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I'm wondering, since the explosion of Javascript frameworks, is there any staistics about how many backend devs move away from their stack into the JS stack ?

I'm wondering, since the explosion of Javascript frameworks, is there any staistics about how many backend devs move away from their stack into the JS stack ? What and why they move then ? What they value ? Beauty vs pragmatism ? Pure static typing vs gradual typing ? Pure backend vs universal stack ?

virtualwhys 7y ago
Scala developer unwittingly switched over to Angular + Typescript. I would love to code Scala across the board but the value proposition that frontend frameworks provide is too compelling to ignore -- code splitting/lazy loading, strong UI support (via Ionic), fantastic tooling (VS Code + Angular CLI), standard app structure, etc. Now the backend is a fairly dumb API that just shovels JSON to/from database with some Akka messaging mixed in here and there for websocket based content. Never would have imagined leaving Scala.js, which is amazing in its own right, but the vast majority of frontend work has migrated to Typescript for a reason.
yogthos 7y ago
Once nice thing with Clojure is that it targets both the JVM and Js runtimes. All the devs on my team work on full stack, because we don't really see the separation. It's the same language, same tooling, and often same libraries. On top of that, Clojure ecosystem is a lot more stable than Js. Library APIs don't keep randomly changing, there isn't an explosion of frameworks. My team has been using Reagent/re-frame for the past 4 years, and it just works. Whenever a new version comes out we just bump up the dependency. What's more interesting is that Reagent is built on top of React, and React itself went through many breaking changes over the years. Yet, Reagent API remained stable throughout that time. I think that's a testament to how well it was designed from the start.
- viebel 7y ago
  I completly agree with yoghtos. One of the main reasons, Clojure is not as famous as it could be in the developer community, because it has a reputation of a language that is hard to learn. I hope that my book will attract many non-Clojure devs inside our wonderful Clojure community.
  - passthejoe 7y ago
    How soon before you release more chapters?
didibus 7y ago
I don't know. But if it helps, I did not. And I know of zero colleague or friend who moved away from a traditional backend environment into a JS one. I've been a backend dev in Java and C# for a good 5 years now. Just one data point though. I did see people move to say Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, Rust, Go, F#, Erlang and the likes, which are arguably other mainly backend languages and ecosystems. Edit: For front end yes. Like I myself know JavaScript/HTML/CSS and use ClojureScript as well for frontend work. I understood your question more as if any backend dev had moved to using Node.js. away from more traditional backend systems.

virtualwhys 7y ago

Scala developer unwittingly switched over to Angular + Typescript. I would love to code Scala across the board but the value proposition that frontend frameworks provide is too compelling to ignore -- code splitting/lazy loading, strong UI support (via Ionic), fantastic tooling (VS Code + Angular CLI), standard app structure, etc. Now the backend is a fairly dumb API that just shovels JSON to/from database with some Akka messaging mixed in here and there for websocket based content. Never would have imagined leaving Scala.js, which is amazing in its own right, but the vast majority of frontend work has migrated to Typescript for a reason.

yogthos 7y ago

Once nice thing with Clojure is that it targets both the JVM and Js runtimes. All the devs on my team work on full stack, because we don't really see the separation. It's the same language, same tooling, and often same libraries. On top of that, Clojure ecosystem is a lot more stable than Js. Library APIs don't keep randomly changing, there isn't an explosion of frameworks. My team has been using Reagent/re-frame for the past 4 years, and it just works. Whenever a new version comes out we just bump up the dependency. What's more interesting is that Reagent is built on top of React, and React itself went through many breaking changes over the years. Yet, Reagent API remained stable throughout that time. I think that's a testament to how well it was designed from the start.

viebel 7y ago
I completly agree with yoghtos. One of the main reasons, Clojure is not as famous as it could be in the developer community, because it has a reputation of a language that is hard to learn. I hope that my book will attract many non-Clojure devs inside our wonderful Clojure community.
- passthejoe 7y ago
  How soon before you release more chapters?

didibus 7y ago

I don't know. But if it helps, I did not. And I know of zero colleague or friend who moved away from a traditional backend environment into a JS one. I've been a backend dev in Java and C# for a good 5 years now. Just one data point though. I did see people move to say Scala, Clojure, Kotlin, Rust, Go, F#, Erlang and the likes, which are arguably other mainly backend languages and ecosystems. Edit: For front end yes. Like I myself know JavaScript/HTML/CSS and use ClojureScript as well for frontend work. I understood your question more as if any backend dev had moved to using Node.js. away from more traditional backend systems.