4 ms·

How much experience do you have working with JS?

by spion 6y ago

austincheney 6y ago
I have been writing it full time about 13 years. I love writing in this language, and TypeScript even more. I am just frustrated by what appears to be some combination of insecurity, false expertise, and a vehement lack of passion in the work force. If I want to be happy I should move on to a different technology stack, but I really enjoy making products in this language.
- BigJono 6y ago
  It's funny, I have about 13 years experience, have been senior in both enterprise, start-ups and everything in-between, and have basically the exact same view about front end dev as your original post. Except I fucking hate using Typescript, and totally wasn't expecting to see you mention you like it, given all the other stuff. IME all the same people that overengineer everything with god awful dependencies are the same ones pushing super hard for typescript on every project I'm on. When they get their way (as always, since everything is decided democratically and everyone is dragged down to the level of the worst dev on the team), they write the worst typescript ever. On my last project, one of the people championing typescript defined some constant strings containing css breakpoints as the type 'string | int'. Rather than getting knocked back as one of the dumbest lines of code in the history of front-end, this somehow generated 3 pages of discussion in code review then got left in. I'd give the person a pass, assuming they'd never used a typed language before, except (a) they were senior and (b) they're the one that wanted types. These "seniors" lack even the most basic understanding of the shit they're using, but feel the need to impose their opinions about libraries, tooling and languages constantly. I don't feel like I'd mind using TS at all on my personal projects, but on work projects with average devs it just adds another entire layer of complexity that they spend hours and days and weeks and months wrangling with instead of writing any code that might be remotely useful, by say, maybe implementing a business requirement, or doing anything that makes the company money instead of pissing away millions in salaries playing npm lego. Plus, although I'm not familiar with any of it since I'm never the one pushing for TS, and so never the one setting it up, I've seen people spend absolutely ludicrous amounts of time tinkering with webpack and fussing over TS integration with 3rd party libraries and whatnot. I'm surprised you haven't run into more of these people that just seem to use TS as a complexity multiplier for every bad engineering decision they make. Like spending 6 months setting up Gatsby or Next isn't costly enough for them, so they decide to tack on 3 months of TS integration and 'upskilling' for 3000 combo points, when they already (more or less, usually less) know how to write Javascript.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - austincheney 6y ago
    TypeScript is nice when you are working with data structures because everything can be defined as interfaces, including functions and methods. This allows you to identify errors as you are writing code instead of having to execute it. Of course this only works if you make use of strict type definitions. TypeScript is like steroids in that it only makes you more of what you already are, which could be quite negative. TypeScript is not a supplement for missing discipline. > I'm surprised you haven't run into more of these people that just seem to use TS as a complexity multiplier for every bad engineering decision they make. AngularJS claims to be TypeScript but most instances of Angular code rarely make use of type definitions, which then defeats the whole point of TypeScript and then only contributes to spaghetti and tech debt.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      AngularJS doesn't do TypeScript, Angular does.
  - deckard1 6y ago
    > some constant strings containing css breakpoints as the type 'string | int' yeah this really is the fundamental problem with TypeScript advocates. They seem to come in two different breeds: A) people that would rather be doing Haskell but are forced to use JavaScript because that's where the jobs are and see nothing at all wrong with type inference and error messages that are 10 lines long and completely indecipherable by actual humans, and B) people that have never used a language that isn't JavaScript and have no clue how to structure type interfaces within an actual system (you end up with partial/omit and optional fields every-fucking-where and no rhyme or reason behind anything). For some stupid reason this entire industry seems to suddenly believe that a 40+ year old debate of static vs. dynamic typing was settled because Microsoft came out with TypeScript.
    - spion 6y ago
      This really isn't true, and TypeScript is fundamentally different from most other typed languages (except perhaps for typed Scheme / typed Racket) and as such is often used in different ways. You should look into the differences.
- spion 6y ago
  Similar situation here. I disagree that frameworks are the problem though. Build tools, especially related to CSS and assets are IMO the biggest issue. TypeScript's support for monorepos could also be better. Things have improved a lot since 2009 however, IMO. There was barely a concept of modularity at that time, the tools (e.g. AMD / requirejs / r.js) were way worse and managing the state of the DOM was a pain, jQuery or otherwise.

How much experience do you have working with JS?

by spion 6y ago

How much experience do you have working with JS?

I have been writing it full time about 13 years. I love writing in this language, and TypeScript even more. I am just frustrated by what appears to be some combination of insecurity, false expertise, and a vehement lack of passion in the work force. If I want to be happy I should move on to a different technology stack, but I really enjoy making products in this language.

BigJono 6y ago
It's funny, I have about 13 years experience, have been senior in both enterprise, start-ups and everything in-between, and have basically the exact same view about front end dev as your original post. Except I fucking hate using Typescript, and totally wasn't expecting to see you mention you like it, given all the other stuff. IME all the same people that overengineer everything with god awful dependencies are the same ones pushing super hard for typescript on every project I'm on. When they get their way (as always, since everything is decided democratically and everyone is dragged down to the level of the worst dev on the team), they write the worst typescript ever. On my last project, one of the people championing typescript defined some constant strings containing css breakpoints as the type 'string | int'. Rather than getting knocked back as one of the dumbest lines of code in the history of front-end, this somehow generated 3 pages of discussion in code review then got left in. I'd give the person a pass, assuming they'd never used a typed language before, except (a) they were senior and (b) they're the one that wanted types. These "seniors" lack even the most basic understanding of the shit they're using, but feel the need to impose their opinions about libraries, tooling and languages constantly. I don't feel like I'd mind using TS at all on my personal projects, but on work projects with average devs it just adds another entire layer of complexity that they spend hours and days and weeks and months wrangling with instead of writing any code that might be remotely useful, by say, maybe implementing a business requirement, or doing anything that makes the company money instead of pissing away millions in salaries playing npm lego. Plus, although I'm not familiar with any of it since I'm never the one pushing for TS, and so never the one setting it up, I've seen people spend absolutely ludicrous amounts of time tinkering with webpack and fussing over TS integration with 3rd party libraries and whatnot. I'm surprised you haven't run into more of these people that just seem to use TS as a complexity multiplier for every bad engineering decision they make. Like spending 6 months setting up Gatsby or Next isn't costly enough for them, so they decide to tack on 3 months of TS integration and 'upskilling' for 3000 combo points, when they already (more or less, usually less) know how to write Javascript.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- austincheney 6y ago
  TypeScript is nice when you are working with data structures because everything can be defined as interfaces, including functions and methods. This allows you to identify errors as you are writing code instead of having to execute it. Of course this only works if you make use of strict type definitions. TypeScript is like steroids in that it only makes you more of what you already are, which could be quite negative. TypeScript is not a supplement for missing discipline. > I'm surprised you haven't run into more of these people that just seem to use TS as a complexity multiplier for every bad engineering decision they make. AngularJS claims to be TypeScript but most instances of Angular code rarely make use of type definitions, which then defeats the whole point of TypeScript and then only contributes to spaghetti and tech debt.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    AngularJS doesn't do TypeScript, Angular does.
- deckard1 6y ago
  > some constant strings containing css breakpoints as the type 'string | int' yeah this really is the fundamental problem with TypeScript advocates. They seem to come in two different breeds: A) people that would rather be doing Haskell but are forced to use JavaScript because that's where the jobs are and see nothing at all wrong with type inference and error messages that are 10 lines long and completely indecipherable by actual humans, and B) people that have never used a language that isn't JavaScript and have no clue how to structure type interfaces within an actual system (you end up with partial/omit and optional fields every-fucking-where and no rhyme or reason behind anything). For some stupid reason this entire industry seems to suddenly believe that a 40+ year old debate of static vs. dynamic typing was settled because Microsoft came out with TypeScript.
  - spion 6y ago
    This really isn't true, and TypeScript is fundamentally different from most other typed languages (except perhaps for typed Scheme / typed Racket) and as such is often used in different ways. You should look into the differences.
spion 6y ago
Similar situation here. I disagree that frameworks are the problem though. Build tools, especially related to CSS and assets are IMO the biggest issue. TypeScript's support for monorepos could also be better. Things have improved a lot since 2009 however, IMO. There was barely a concept of modularity at that time, the tools (e.g. AMD / requirejs / r.js) were way worse and managing the state of the DOM was a pain, jQuery or otherwise.