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I don't think we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. JavaScript is perfectly adequate. Like you said it's just how it's used which makes front-e

I don't think we have to throw out the baby with the bathwater here. JavaScript is perfectly adequate. Like you said it's just how it's used which makes front-end development exceedingly complex. So, our approaches and techniques need to change not necessarily the language itself. I agree that the pendulum will swing back to the back-end again. The question is how we can achieve that without foregoing many of the useful patterns and the interactivity that came along with approaches like SPAs and frameworks like Angular and React. The approach Rails took with Turbolinks seems viable in some ways. It's lacking in terms of reactiveness / interactivity though. Turbolinks is great for SPA-like switching between views but not really useful for making that views more reactive. I'm not sure how exactly a technique would have to look like that allows you to have React-like reactiveness but still have all the logic in the back-end. Maybe that's an avenue worth exploring. Another one might be how the same problem was solved with Swing and similar UI frameworks for other languages.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago
I agree with you to certain degree, but this was not the only thing I was talking about. I dislike what has happened to Javascript the language itself. The way they changed makes the language almost unrecognizable. I think JS the language used to be simple and elegant (even though a lot of people would say otherwise). But they've added on these new features that introduce a lot of complexity. Sure these features make Javascript more "powerful", but at a cost of making it way too complex. And these new features don't do anything that wasn't possible before. The new JS is more different from the old JS than how C++ was different from C. Normally when something like this happens to other languages, they say they've "forked" it and come up with a new name. I was perfectly fine with the old approach of creating classes from functions and that was what really attracted me to javascript once I got used to it since it's a very unique concept that showed you how you can create complexity from simplicity. And I'm sure soon with the official support of the new js, the ecosystem will become even more complex and chaotic. And then people will realize it's not worth it to build or learn yet another javascript framework, and stop. Then there will be few winners left in the arena, and innovation will stop. No more "javascript fatigue" so I guess that would be good, but that's when I think another simple language will take over. Besides, js will probably NOT be the primary language of devices of the future, so people will probably move on.

cocktailpeanuts 10y ago

I agree with you to certain degree, but this was not the only thing I was talking about. I dislike what has happened to Javascript the language itself. The way they changed makes the language almost unrecognizable. I think JS the language used to be simple and elegant (even though a lot of people would say otherwise). But they've added on these new features that introduce a lot of complexity. Sure these features make Javascript more "powerful", but at a cost of making it way too complex. And these new features don't do anything that wasn't possible before. The new JS is more different from the old JS than how C++ was different from C. Normally when something like this happens to other languages, they say they've "forked" it and come up with a new name. I was perfectly fine with the old approach of creating classes from functions and that was what really attracted me to javascript once I got used to it since it's a very unique concept that showed you how you can create complexity from simplicity. And I'm sure soon with the official support of the new js, the ecosystem will become even more complex and chaotic. And then people will realize it's not worth it to build or learn yet another javascript framework, and stop. Then there will be few winners left in the arena, and innovation will stop. No more "javascript fatigue" so I guess that would be good, but that's when I think another simple language will take over. Besides, js will probably NOT be the primary language of devices of the future, so people will probably move on.