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First, it's important to understand that most of these technologies have emerged and became popular because they solved real problems. In this regard, it may be

First, it's important to understand that most of these technologies have emerged and became popular because they solved real problems. In this regard, it may be difficult to "learn" them, if you never had those problems in the first place. If you feel comfortable learning jQuery, learn/use it enough to run into its weaknesses -- it won't take long. Then moving on will feel more natural and will feel less like effort and more like pain relief. Second, I would be more focused on obtaining fundamental programming skills, like the ones you get taught in academic CS classes, and less concerned about [insert-your-shiny-"new"-js-paradigm-here]. The reality is, pillars of programming haven't changed drastically since 70ies, and if you're very comfortable with the fundamentals, everything else becomes less a matter of understanding, and more a matter of memorizing ("oh so this is how you do fundamental thing X in this particular framework"). Finally, as others have rightfully noted, focusing on one thing at a time makes learning way more efficient. It may seem counter-intuitive, but learning ten things consecutively will take way less time and energy than learning them in parallel.

2pointsomone 10y ago
Agreed! I know it can be so so overwhelming, but just hang in there. We have had these problems with the web from the very early days of JavaScript, but we have only reached an inflection point in the past 5-ish years where we have solved these problems. So these new and successful JavaScript abstractions/frameworks/layers/patterns are here to stay. And yes, things like React, Redux, Flux, Backbone (if people still use that) etc etc etc are based in some solid grounding CS and technology architecture principles. Let the burden of engineering load not get mixed up with your ability to embrace and understand application of the fundamentals that underlie here. I complained about something similar about a year ago, and the Facebook guys told me they felt the pain, but said that the investment would pay off, and it already has in the shortest amount of time. Just. hang. in. there.
tluyben2 10y ago
>and became popular because they solved real problems Maybe someone should write a blogpost about which real problems they solve per framework; not only is there a lot of overlap (very confusing for beginners: people want to use the best not have choices they cannot possibly make at that early point) and the problems they solve are often really not relevant for the problem at hand. A lot (most; considering most sites are wp or some other point and click cms) of people never run into the shortcomings of Jquery or PHP or Mysql etc. A blogpost about connecting the fundamentals to modern frameworks and to specific parts of modern frameworks might be good too. For instance why the fundamentals are easy to understand and when applied to serverside they are still easy but when moving to frontend/js it often looks like a ball of poop. A lot of that is because many of these things are not fundamentals anymore: 20000 slightly different build, pack, deploy etc tools are a good example why a lot of people I know struggle. Boilerplate du-jour is another one: the minute you pick one it is outdated and people moved on to some other repos it seems. Many tools within boilerplates seem overlapping or redundant to beginners: no one explains why and docs are often written for experts (or: read the source). Another point is that unless you have a team with you, it is hard to run projects when so many changes to these modules and frameworks happen. If you are a coder working alone it is hard to keep all stacks up to date (security: less relevant for frontend a lot of they time but still) when they are so instable API wise. We do experiments internally but for production we use the tools we know until things have stabilized. I need to know I can run security updates in 5-6 years , run the testsuite and be quite confident I do not have to spend a few weeks refactoring.
- sssilver 10y ago
  > A lot of people never run into the shortcomings of Jquery or PHP or Mysql etc I'd rephrase that as "A lot of people don't identify and challenge the pain points of technologies they know and use for a while". Yes, that's a common pitfall and one every developer should be aware of. Question everything. In the example of jQuery -- "is there a way to bind my data to my view in a way that wouldn't require diligent manual updates in a highly stateful system that is now a major source of bugs in my existing design?" In the example of PHP -- "I keep having these bugs with comparing null, false, empty string, and zero, I wonder if there's a better way", or even "often I have a variable that I expect to be a dictionary, but it's null, and I have to check that everywhere, what if nullability could be ensured?", etc. But these questions won't occur without the solid fundamental base I've mentioned earlier. Because, guess what, the fundamental theory does include type theory, which does include nullability. I don't think the fundamentals are easy at all. I think they're the hardest, but they're the knowledge that'll never become "obsolete", and will make everything else relatively effortless. > 20000 slightly different build, pack, deploy etc tools are a good example why a lot of people I know struggle Yeah too much choice is bad, but since most of them are incremental "improvements" of each other and obsolete each other, the real choice isn't that big. Honestly, with something like a JS build/pack system, I would just grab whatever Google gives me first and wouldn't switch unless it caused me a headache and there was an alternative that I knew fixes the problem. At the end of the day they're all just some command-line tool coupled with some JSON config file. It's not that hard to switch, most of us are not quite compiling the Unreal Engine. Full disclaimer: I'm not a frontend engineer, and am only aware of frontend things on the surface plus the things I infer. I may be unaware of important details that dramatically change the situation.
- JustSomeNobody 10y ago
  The people building these front end frameworks aren't building products to last 5-6 months much less 5-6 years.
dancek 10y ago
This is a very good point. All the JS frameworks I know of solve a real problem. Still most of them are just horrible unless you know exactly how to use them properly. Then again, UI programming tends to be ugly in any case (at least when you're stupid and do all the wrong things). WRT jQuery, I'd even go further and say there's nothing wrong with jQuery perse [0]. It's just very hard to write modular, easy-to-read, reusable code with it. If you're smart enough and can come up with a good architecture, or if you need just a dozen of lines of JS, jQuery (or a lightweight reproduction of the API, eg. Zepto) might be the best choice. So yeah, work on fundamental programming skills; learn to design good software architecture; and stay critical. You can work with most technologies, and you can mess up with all of them. [0] I'm a Finn btw

2pointsomone 10y ago

Agreed! I know it can be so so overwhelming, but just hang in there. We have had these problems with the web from the very early days of JavaScript, but we have only reached an inflection point in the past 5-ish years where we have solved these problems. So these new and successful JavaScript abstractions/frameworks/layers/patterns are here to stay. And yes, things like React, Redux, Flux, Backbone (if people still use that) etc etc etc are based in some solid grounding CS and technology architecture principles. Let the burden of engineering load not get mixed up with your ability to embrace and understand application of the fundamentals that underlie here. I complained about something similar about a year ago, and the Facebook guys told me they felt the pain, but said that the investment would pay off, and it already has in the shortest amount of time. Just. hang. in. there.

tluyben2 10y ago

>and became popular because they solved real problems Maybe someone should write a blogpost about which real problems they solve per framework; not only is there a lot of overlap (very confusing for beginners: people want to use the best not have choices they cannot possibly make at that early point) and the problems they solve are often really not relevant for the problem at hand. A lot (most; considering most sites are wp or some other point and click cms) of people never run into the shortcomings of Jquery or PHP or Mysql etc. A blogpost about connecting the fundamentals to modern frameworks and to specific parts of modern frameworks might be good too. For instance why the fundamentals are easy to understand and when applied to serverside they are still easy but when moving to frontend/js it often looks like a ball of poop. A lot of that is because many of these things are not fundamentals anymore: 20000 slightly different build, pack, deploy etc tools are a good example why a lot of people I know struggle. Boilerplate du-jour is another one: the minute you pick one it is outdated and people moved on to some other repos it seems. Many tools within boilerplates seem overlapping or redundant to beginners: no one explains why and docs are often written for experts (or: read the source). Another point is that unless you have a team with you, it is hard to run projects when so many changes to these modules and frameworks happen. If you are a coder working alone it is hard to keep all stacks up to date (security: less relevant for frontend a lot of they time but still) when they are so instable API wise. We do experiments internally but for production we use the tools we know until things have stabilized. I need to know I can run security updates in 5-6 years , run the testsuite and be quite confident I do not have to spend a few weeks refactoring.

sssilver 10y ago
> A lot of people never run into the shortcomings of Jquery or PHP or Mysql etc I'd rephrase that as "A lot of people don't identify and challenge the pain points of technologies they know and use for a while". Yes, that's a common pitfall and one every developer should be aware of. Question everything. In the example of jQuery -- "is there a way to bind my data to my view in a way that wouldn't require diligent manual updates in a highly stateful system that is now a major source of bugs in my existing design?" In the example of PHP -- "I keep having these bugs with comparing null, false, empty string, and zero, I wonder if there's a better way", or even "often I have a variable that I expect to be a dictionary, but it's null, and I have to check that everywhere, what if nullability could be ensured?", etc. But these questions won't occur without the solid fundamental base I've mentioned earlier. Because, guess what, the fundamental theory does include type theory, which does include nullability. I don't think the fundamentals are easy at all. I think they're the hardest, but they're the knowledge that'll never become "obsolete", and will make everything else relatively effortless. > 20000 slightly different build, pack, deploy etc tools are a good example why a lot of people I know struggle Yeah too much choice is bad, but since most of them are incremental "improvements" of each other and obsolete each other, the real choice isn't that big. Honestly, with something like a JS build/pack system, I would just grab whatever Google gives me first and wouldn't switch unless it caused me a headache and there was an alternative that I knew fixes the problem. At the end of the day they're all just some command-line tool coupled with some JSON config file. It's not that hard to switch, most of us are not quite compiling the Unreal Engine. Full disclaimer: I'm not a frontend engineer, and am only aware of frontend things on the surface plus the things I infer. I may be unaware of important details that dramatically change the situation.
JustSomeNobody 10y ago
The people building these front end frameworks aren't building products to last 5-6 months much less 5-6 years.

dancek 10y ago

This is a very good point. All the JS frameworks I know of solve a real problem. Still most of them are just horrible unless you know exactly how to use them properly. Then again, UI programming tends to be ugly in any case (at least when you're stupid and do all the wrong things). WRT jQuery, I'd even go further and say there's nothing wrong with jQuery perse [0]. It's just very hard to write modular, easy-to-read, reusable code with it. If you're smart enough and can come up with a good architecture, or if you need just a dozen of lines of JS, jQuery (or a lightweight reproduction of the API, eg. Zepto) might be the best choice. So yeah, work on fundamental programming skills; learn to design good software architecture; and stay critical. You can work with most technologies, and you can mess up with all of them. [0] I'm a Finn btw