention of all of computer history, only without applying all of the lessons learned. Activity does not equate quality.

infinity0 10y ago
Not only are they doing that, but they are insanely arrogant about rejecting criticism that they're doing this too.
- cjfont 10y ago
  You don't drop an incendiary statement like that without at least citing an example of where that has been the case.
- adbachman 10y ago
  You just summed up "the largest, most active open source community that has ever existed" with "they" and suggested that "they" are all thinking the same thing with one mind. That seems like a bit of a reach.
- tempodox 10y ago
  With some of the comments around here being a demonstration of this very phenomenon. But then, “what I cannot build, I do not understand”. The kids may be rewriting the universe in JS, but hopefully they will learn something from it, too. When we did it, in the bad old days, it was Basic and Assembler. Those environments were about as shitty and unstable as JS is today, but otoh that may foster an appreciation for proper tools once you get your hands on them. It worked like that for me. And, besides, arrogance is the privilege of youth. It would be very strange indeed if we didn't encounter it in this space.
civilian 10y ago
Dude, comeon. The browser has evolved a lot as a platform, as has the hardware power of computers running them. Maybe we're re-writing computer history, but if that's the case then it's because we have to migrate everything to javascript and the wiser old timers want nothing to do with it. * Do you really want to write CSS without a pre-processor? * Do you really want to control a webpage's state without JS models in the browser? * Do you really want to update html with individual jquery calls? * Do you really want to write websites _without_ using jquery? Keep in mind that jquery is only 10 years old. I'm glad that we have an open market to exchange people's ideas. Yes, a lot of it is crap, and even among the highly adopted packages there will be problems. But that's the beauty of the market-- people can vote with their feet. This article sums up how I feel: http://mrmrs.io/writing/2015/07/27/too-many-tools/ http://mrmrs.io/writing/2015/07/27/too-many-tools/ > "Four–fifths of everybody's work must be bad. But the remnant is worth the trouble for its own sake." - Rudyard Kipling in 1890
- rer 10y ago
  > we have to migrate everything to javascript Why? What I really want is the whole browser to go away.
  - civilian 10y ago
    Okay. I guess you're welcome to do that? We browser coders will just continue to go to market faster. It's pretty cool that, if you put your work in, you can make a GUI on the browser that is accessible to all desktops and phones. That's 2 billion users. The obvious question is: what would you replace it with? Do you want to replace it all with native apps? Or do you think that this whole internet thing is overrated?
    - adrianN 10y ago
      He probably agrees with this http://web.archive.org/web/20120509105723/http://teddziuba.com/2008/09/a-web-os-are-you-dense.html http://web.archive.org/web/20120509105723/http://teddziuba.c...
    - 10y ago
hoorayimhelping 10y ago
Give me a break. The entire internet and software landscape is changing and everyone is in a constant rush to stay current. You make it seem like it's some kind of concerted effort to insult the sensibilities of good, proper software engineers who know the right way to do things. Everyone is just trying to do the best they can with the incredibly complex stack of technologies in play today.
- shawn-butler 10y ago
  "The entire internet and software landscape is changing" Really? Is it Web 4.0 now? People are changing the stack because they don't know any better and trying to justify their salary. That's the bottom line. The rush to stay current is just bandwagon-hype.
  - smonff 10y ago
    I love you.
jameskegel 10y ago
I'll admit, you got a laugh and a smirk out of me, but this still seems like an unfair statement. The JS community at large isn't reinventing the wheel, just iterating on a wheel as it moves, if that makes sense.
- datavirtue 10y ago
  It's wheels within wheels. Eat a mushroom.
cdata 10y ago
It's easy to sit back and critisize JavaScript and the web with dismissive comments like this. I have heard variations on these same memes for many years. But something that I almost never hear: critics offering a candid explanation for why their platform / language / framework - which maybe wasn't perfect but CERTAINLY compared to JavaScript was awesome - did not become the de facto tool across as diverse a spectrum for delivering features / products / tools to users. It's always fair to criticize so that we ask ourselves the hard questions. So, it's also worth asking ourselves if we are staring too close to the wall when we try to paint other languages as backwards and therefore bad (or at least a bad choice). Just maybe, the language feature bullet list in your head (and corresponding subtleties of implementation) isn't the thing that matters most. Maybe the thing that really matters is something not as easy to codify as a language tool chain, like human consensus. Also, it is false association to suggest that quantity != quality is somehow particular to JavaScript. Infinite monkeys will produce infinite crap no matter what brand typewriter you give them.
- collyw 10y ago
  In my experience working with Perl and Python most external libraries work and are well documented. Whenever I have tried JavaScript its a vastly poorer experience. Admittedly I have far more experience with the first two languages, but that would likely find more problems with Perl or Python, no? (I don't really do PHP, but I have a feeling that I would find the experience closer to JavaScript from talking to colleagues and reading about it).
  - roblabla 10y ago
    I've never had problems with docs in JS, both node and browser. The MDN is a limitless ressource of information for the base language, and for libraries, well you're going to get undocumented libraries in any language. It might be more "obvious" in JS because of the sheer amount of libraries, but I've found python libs that were very poorly documented too. This is a problem we should be HAPPY to have. Having libraries doing EXACTLY what we want, that's just missing docs, is better than the alternative I've found in many other languages : no libraries, so we have to do everything ourselves.
robmccoll 10y ago
Things re-invented in JS (and by most language communities as they evolve): - Build systems - Dependency management - Some form of code modularity and references between modules - Preprocessing/macros/templating - Source to source - DSL embedding - Compartmentalization of state (globals bad) - More advanced type systems - OO-ish systems - Forms of data flow - Message passing - Functional style (including limiting mutability) - Forms of control flow - Frameworks providing more magic - Calls for less magic and more explicit control flow - Exception handling good - Explicit errors better - Event loops ...
- Roboprog 10y ago
  On the one hand, I really miss simply being able to use "Make" for builds (Damn you to HELL, Microsoft!). On the other hand, I loathe the spam code that checked exceptions causes (alas MS/Anders/C# gets this right, and Java got it wrong)
rpeden 10y ago
I remember you writing something similar 4 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5415585 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5415585 It's definitely frustrating to see. And it's also frustrating to see the vitriolic reactions to anyone who criticizes the current culture of the JavaScript community. I use React and all of its associated tools and ecosystem, and while I find them productive and useful, the whole situation is a bigger mess than it needs to be. I don't think it's necessarily anyone's fault; I don't see a willful desire to ignore the hard-won computing knowledge we'e accumulated. It just seems as though the JS community's enthusiasm has, at least recently, has exceeded the rate at which good tooling can be developed. I think that's changing, though. From what I've seen, in the past year there has been more of a push toward building mature, reliable, maintainable JS applications. I've also seen more interest in optimization. The Closure Compiler has been around for a long time, and at least in the Angular 2 community I've noticed jump in the number of people looking to use Closure and other tools like Rollup to optimize everything and deliver the smallest possible code bundle to the browser. And ES2015's statically analyzable modules go a long way toward making more optimization possible. So I agree, things are a bit crazy. And I agree that activity does not equal quality. But there's a lot of activity, and some of it is of high quality. I can't guarantee that the high quality work that brings more of those lessons learned to the JS world will become popular, but I'm at least seeing a positive trend in that direction.

smonff 10y ago

It is not because something is larger that it is better. These stats prove the hype, not that it is good quality code, with good quality documentation, with a friendly and safe community, and a reliable archiving system for it's dependencies. I have nothing against JS in particular, but there is a bit too much hype about it.

dwaltrip 10y ago

You have to be careful with the GitHub stats. I have a few Python/Ruby projects that GitHub categorizes as JavaScript because I have a few 3rd party JavaScript dependencies that ended up being larger than my actual project. These libraries were checked into Git because it was more convenient at the time and I hadn't set up a good build system, as they were non-critical side projects. I know I'm not the only one who has done this in the past. I'd be curious to see GitHub stats that tried to account for this.