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I'll agree that SPAs are a bit of a departure for folks who have been building legacy ASP.NET or JSP / Java Request / Response apps. There are some new things

I'll agree that SPAs are a bit of a departure for folks who have been building legacy ASP.NET or JSP / Java Request / Response apps. There are some new things they must learn, so they may have a higher learning curve. Additionally the technology is really unstable. The build tools for example (webpack, babel, gulp, grunt) have changed tremendously and in breaking fashion now drastically over the past 4-5 years. Lots of legacy technology has stable tooling and so a more "seasoned" programmer may be a bit put off by that. Maybe that's this guys's problem. He should Green Egg's and Ham this mofo and just "try it" earnestly before writing a total dump of a blog post and sharing it on Hacker news.

jorgeleo 9y ago
Doing SPA commercially for years now, never needed any of those: webpack, babel, gulp, grunt, etc. If the developer understands the technology that they are built upon he will realize that there is no need for them. Surely they add nice things, but in my experience, they add nothing that worth the learning curve. BTW, I have 25+ years developing software, so I kind of consider my self a "seasoned" programmer, and I can tell you, I am not put off by technology, if anything else, every once in a while, I get a good chuckle out how the javascript world is reinventing what has been done 20 or 30 years ago. And I don't know many people that get to be "seasoned" programmers and that they get put off by what the new kids are doing. Actually, I don't know any at all. Most of the time the reaction is: Do you remember when we did something similar on that old xyz computer? Yeah! and we had to do a, b and c to adjust to the lack of memory space, now this library is wasting it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472325)
- seekbeak 9y ago
  None of them? Are you just doing everything vanilla js/html/css with no build tools, or just using bash/npm scripts?
  - jorgeleo 9y ago
    Nothing beyond jQuery, Bootstrap at the core. Sometimes some libraries for UI components like datatables.js, or a datetimepicker, but that it is.
    - neosavvy 9y ago
      Does anyone else even have a desire to work on the apps you are contributing to with you?
      - jorgeleo 9y ago
        <sarcasm> I guess you must still be living in your parent's basement because you must not have many bills to pay </sarcasm> LOL Now seriously: Quite the opposite, I always receive comments on the simplicity of my code. Also, I code so the user has a pleasant work experience, and also so the CPU executes the code faster, I don't put much attention to the comfort of the next developer, but I am always willing to show and explain what I did and why.
        varenc 9y ago
        Are any of the apps you made public? :) Also sounds like you’re working in a small group? I’ve found large teams will value clarity and maintainabiliy lots more.
        jorgeleo 9y ago
        Lots of my work is under very restrictive NDAs, so not much public, all though heavily used internally by my clients.
        neosavvy 9y ago
        Wow, ok. I won't get into a pissing contest, but I've solved and managed large and small teams. Folks don't like to maintain custom built software solutions that don't use common accepted best practice frameworks. JQuery is widely accepted as an anti-pattern by huge swathes of the programming community. You are right though, I've paid off most of my bills and do have a choice in what I work on anymore. I definitely don't live in a basement.
- neosavvy 9y ago
  Your thoughts on webpack/babel/grunt/gulp well echo my sentiment towards seasoned programmers. I've only been at this for around 15+ years right now. I agree I am starting to see repeated problems solved in new JS languages that I've seen solved in the past. That's part of the fun in what we do for a living though. I consider myself at least mildly seasoned, but still a ton to learn from those fresh to the field and those who have been around the block at least twice. I quite well understand what WebPack is doing, and find it very useful. Anytime I find myself thinking I'll make my own recipe for a build system with custom scripting, I seek a well supported framework, you know on the off chance someone else wants to understand and contribute to the build system. I think it's a poor choice frankly to build 100% custom frameworks for building when you can use a widely adopted community choice. I was more pointing to the volatility of JS frameworks vs stable frameworks in Java like Spring. As we age in our career though it seems we should avoid condescending tones with more junior programmers though, as they may have a unique solution to problems. I've seen some junior folks get quite offended when a non-producing "seasoned" programmer gives them the "I've been doing this for 20 years" schtick, then turn around to spend a few days on a powerpoint instead of contributing to the team. Anyways, I don't want to rant.
  - jorgeleo 9y ago
    I hear you. Instead of thinking about a build system (custom or not), I normally begin by trying to keep the project simple enough that file copy is my build and deploy mechanism.
    - studio_monolith 9y ago
      I am a semi experienced dev, about seven years of experience. I know what you are saying, and I agree it should be kept simple. I only picked up gulp last year, and honestly I use it to just automate the stuff I was doing before. Basically all my build system does is concatenation, minification, and preprocessing css to add browser prefixes. Oh and live reload my browser whenever I make a change. It's honestly refreshing and a huge time saver.
- mthamil 9y ago
  I don't mean to be rude, but you clearly aren't talking about the same kind of application. I have worked on a SPA before that used knockout and jquery with an ASP.NET MVC backend and Razor-rendered 'templates'. It was a much different beast than an angular or react app.
  - neosavvy 9y ago
    I agree we aren't talking about the same apps. I don't know if folks much consider vanilla JS / JQuery apps Single Page Applications. I think (but am not sure) that all SPAs are built these days with Angular, React, Ember, Elm, Vue, or some other framework I haven't paid attention to. Usually tied into Restful webservices that don't do any templating server side unless it's via Isomorphic JS. Maybe I got it all wrong though.
  - jorgeleo 9y ago
    I am observing that you are right, there is no definition globally accepted by the community on what an SPA is. For me, a better definition is the one that it is independent of the technology used to implement it. An SPa is a way to structure an app, is not a vendor feature or a tool. While is true about nowadays angular et all are the tools commonly used to create SPA, the tool shouldn't have the power to change the definition, so your knockout MVC is still an SPA. If the OT chose a complicated set of tools to develop an SPA, then is his decision and the difficulty lies in his decision of the tools chosen, not on the SPA type of app.

jorgeleo 9y ago

Doing SPA commercially for years now, never needed any of those: webpack, babel, gulp, grunt, etc. If the developer understands the technology that they are built upon he will realize that there is no need for them. Surely they add nice things, but in my experience, they add nothing that worth the learning curve. BTW, I have 25+ years developing software, so I kind of consider my self a "seasoned" programmer, and I can tell you, I am not put off by technology, if anything else, every once in a while, I get a good chuckle out how the javascript world is reinventing what has been done 20 or 30 years ago. And I don't know many people that get to be "seasoned" programmers and that they get put off by what the new kids are doing. Actually, I don't know any at all. Most of the time the reaction is: Do you remember when we did something similar on that old xyz computer? Yeah! and we had to do a, b and c to adjust to the lack of memory space, now this library is wasting it (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15472325)

seekbeak 9y ago
None of them? Are you just doing everything vanilla js/html/css with no build tools, or just using bash/npm scripts?
- jorgeleo 9y ago
  Nothing beyond jQuery, Bootstrap at the core. Sometimes some libraries for UI components like datatables.js, or a datetimepicker, but that it is.
  - neosavvy 9y ago
    Does anyone else even have a desire to work on the apps you are contributing to with you?
    - jorgeleo 9y ago
      <sarcasm> I guess you must still be living in your parent's basement because you must not have many bills to pay </sarcasm> LOL Now seriously: Quite the opposite, I always receive comments on the simplicity of my code. Also, I code so the user has a pleasant work experience, and also so the CPU executes the code faster, I don't put much attention to the comfort of the next developer, but I am always willing to show and explain what I did and why.
      - varenc 9y ago
        Are any of the apps you made public? :) Also sounds like you’re working in a small group? I’ve found large teams will value clarity and maintainabiliy lots more.
        jorgeleo 9y ago
        Lots of my work is under very restrictive NDAs, so not much public, all though heavily used internally by my clients.
      - neosavvy 9y ago
        Wow, ok. I won't get into a pissing contest, but I've solved and managed large and small teams. Folks don't like to maintain custom built software solutions that don't use common accepted best practice frameworks. JQuery is widely accepted as an anti-pattern by huge swathes of the programming community. You are right though, I've paid off most of my bills and do have a choice in what I work on anymore. I definitely don't live in a basement.
neosavvy 9y ago
Your thoughts on webpack/babel/grunt/gulp well echo my sentiment towards seasoned programmers. I've only been at this for around 15+ years right now. I agree I am starting to see repeated problems solved in new JS languages that I've seen solved in the past. That's part of the fun in what we do for a living though. I consider myself at least mildly seasoned, but still a ton to learn from those fresh to the field and those who have been around the block at least twice. I quite well understand what WebPack is doing, and find it very useful. Anytime I find myself thinking I'll make my own recipe for a build system with custom scripting, I seek a well supported framework, you know on the off chance someone else wants to understand and contribute to the build system. I think it's a poor choice frankly to build 100% custom frameworks for building when you can use a widely adopted community choice. I was more pointing to the volatility of JS frameworks vs stable frameworks in Java like Spring. As we age in our career though it seems we should avoid condescending tones with more junior programmers though, as they may have a unique solution to problems. I've seen some junior folks get quite offended when a non-producing "seasoned" programmer gives them the "I've been doing this for 20 years" schtick, then turn around to spend a few days on a powerpoint instead of contributing to the team. Anyways, I don't want to rant.
- jorgeleo 9y ago
  I hear you. Instead of thinking about a build system (custom or not), I normally begin by trying to keep the project simple enough that file copy is my build and deploy mechanism.
  - studio_monolith 9y ago
    I am a semi experienced dev, about seven years of experience. I know what you are saying, and I agree it should be kept simple. I only picked up gulp last year, and honestly I use it to just automate the stuff I was doing before. Basically all my build system does is concatenation, minification, and preprocessing css to add browser prefixes. Oh and live reload my browser whenever I make a change. It's honestly refreshing and a huge time saver.
mthamil 9y ago
I don't mean to be rude, but you clearly aren't talking about the same kind of application. I have worked on a SPA before that used knockout and jquery with an ASP.NET MVC backend and Razor-rendered 'templates'. It was a much different beast than an angular or react app.
- neosavvy 9y ago
  I agree we aren't talking about the same apps. I don't know if folks much consider vanilla JS / JQuery apps Single Page Applications. I think (but am not sure) that all SPAs are built these days with Angular, React, Ember, Elm, Vue, or some other framework I haven't paid attention to. Usually tied into Restful webservices that don't do any templating server side unless it's via Isomorphic JS. Maybe I got it all wrong though.
- jorgeleo 9y ago
  I am observing that you are right, there is no definition globally accepted by the community on what an SPA is. For me, a better definition is the one that it is independent of the technology used to implement it. An SPa is a way to structure an app, is not a vendor feature or a tool. While is true about nowadays angular et all are the tools commonly used to create SPA, the tool shouldn't have the power to change the definition, so your knockout MVC is still an SPA. If the OT chose a complicated set of tools to develop an SPA, then is his decision and the difficulty lies in his decision of the tools chosen, not on the SPA type of app.