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I really like the evolution of JS over the past two decades. I strongly believe the evolution of JS revolutionized the web in a positive way and significantly b
by mmcnl 5y ago
I really like the evolution of JS over the past two decades. I strongly believe the evolution of JS revolutionized the web in a positive way and significantly boosted innovation by lowering the costs for application development. For example, every corporate app these days is a web app, which is much easier to manager from an IT perspective than OS applications. Shipping working code at scale has never been easier. In my relatively short career I've seen consumers and organizations adopt innovative new applications at an accelerating rate because of this.
Is it perfect? Definitely not. JS is so easy that it also makes it easy to write bad code. Higher-level languages also consume a lot more resources. Browsers become the defacto OS (good / bad?), etc. But in general I think JS has been revolutionary and the benefits far outweigh the costs from a functional perspective.
As for the article: jQuery receives to little praise imo. At the time it was truly revolutionary. Suddenly you could make your websites interactive with just a few lines of code, and it worked in every browser! This inspired an entire generation of web developers.
- ozim 5y agoNot arguing that you are wrong but... I believe causality went other way around. Everyone started migrating to web applications so there was money in improving tooling. So push to web applications revolutionized JS tooling.
- mmcnl 5y agoI don't think so. Angular and React are made by Google and Facebook. The Bootstrap CSS framework originated at Twitter. Chrome/WebKit were developed by Google and Apple. The V8 engine inspired NodeJS. Also there was this weird time period where every app suddenly had to be isomorphic, i.e. sharing the same codebase as the webapp with the native apps. I think a lot of the initial work to deliver code at scale had to be done by Big Tech to accommodate their hypergrowth in the early 2010s.
- justsomeuser 5y agoI still have the jQuery APIs memorised, it’s often easier and more concise than the standard web APIs.