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You have ruined JavaScript

• CmonDev 12y ago
  It's like a decorative tuning of a broken car. But it was already broken to begin with. The problem is that everyone is too familiar with how to drive that specific brand of broken cars.
  • VMG 12y ago
    If you actually read TFA it's more like using an airplane as tractor.
    • fnordfnordfnord 12y ago
      You might find this amusing. http://www.airtractor.com/ http://www.airtractor.com/
• Drakim 12y ago
  I keep reaching the conclusion that frameworks are evil and libraries are awesome. Frameworks promise to organize your code and keep things structured, but the inherent verbose nature of JS frameworks ends up harming more than the structure helps. Ultimately, if naked JS is too difficult to manage due to the lack of types and interfaces, I much prefer to use another language that translates to JS, rather than attempting to force it onto the JS language, because it always becomes messy and half-baked.
  • Nemcue 12y ago
    > (..) but the inherent verbose nature of JS frameworks ends up harming more than the structure helps Does that statement actually mean anything? I don't see how it's anything but nonsense. Also note that AngularJS (which is what's being discussed) is a library.
    • Bahamut 12y ago
      In addition, the frameworks actually help you write less code, and certainly more organized and modular code. The article comes off as whiny without really giving any argument for the viewpoint other than essentially "this pattern sucks because I say so"
      • gldalmaso 12y ago
        So long as you never run into an edge case the framework was not designed to deal with. But oh, the framework itself makes it very hard for you to have a workaround. But that only happens... very often. The difference between a framework and a library, IMO, is control. You forfeit control to the framework in exchange for less code. But then you depend on it for your every feature. Also, when the next big framework comes along that promises you even less code writing. It usually is non-trivial to make them work together, if at all. you just might end up with a legacy framework on your hands or face a complete rewrite. Disclaimer, I work with legacy code written on top of JSF 1.2 and Richfaces 3. It probably seemed more organized and modular at the time. It's not.
    • arethuza 12y ago
      Actually, from the AngularJS FAQ: "AngularJS fits the definition of a framework the best, even though it's much more lightweight than a typical framework and that's why many confuse it with a library." https://docs.angularjs.org/misc/faq https://docs.angularjs.org/misc/faq [NB I was curious as I haven't used Angular and I thought it was a framework and I wanted to check to see if I'd got things completely wrong!]
      • lebek 12y ago
        They can call it a framework all they like, and obviously that word means different things to different people, but I've found AngularJS is more useful when described and treated as a library - a library for building a front-end framework. AngularJS might exhibit some of the trappings of a framework (e.g. inversion of control), and it has some of the components a front-end framework would need: routing, templating, networking... but these components aren't tied together in a way that impresses an overall architecture. Calling Angular a framework leads developers to assume architectural decisions have been made when they haven't.
  • arethuza 12y ago
    You might like the "Why I Hate Frameworks" discussion (rant) from a while back: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12 http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12 Although it's ranting about Java frameworks rather than JavaScript a lot of the complaints look rather familiar. Having said that, I don't think anything in the JS world has reached the baroque complexity once regarded as normal in the enterprise Java world. [NB Note my comments on that discussion - I had not long finished rescuing a monster of a Java enterprise application where the simplest thing needed to go through about 30 layers of abstraction (I did actually count them) from a page being submitted to the underlying message being sent over MQ - it seemed to be a point of honor to combine every feature of J2EE with every design pattern to do the simplest things. Having multiple huge jar files in the classpath each 97% identical to the other just added to the sense of adventure when you clicked on something.]
    • dwd 12y ago
      There's also Steve Yegge's epic rant http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.au/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com.au/2006/03/execution-in-king...
      • arethuza 12y ago
        A quick Google for "FactoryFactory" led me to this wonderful page: http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server/RequestProcessorFactoryFactory http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/apidocs/org/apache/xmlrpc/server... I know it's a bit unfair to pick on that particular document - but I'm worried as a long recovered abstraction addict to what degree I actually thought things like that were ever a good idea.
        • vidarh 12y ago
          Java code is one of those few things that managed to successfully parody itself.
    • mattmanser 12y ago
      You mentioning Java actually reminds me, what I find bizarre about the recent trend in javascript is that they're creating the boiler plate on purpose. In Java the boilerplate was a creation of the language, but in javascript it's a creation of the community! It's like some sort of sick joke. The stuff I hate most is the boilerplate that means you find crappy little singletons everywhere when all that was needed was a function. And for the love of god, a function that's named and not pointlessly assigned by a var because you're mono-linguistic and haven't realised yet what the actual point of functions are yet. Huge chunks of the javascript in the web site I've taken over were done by someone who loved these patterns, this is an example of his favourite one, pointless and led to colossal code bloat as he used it over and over for basic handlers. function instantSearch() { var instantSearchObject = { config: { animSpeed: 250 }, init: function () { this.findComponents(); this.bindEvents(); }, findComponents: function () { this.searchBlockCollection = $('.search, .entry-search'); this.searchInputCollection = this.searchBlockCollection.find('input:text'); }, bindEvents: function () { var self = this; this.searchInputCollection.on({ 'focus': function () { var currentInput = $(this), currentSearchSuggestionsBlock = currentInput.parent().siblings('.search-suggestions'); currentSearchSuggestionsBlock.slideDown(self.config.animSpeed); }, 'blur': function () { var currentInput = $(this), currentSearchSuggestionsBlock = currentInput.parent().siblings('.search-suggestions'); currentSearchSuggestionsBlock.slideUp(self.config.animSpeed); } }); } }.init(); } Nigh on 30 lines of code, so few lines that actually do something. I tend to refactor them when I can so I can see what they're actually doing, the following code should do exactly the same thing (without me testing it): function bindSearchBox() { $(".search input, .entry-search input") .on("focus", function () { $(this).siblings('.search-suggestions').slideUp(250); }) .on("blur", function () { $(this).siblings('.search-suggestions').slideDown(250); }); } Hmmm, even just refactoring that tiny bit of code shows that there might even be a bug there, or at least pointless code, I'm not sure why he's sliding the search results up on focus, they don't stay open.
  • Touche 12y ago
    Please name a UI platform where you don't use frameworks. Android activities/fragments = a framework. WinForms = a framework. ncurses = a framework. Unity / Unreal3 = a framework.
    • simias 12y ago
      I'm not familiar with your other examples but I object to ncurses being called a framework. In my understanding of the word a framework defines to some extent how your code needs to be organized and architectured, I don't think ncurses fits this description. It's more like a terminal-based drawing library.
      • yoklov 12y ago
        Thats what people typically market it as, but when you use it, it has mor in common with various GUI toolkits. Lots of windowing, and the like, but not much drawing. Not sure if that makes it a framework, though.
    • frik 12y ago
      HTML5 with CSS and JS ;)
      • nailer 12y ago
        Most people use a data binding binding framework these days.
        • deleted 12y ago
          [deleted]
    • 1ris 12y ago
      The unix way: Textfiles as in and output.
      • Cthulhu_ 12y ago
        Using the POSIX standardized utilities and scripting framework.
  • marknutter 12y ago
    To me, there's really only two choices. You can use someone else's framework, or you can create your own. For applications above a certain level of complexity you are forced to choose one of those paths. There simply is no way to avoid it. Both are valid choices of course, each with their own pros and cons. But don't fool yourself into thinking frameworks are somehow evil. What I think you mean when you say that is "other people's frameworks are evil" and your frameworks (that you build with libraries) are awesome. That may be true, but keep in mind, when you build your own framework, you now have become the maintainer and de-facto teacher for both your application and your home-rolled framework you created to build it. As long as you're cool with globbing on those responsibilities and you feel confident you can help other developers get up to speed on your custom framework's architecture, then it's a fine choice.
• michaelochurch 12y ago
  I've come to the conclusion that this non-programming programmer "design pattern" fad is a way of obfuscating mathematical and computational concepts while making them no less hard (as we see by them often being poorly used) but seem less hard (and, paradoxically, more intelligent due to buzzword compliance) to the businessmen who, because of programmers' weak professional identity, call the shots. Curried function? Too mathematical. Let's call it a Factory. Tree-walking algorithm? Let's call it a Visitor. Sinusoidal curve? Again, too mathy. Let's call it the Vibrator pattern. Lots of words get spilled, mediocre employees remain employed, good people leave or get fired while trying to fight the current of stupidity, and nothing gets done. Brilliant! Now, you can go a step further by creating a system to monitor those mediocre employees, making them basically employable while bringing down the top, and call it "Agile" when it's the exact opposite of agility.
  • Dewie 12y ago
    For all the talk of abstraction by so many programmers, I wonder how many of us just really want metaphors. Ways of organizing and relating to code that are at least vaguely familiar. But then some programmers start talking about abstract math and category theory, and many people recoil because it is too abstract, or because it is so abstract that it is more general than the most immediately obvious metaphor (Functors are kind of like boxes, but not always. You should think of them like computational contexts instead). Of course metaphors have their place; there is no need in making things less relatable just because. But at some point you may have to abandon the comfort zone of trucks being a specialization of a more general car blueprint.
    • brudgers 12y ago
      I think it's more concrete. FactoryProviderProviderProviders provide a common set of procedures for programmers to provide programs [sorry, second cup of coffee]. All that framework makes the landscape familiar and allows the procedures which worked for generating Java code to work when a person wants to generate JavaScript. It provides space for algorithms for writing programs. The tradeoff is that it will never be done in a way that optimizes on logical insight. Simple currying would be simpler but the boss still might not understand it, and it's better culturally if the boss doesn't understand sixty lines of boiler plate than twelve lines of mathematical reasoning. The advantage is that the programmer can know, if I do these things I will get close to the result without worrying over much about the degree to which I might lack deep understanding. On HN there are plenty of people comfortable with the idea of factories as curried dispatch constructors. But that's not the typical case.
• swalsh 12y ago
  I loved Angular when i first stumbled on it. Binding was cool... the rest of it, i'd throw away and be really happy.
  • jiaweihli 12y ago
    You may want to take a look at knockout.js then.
    • slowmotiony 12y ago
      People tend to overlook knockout, but it really is great at what it does.
  • taude 12y ago
    Second vote for Knockout.Js. We use it as a base for building up out own framwork/patterns. It's got a couple of benefits, too: 1) It's easier for non OO-devs to understand, especially when coming from a JQuery-only background. Because it's mostly dealing with two-way data-binding, and separating your DOM from yoru code via a ViewModel. 2) it's a lot easier to make custom bindingHandlers than it is Angular's Directives. (And you'd be surprised - or not - at how many web devs even stuggle with KOs simple bindingHandlers syntax) 3) it's easier to work with straight JQuery widgets without a lot of re-wrapping kung-fu, so when you find a component you want to use, you can get it into your project in a straightforward way. (In a pinch you can write some functions on you KO ViewModels that access JQuery directly) 4) You might/might not be creating a SPA app that requires the routing API 5) You're free to build your own service layer for interacting with your crazy service (we have legacy Soap-based WSDL that we manipulated into JSON) All of this could be build in Angular, too, and that would have some potential benefits, mostly potentially around testability, but won't only have integration tests, so...
  • nailer 12y ago
    If only binding could be as simple as telling JS you would like a binding somewhere, using a particular template, with some particular data object. var someBinding = new Ractive({ el: .class-where-id-like-a-binding, template: aMustacheTemplateYouLoadedWithRequiresTextPlugin data: {some: object} }) At least you're now a ractive.js expert.
• mercurial 12y ago
  I can sympathize with the article, but on the other hand, when you reach a certain level of complexity, OO kind of forces you to use dependency injection. Which means providers and factories of some sort for short-lived objects, at least if you want to have testable code. I don't know if it's "enterprise hand-holding bullshit", but having seen code with and without DI, the DI one is definitely easier to work with and refactor. This doesn't mean Angular is not over-engineered, since I don't use it I have no opinion on the matter.
  • chmod775 12y ago
    Yeah. You're pretty much right. The solution is to not use OO. JavaScript is not that good at it anyways.
    • jimmaswell 12y ago
      I really am not seeing a problem anywhere. OO and the structure that follows from it, which is what ends up being seen in this instance, seems like a perfectly reasonable way to write these programs. Programming in an inherently object-based thing like the DOM without objects.. why?
      • zoomerang 12y ago
        Saying "OO is Evil" is the flavour of the month. Functional Programming is the new cool kid on the block. This would, in theory, be a good thing. Unfortunately legions of Javascript fanboys have recently noticed that they don't have the keyword 'class' in the language, but they do have functions and have decided this means that it's a functional programming language, and they knew better than everyone all along. They'll then follow it up with some perfectly nice procedural code and tell themselves it's functional with a nice little pat on the back.
        • nobleach 12y ago
          I don't know if any of the "cool kids" believe Javascript is a functional language. Can one write code in a functional STYLE in Javascript? (can they write higher order functions, can they write functions with no side-effects, could they build monads) Sure, it's entirely possible - just like it is in Ruby, Python, and pretty much any decent language. I think what some of the push is, is to write javascript in more of a functional style as they feel it's more elegant. (I could be way off base though... I haven't been "cool" in years)
• boobsbr 12y ago
  This type of writing is getting really tiresome. "Enterprise sucks, frameworks suck, X language sucks..." You don't like, but other people like it, get over it. Just don't use them and stop complaining all the time.
  • remon 12y ago
    I suppose what's really tiring is that this sort of writing is upvoted by enough people to make it hit the front page. The magic formula is basically : "Bait title" + "personal opinion that is not necessarily backed by any real world experience and expertise". There won't be that many good developers that actually worked on projects with a huge code base and that support the notion that DI, frameworks and so forth are "bad". The other half up-voted this post and the top comments apparently.
  • philtar 12y ago
    I like it because it's about technology and it's entertaining. I used to complain about the content but now I accepted what comes up and learned to ignore any title with "2048" in it.
  • coldtea 12y ago
    >You don't like, but other people like it, get over it. Just don't use them and stop complaining all the time. Yes, it's like there's these things called "opinions" and people are posting theirs and trying to compete for mindshare. Instead everybody should just do whatever thing he prefers, and nobody should attempt to convince others that this or that way is better. We are all unique snowflakes, after all, and it's not like an industry or profession needs best practices... /s
    • boobsbr 12y ago
      This post is not a constructive discussion, it's ranting. Ranting is tiresome.
      • coldtea 12y ago
        Well, not sure why it's not constructive. For one, it gives examples of the abuses he describes, and analyzes them (e.g the SO example).
• guard-of-terra 12y ago
  I still write inline javascript blocks in my internal /admin service. Who wants to touch me?
• pilif 12y ago
  It's the same pattern that repeats itself all over the place. We've seen it with Java, with Ruby, heck, even with PHP. And now with JS: As applications grow, we tend to search for tools to help us cope with the growth. After doing similar (but still slightly different) things over and over, we start building abstractions and with every thing our abstraction can't deal with, we make them more complicated. Whether you use the official name of your thing ("factory") or you just run with your own idea and term - the outcome is always the same. As a library, you feel the need to be abstract enough to cope with every feature request ever asked from your library and there will be tons of feature requests and tons of little parts people want to customize. And honestly, don't we all prefer using some public API of a self-contained library to patching said library (think of the maintenance as that library gets updated)? This isn't about ruining a language. This is about making the right choice of library or about the decision of building your own little customized thing that exactly fulfills your requirements (and nothing else), but as your requirements change, you're going to add abstractions yourself and suddenly you're back at the AbstractSingletonProxyFactoryBean, though you might have chosen a different name that nobody but your team understands. As a library author, try to resist the feature creep; try to be opinionated ("I'm really sorry, but logging isn't pluggable. You want to log to your XML based logging server? That's fine, but you'll have to build your own thing or use a different framework") then you remain accessible and buzzword-free, even though that might cost you some users in the short term. Language has nothing to do with this.
  • anon4 12y ago
    An abstraction is not useful, in fact it's downright harmful, if it does exactly the same thing as what it abstracts over, but more verbosely. A lot of these patterns you're used to seeing in Java stem from Java's static nature. Here's a car factory in javascript: function makeCar(dealerName) { return new Car(dealerName); } And here's a configured car factory: var myCarProvider = makeCar.bind(null, "my dealer"); It makes precisely zero sense to create abstractions that reimplement core language features. That would be like writing a C function to add two uint8_ts, or a macro that expands to inline assembly to convert a float to an int32_t. You already have these things built-in, you don't need a gorillion enterprisey patterns.
• PhilipA 12y ago
  The author might be confused by AngularJS, but all of the projects I have converted from simple JS to Angular have more than halved the amount of code needed, and made the applications much more easy to maintain.
  • remon 12y ago
    I had to scroll down too far to find this.
  • bsaul 12y ago
    i completely agree. I'm 100% against bureaucratie , but accusing angular of being bloated is a bit unfair. It does has its weird part (like the service/factory pointed in OP) but in general code is much much lighter using the framework. As opposed to , let's say, spring, which transforms a simple project into a gigantic mess of configuration files and abstract annotated code.
• fauigerzigerk 12y ago
  It's even worse. In Java the whole factory/provider approach was down to a limitation of the type system. Yes they (we) went completely overboard with it and the ridicule is deserved. But what on earth is the justification for using that pattern in a dynamically typed language that lets you tack anything onto an existing object without controlling its creation?
  • Bahamut 12y ago
    I too was interested in what decisions spurred this design with application using Angular at one point, and there is a talk from ng-conf by one of the core developers of Angular that I think illuminates this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OGGsf1ZXMs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OGGsf1ZXMs It boils down to managing complexity in complex web apps.
    • insin 12y ago
      So it's a ComplexComplexApplicationComplexityManager.
• pavlov 12y ago
  So much of the bad stuff in enterprise-style web frameworks is basically a software reinvention of classic bureaucracy. Concepts like inversion of control are meaningful, but applied in accreting layers they turn APIs into a re-enactment of Kafka's The Castle. The application developer is left holding the receiver of the telephone that supposedly allows him to receive calls from the Castle. If only he can get the right person at the other end of the line, then everything will certainly be sorted out! The Castle is there to serve the developer, so of course there is someone at the Castle who cares: it must be that he just hasn't got the word yet... "My dear Land Surveyor," replied the Superintendent, "how on earth should I know all the sons of all the under-castellans?" "Right," said K., "then you'll just have to take my word that he is one. I had a sharp encounter with this Schwarzer on the very day of my arrival. Afterwards he made a telephone inquiry of an under-castellan called Fritz and received the information that I was engaged as Land Surveyor. How do you explain that, Superintendent?" "Very simply," replied the Superintendent. "You haven't once up till now come into real contact with our authorities. All those contacts of yours have been illusory, but owing to your ignorance of the circumstances you take them to be real. And as for the telephone. As you see, in my place, though I've certainly enough to do with the authorities, there's no telephone. In inns and suchlike places it may be of real use, as much use say as a penny in-the-slot musical instrument, but it's nothing more than that. Have you ever telephoned here? Yes? Well, then perhaps you'll understand what I say. In the Castle the telephone works beautifully of course, I've been told it's going there all the time, that naturally speeds up the work a great deal. We can hear this continual telephoning in our telephones down here as a humming and singing, you must have heard it too. Now this humming and singing transmitted by our telephones is the only real and reliable thing you'll hear, everything else is deceptive. There's no fixed connexion with the Castle, no central exchange transmits our calls further. When anybody calls up the Castle from here the instruments in all the subordinate departments ring, or rather they would all ring if practically all the departments -1 know it for a certainty - didn't leave their receivers off. Now and then, however, a fatigued official may feel the need of a little distraction, especially in the evenings and at night and may hang the receiver on. Then we get an answer, but an answer of course that's merely a practical joke. And that's very understandable too. For who would take the responsibility of interrupting, in the middle of the night, the extremely important work up there that goes on furiously the whole time, with a message about his own little private troubles? I can't comprehend how even a stranger can imagine that when he calls up Sordini, for example, it's really Sordini that answers. Far more probably it's a little copying clerk from an entirely different department. On the other hand, it may certainly happen once in a blue moon that when one calls up the little copying clerk Sordini will answer himself. Then finally the best thing is to fly from the telephone before the first sound comes through."
• thruflo 12y ago
  I switched to angular explicitly for the dependency injection. Registering a singleton so it can be passed in to other functions and mocked out easily in tests is something I find extremely useful. Whether the framework should provide three different ways to register the object is another matter (a design decision along the harder-to-grok vs accommodate-variety axis) but, frankly, if you don't like factories, don't use them.
• antocv 12y ago
  For all the negative comments about FactoryProviderBeanCreator whatever style of enterprise-programming: There is a point to it all. The point is software exists mostly within its socio-economic context - software is mostly made for people by people and will be used by people. The SingletonProxyFactoryBean enterprise-programming tries to solve people-problems, it tries to waddle through dependencies between libraries, frameworks, language specifications, implementations, organizational structure and various teams within an organization. This angular.js enterprisy-feel tries to do the same - push responsibility onto the others, or separate responsibility down (separation of concerns) where nobody actually has to do anything but "configure". Or "run" it. Or just "buy" it. Thats the ultimate goal of enterprise and this style of programming - which eventually leads to somebody being required to know a language on top of a language on top of a language to adapt it to the business needs. Its the same reason why abominations such as SAP and Microsoft Dynamics (or basically any closed source very expensive suite of software) exist - those products are on the altar of Enterprise, they fit well to the organization and culture of capitalism. They fulfill the goal of "just buy it" or "just install it" and it will do _everything_ a manager or team thinks of. So the programmers make it so - sure the program doesnt actually do anything without the correct set of configurations and options, but now its not an application thats developed inhouse, its a product we buy and can get support for, kind of.
  • tomp 12y ago
    I think there is a different point to it all: Java doesn't have first-class functions. In OCaml (and without doubt other programming languages as well), you can use a function to make "objects"/"values" that you want made ("constructors"). If you want to parametrize the function ("factory"), you just partially apply it to some arguments. If you need to make other objects before you can make the desired object ("dependency injection"), you pass other functions as arguments. If you want to do something else instead of creating a new object (e.g. "singleton pattern"), you write a different function. It's just functions, all the way down.
    • antocv 12y ago
      Its not a Java problem as this JavaScript demonstrates. Its not a language feature X problem. There is something which drives people to make a factory for a dynamic and another static language. Instead of writing the thing they want they write a thing to give them what they want.
• outside1234 12y ago
  One word: Ember.js I can't for the life of me understand the popularity of Angular.js.
• pron 12y ago
  Sigh. I can't say anything about Angular because I've never used it. But this constant ridicule of "the Enterprise" is getting on my nerves. Obviously, software design patterns change a lot over the years. Old practices are abandoned -- sometimes more slowly than we'd wish -- and others replace them. But much of this criticism comes from the fact that the critics 1) use technologies that are not mature enough to have growing pains, and 2) don't really know how software is made in the real world. RE 1, the factory/provider/whatever pattern, comes in real handy when 2 years from now, a crucial ODE library that your air-defense system uses, absolutely has to be replaced by something else. And it's not like a kid could write a quick re-implementation in Go over the weekend. As for 2, many of these patterns have been designed for software that does not resemble web applications at all. Just to give a sense of how out-of-touch SV developers can be with regards to the software world at large, IBM, Oracle and SAP combined employ more people than Google, Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn combined, ten times over; there are more Java developers in the world than the entire population of the entire Bay Area. I'm not saying that the maligned "enterprise" patterns have a place in a client web framework, or that some of them aren't dated. All I'm saying is, stop treating some software patterns that you think are unnecessary just because all you build are CRUD web-apps as inherently stupid. They are not. One of the reasons people working on CRUD web-apps can "move fast and break things", and just "rewrite the whole thing in a couple of weeks", and say stuff like "what's wrong with a simple 'new'?" is precisely because the software they develop is, frankly, not that complicated. I would also like to remind the author that his beloved Erlang was developed in the very same environment he thinks so little of.
  • JanezStupar 12y ago
    I would just like to say that thank God Joe Armstrong was building Erlang instead of James Gosling. At the same I would like to say that I am sorry that Joe Armstrong didn't design Java instead of James Gosling. I am also extremely sorry that Rob Pike, Ken Thompson and Robert Griesemer didn't get around to building Golang before there was Java...
    • Cthulhu_ 12y ago
      And yet, Go (and other modern languages) wouldn't look the way they did if it wasn't for Java.
• bitL 12y ago
  Is actually anyone considering JavaScript not to be "ruined" by default in the first place?
  • edwintorok 12y ago
    One of the LibreSSL blog posts linked to this rant about JavaScript, it goes quite nicely with the AngularJS rant: https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1403_02-08_mickens.pdf https://www.usenix.org/system/files/1403_02-08_mickens.pdf
    • guard-of-terra 12y ago
      Thank you, an awesome read!
• rafekett 12y ago
  I feel like these articles come up every few weeks. people don't understand angular (particularly why DI is useful) and criticize it for being verbose or confusing, usually using the provided sample code -- would it hurt to spend some time actually trying to understand the framework than to dismiss it on face because it looks kind of like something people don't like in Java?
  • XorNot 12y ago
    This would happen less if the sample code highlighted the benefits more. Sample code which shows me how complex something simple is kind of fails at that - and worse, it fails to let me grok why the way they're doing it is better. Where does it all fit in? What will this translate too? To some extent I wonder if we make the mistake of using "hello world" too readily, whereas what we want to do is show the end product and then start with what that does to simple processes to make it work.
  • davexunit 12y ago
    "Dependency injection" is just a silly term for formal parameters. Wow, we can make a function more generic by minimizing the number of free variables! Who knew?
    • seanmcdirmid 12y ago
      Dependency injection is more like dynamic scoping, whereas most formal parameters are lexically scoped.
      • davexunit 12y ago
        Fair point, but that makes DI a really poor implementation of dynamic scoping.
  • mac1175 12y ago
    Some people consider it verbose? Wow. After starting with backbone and then later on discovering angular, I can confidently say it is not as verbose as other well known frameworks (such as backbone).
• mmaldacker 12y ago
  This is just the same rant as the classic "Why I hate frameworks" http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12 http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12 but applied to Javascript instead of Java.
• denibertovic 12y ago
  This article really hits the nail on the head. In the comments, many people confuse layers of indirection with dependency injection. Those are 2 separate things, you can have dependency injection and not have 100 layers of indirection that confuse the hell out of people. And while we're at it. Why the is there a term "Dependecy injection"... it's freaking argument passing to functions, and it's been around a really really long time. I'd expect this kind of crap from the JVM and other OO only worlds, but JS is more functional then it is OO, you have higher order functions...why the hell would you want to think in OO terms?
• sklivvz1971 12y ago
  It's not the language, it's the people... Most developers are... not very good. It's a fact of life. Abstractions are a phase in learning how to code: I am not surprised that people reinvent the wheel in [insert-currently-trendy-platform]. I am surprised that people think that a LANGUAGE can make any difference. Languages are tools, stop pretending they make any difference and fix the people :-)
  • CHY872 12y ago
    No. The purpose of a programming language is to remove the incidental complexity leaving only the intrinsic complexity of the task. All languages have the same expressive power in principle, but it is intrinsically easier to perform certain tasks in certain languages.
• ses 12y ago
  This indictment of angular and 'enterprise' frameworks is pretty one-sided and self-righteous. I hate the bureaucratic and restrictive nature of some frameworks too, but you can't dismiss the entirety of them and the problems some of them solve because of it. It's very easy to criticise without suggesting or showing any better alternative. For example... if you are a software manager with the 'power' to choose an entire stack for a new product, what would be your choice and how would you justify it on criteria such as: availability of documentation, developer skillset, testing, security, performance, platform compatibility, time to market etc? Unfortunately all this type of 'boring' shit that enterprises deal with, they have to deal with for a reason. If you don't like that then you have a problem with the structure of the economy, larger businesses, and their politics as well as the technology.
• rquantz 12y ago
  This is silly. It basically amounts to "waaaah I don't know angular!" because they saw funny words I a stack overflow example. Factories etc., in angular are not the same as the Java equivalents. And you're usually not going to be using providerProviders in your application code, that stuff goes in libraries that, yes, need to be configurable. Angular is a boon for writing testable, changeable javascript apps. Just because one of the features happens to use words you don't like in java doesn't mean JavaScript is ruined.
  • heidar 12y ago
    I don't think unit tests should dominate the architecture of your applications. I hear this a lot from the angularjs crowd. I also disagree with architecturing your applications for things that might need to be changed in the future (but probably won't). That is something from enterprise and Java world and a lot of people including myself dislike it. I know people who love it though and that's fine, as long as I don't have to work with them. :)
    • camus2 12y ago
      I think one should write testable code,past a certain "size" because somebody sometimes will have to maintain that stuff. the question is should it be "unit testable" or is it ok just to write integration test. I think the code you write should be unit testable,doesnt mean the units cant depend of apis you didnt write(while already tested). should you expose everything for the sake of being able to mock stuffs up? I'm dont know the answer. to that question.
    • rquantz 12y ago
      Yes, most of the code will never change. But some of it will, and it's sometimes hard to predict what that will be. So, to an extent, all of your code needs to be written so it's changeable in the future. It doesn't have to be enterprise java style to be flexible -- just well encapsulated, and testable code helps with that. Also, it seems like people in this thread who haven't used angular see that word -- factory -- and think of endless crappy java abstractions. You are overestimating the overhead that angular is bringing into your application in this case. A factory is just a component that can be shared between controllers. It's a singleton, like a lot of sharable components in vanilla Javascript applications, just with a defined way of being injected into the controller, and a way of declaring dependencies. If your problem is with object oriented programming in general well... I can't help you there.
• colemorrison 12y ago
  Angular can be confusing, but the speed of development you can achieve with it has helped give me back many hours of my life.
  • rbanffy 12y ago
    Caution: do not underestimate the problem the extra complexity added creates.
• flyworldhan 12y ago
  I totally understand the point. You only need to do is choose the right 'framework' for your work. Dont make it angryler.js
• KhalPanda 12y ago
  Sorry, you only get 9/10 from me, not enough swearing.
• zoomerang 12y ago
  Another case of "I don't understand something so I'm going to just say it's too complex and stupid". The author completely misses the point of service injection in Angular, and then goes on to offer a simpler "solution" that doesn't even remotely do what service injection is trying to do. Here's the thing - Inversion of Control exists for a reason. Once your codebase gets to a certain size it becomes far, far more manageable to work with loosely coupled components that have no direct knowledge of each other. These abstractions are a good thing. Lord knows how many projects I've had to fix because some idiot decided that "Architecture" was just some silly crusty of enterprise thing, and "Frameworks" are too opinionated - so instead they decide to ignore 50 years of industry conventions and write a spaghetti code pile of shit (But at least there are no factories!) Whether you're using procedural, functional, or object-orientated style - A large codebase is still going to be unmaintainable if you don't understand how to write loosely coupled components. (More specifically, don't write a large program - write lots of small ones and compose them together).
  • CHY872 12y ago
    You may be confusing abstraction and indirection. Of course writing large software is hard, and of course we want to make it easier. The real question is whether we want to do it the same way in Javascript that we did in Java, and the answer's probably no. Also, a large codebase can be very easily maintainable with tightly coupled components. The only reason you would want to loosely couple them is if you have a reasonable belief that you might want to swap out the implementation at some point, and even then you can usually do it fairly transparently by adding the indirection when it comes to it.
    • zoomerang 12y ago
      > Also, a large codebase can be very easily maintainable with tightly coupled components Agreed, but having worked on large codebases it's usually easier to plan ahead and decouple from the start - it can be hard to decouple components later when you didn't plan for it. It's also much easier to properly unit test when you can trivially inject a mock. Of course this is only relevant if you're building a large project. The typical web app just doesn't need it.
• protonfish 12y ago
  It makes me so happy so see some hate for Angular. I decided to specialize in front-end web development a few years ago because the state of back end frameworks was so abominable. I escaped to HTML, JS, and CSS so I could quietly develop in peace. Now we have Angular, Knockout, Bootstrap - please for the love of all that is good, just stop. This nonsense is nothing but mountains of technical debt. When I tell this to framework fanboys, they counter with "But you can get things running so quickly using frameworks." This is the definition of technical debt (doing things fast now at the expense of doing things slow later) but it is also complete nonsense. I challenge anyone to a contest to create a quick font-end site where you can use as many Rube Goldberg contraptions as you like and I only use jquery. So then when they back down because they know they will lose their excuse is "But Chris, you are just so smart - the average dummy developer can't do what you do." My final rebuttal is "If you agree that I am such a genius, why won't you listen to my advice?"
  • jordanthoms 12y ago
    We actually did this - we built our entire app using just jquery - and then we spent a month tracking down issues with applying state changes to the DOM before we gave up and rewrote the thing in Angular. We had a few bugs at first but they were quickly fixes and then we had had a much more solid application, since we only had to worry about keeping our data structures straight and the two way binding would take care of showing/hiding the elements, updating values, etc. Whole classes of bugs we were spending ages tracking down before which happened after a particular sequence events just couldn't happen anymore. If you are doing something simple and quick by all means just use jQuery or plain JS - the advantage of the more powerful frameworks comes into play when building bigger things with complex scenarios happening. The challenge to make a quick front-end site is meaningless - the more meaningful challenge would be to write a complex real time application with both and compare, which of course we have already done.
    • protonfish 12y ago
      You built a poor application, then rebuilt it - one would expect the second one to be better no matter what frameworks you used. I still believe I could do it faster and end up with a more maintainable code base. The tools I use to keep my code maintainable are good practices, frequent refactoring, and clear thought. No library can replace those. Why do you need a 2 way binding to take care of showing and hiding elements? Only a 1-way binding is required. I am currently working on an app that uses Knockout and we are having horrible performances issues - all of these 2-way bindings are checking for everything all the time. There are fixes for this - fixes that would not be needed if we didn't build it with duplo.
• haberman 12y ago
  What the actual fuck is this? I read this as "in order to do a hello world, you must first create a hello world service to create the hello world factory to create the hello world sercice so you can print hello world on the screen." Well, you misunderstood, and now you're ranting according to your misunderstanding. I'm not an Angular, expert, but I'm pretty sure that the situation is this: 1. "Hello world" does not require any dependency injection whatsoever. (ie. it does not require services, providers, or factories). Note: if this was not true, I would agree with this rant completely. 2. If and when you decide you want dependency injection, if what you want to inject is a simple value, you can just provide it directly, without using a service, provider, or factory. 3. If and when you decide that you want to provide a dynamically-generated value, you can specify a function instead which will get called whenever the value is requested. This is called a "factory." 4. If and when you decide that you want your factory to just "new" an object instead of running an arbitrary function to provide the value, you can register that object type as a "service." 5. If and when you decide that you want to configure that object type first, you can register it as a provider. If you want to stay at step 1 forever to keep things simple, groovy. This is a example of success, not failure: you pay for only as much complexity as you actually want to use.
  • nlh 12y ago
    As a newbie to all of this stuff (and yet still reading through this thread trying to keep up), thank you. This was the clearest explanation & summary I've read.
    • badman_ting 12y ago
      Note that you'll find nothing of the sort in the Angular docs. I believe this is at least part of what the author is really railing against. If the docs were crystal clear as to how Angular actually works, doing stuff in Angular would be a lot easier and keep devs from getting pissed-off enough to write rants like this.
  • yulaow 12y ago
    You should absolutely propose to put this into the main page of the documentation of angular.js, please.
• skore 12y ago
  I have no idea why the author tries to judge a framework by a stackoverflow post. A lot of the examples are needlessly verbose and some are even wrong, like the "providerprovider" he rightly mocks. Well, how about we look into the actual documentation? https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/providers https://docs.angularjs.org/guide/providers What you find is that you define a provider like so: myApp.provider('Car' //... and then, if you want to configure it, you inject it with the suffix 'Provider' into your config function (called when launching the app): myApp.config(["CarProvider", function(CarProvider) { //... So - what's so ridiculous about that? ---- Next up he still does not seem to understand the difference between Services, Factories and Providers. That's cool and all and might even prompt some to, you know, investigate further and assume that maybe they haven't understood it correctly yet before clicking "must blog now" button. He jumps the shark (straight to ridicule) by making up his very own nonsense: > Of course we we can configure providers if we need to configure our applications. How else could we configure our applications and make them configurable for our enterprise scale configurable applications. You know, actually the distinction makes perfect sense. A provider is an object that you know you will want to configure globally before it is being used (data source providers, url routers etc.). A service sits on the other end of the spectrum and is being called freshly right when you need it (more in the direction of the pure objects he has in mind). Factories sit in between those two - they cannot be configured ahead of the application, but allow for more internal functionality instead of just returning an object. Having the distinction helps people editing the code figure out what they want to do and others, in turn, to understand what the other programmer was up to. Yes, you can use them somewhat interchangeably, but that's life for you: things overlap. How well and strict they are used is up to the programmer. Now, I'm not bashing plain, custom OOP Javascript - If that's your thing, by all means do it, knock yourself out! But what's with the hating on people who seem to have a different approach? Wouldn't it be healthier to first try to understand where they are coming from? Surely they can't all be totally in love with wasting their time on "ruining it". ---- In the end what this comes down to is that the author doesn't seem to have sufficient experience with the kinds of environments that make the structures in AngularJS not just pleasant, but actually a life saver. That's fine - we don't need to all have the same perspective. I just don't get this style of argumentation that boils down to "don't understand, must bash". He also makes fun (as does one of the SO comments) of this quote from the (old?) angular docs: > An Angular "service" is a singleton object created by a "service factory". These service factories are functions which, in turn, are created by a "service provider". "The service providers are constructor functions". When instantiated they must contain a property called $get, which holds the service factory function. You know what? Fuck it. When I tried to understand the Servicy/Factory/Provider distinction, I stumbled upon the same SO post and you know what ended up being the perfect way of understanding it? Forcing myself to go back to that paragraph right there until I understood it. > No, you are not reading a thesis, you are reading the angular docs apparently. If it were a thesis it would probably be trying to explain a solution to some sort of problem instead of describing a made up solution to a made up problem. (Actually, that's not strictly true because academics are in a world of their own too but close enough). > It's okay, I don't really do enterprise any more. I'm as sceptical as the next guy about frameworks, hate "enterprise" with a fiery passion and I escaped academia before it fried my brain. But I don't think myself too cool to do my due dilligence before dismissing something that I very obviously don't understand yet.
• weavie 12y ago
  Factories are singletons. Services are not. Providers let you configure stuff before they are invoked.
  • camus2 12y ago
    are you sure? i thought the 3 apis provider/factory/service return only one instance per application.
    • weavie 12y ago
      Darn it, you are right. Not sure how I'd come to that conclusion. Thanks for putting me straight.
• cs702 12y ago
  This reminded me of "Why I Hate Frameworks," a great post from 2005 in the Joel on Software forums: http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12 http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/?joel.3.219431.12 -- my favorite quote from it: "I'll get around to building [it] one of these days, as soon as I've got my factory factory factory all up and running." Frameworks often are helpful, but as project complexity increases they tend to make it harder to get things done.
  • imthatguyama 12y ago
    Sure, meet you at callback hell.
• julius 12y ago
  For me, the most helpful feature of AngularJS is the separation of DOM and data. If you just want to use that feature, but you do not want all the framework stuff, you actually can. Here is my way of doing it: https://github.com/julius/AngularLite https://github.com/julius/AngularLite Disclaimer: I actually like the framework stuff. I just made this to use it in an existing project (which is too big for a total conversion into the framework structure).
• marknutter 12y ago
  I wish a more thoughtful criticism of angular without all the vitriol was getting up-voted to the top of HN rather than this drive-by blog post. It's clear that anti-framework people are up-voting to validate their own world views.
• justinhj 12y ago
  This web page is one of those that is just unreadable on mobile.
• epayne 12y ago
  Thank you Rob. Although there are perhaps some things to nit-pick about your post, I think you have expressed something important about recent changes (last 5 years) to attitudes in the JS community.
• jebblue 12y ago
  Good article, I do a lot of Java coding that isn't complex at all, the stuff he shows in the article looks like the EJB people got hold of JavaScript and went wild. That's sad because I'm getting back into the front-end more and finding jQuery has stood the test of time and is actually fun to use.
• joekrill 12y ago
  This is just plain absurd. We are not in a one-size-fits-all industry. Far from it. Just because you don't quite understand the benefit of a very specific framework (that, incidentally, you know virtually nothing about) does NOT mean it is not useful, or that it has "ruined" anything. We pick the best tools for the job. In some cases that actually IS Angular. In many cases, it is not. But to make broad generalizations like this does nothing but show a lack of understanding.
• ff_ 12y ago
  The only thing I'm able to say after this piece is: "WOW."
• brudgers 12y ago
  Screw the technical merits of arguments for and against frameworks in general or Angular.js in particular - that's not really the point. By internet standards, it's a great article because it has an interesting topic, personal narrative, a strong opinion, a bit of humour, consistent tone, and a reasonable style. In the tradition of wistful paeans - the author is longing for a more wholesome past when JavaScripts roamed unfettered by barbed wire across a pastoral landscape of virgin DOM's [yes, intentional] and free of proletarian factory classes. It's entertainment not evangelism. Nobody whose work-a-day problems are soothed by Angular will go native because of it. It's sermon about 'those people' and the choir's Schadenfreude...and then once the act writing this comment hit 'Schadenfreude', I had to ask myself is it a good article by HN standards? Empirically, probably yes. Theoretically no. The problem with Schadenfreude is that it comes at the price of another's misfortune, and that is a route to the meanness that both entertains the internet and harms StackOverflow. Telling people that you are laughing at them is the hell of junior high bullying - it's just that cool kids get paid to do Erlang and the kids in Toughskin dungarees are getting mocked for using JavaScript boiler plate. It dawned on me that the best HN articles are written in the spirit of mudita - finding joy in the good fortune of others, not their misery unless our humor is black and shares their burden. http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html
• ilaksh 12y ago
  If you think AngularJS is too complicated, I agree. Check out Polymer and web components.
• taude 12y ago
  I don't really agree with the sentiment. I think JavaScript is being pushed harder and in much larger apps these days, which is why these frameworks and design patterns have cropped up. Try getting a large team, building a large app writing cohesive code without some of these patterns. It's true, though, maybe Angular takes it a little too far...but maybe not, I don't know, each project is different in size, scope. At first, we rewrote an app using mostly just JQuery, but it quickly turned into spaghetti. Then we added four more devs to the team because it's a pretty large project and this is when you need to start reeling in peoples coding style, and applying some design and patterns so that when a new person comes along in 8 months, they aren't totaly WTF? The author sounds like he's working on a small team (maybe just with himself, since he's writing bot the video streaming/encoding backend along with the front-end), and therefore his style of coding while effective for a team of one or two, likely won't scale up.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• facorreia 12y ago
  For the application I'm developing I've decided to keep it simple. Instead of relying on a complex framework with a lot of abstract concepts and layers, I'm using jQuery Mobile, Riot.js events and Handlebars templates. The actual application code is plain old JavaScript and I can actually understand what's going on at any given time.
• Cthulhu_ 12y ago
  I think the OP and some of the people in the comments thread just don't have the kind of experience needed to realise why Angular is the way it is. The OP does not seem to be a JS developer, definitely not with experience in larger applications or in larger / multiple teams working on the same codebase. Checking his profile, all I'm seeing is short weekend projects and a small (code size based) library; definitely not the kind of thing where using AngularJS would help out with. Just saying; if your only experience is small solo projects (instead of >10K loc, team-based projects etc), then yes, AngularJS will quickly smell of enterprise and eww, especially if based on just that one SO post from a long time ago. If however you've trudged through unmaintainable jQuery code, wrote >30K multi-team BackboneJS applications, etc, then angular is a relief. It allows you to stick to patterns, to isolate your logic, to not have an excuse to not write unit tests anymore, and to actually write an application instead of struggle with your framework or how your views get rendered and when.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• kuchaguangjie 12y ago
  Jquery & extjs is just enough, things like Angular are too complex and abstract, make programming no fun any more.
• ulisesrmzroche 12y ago
  When was the last time ya'll went 'hell yeah' when you saw the team you joined was a) was not using a framework or b) built their own? You're just begging to be swirlied, my dudes.
• taude 12y ago
  The OP got a two-fer: mixing the arguments for/against Angular and the arguments for/against JavaScript frameworks in general. I think they are separate conversations, which is evident below (or above) depending on which threads your read.
• nakovet 12y ago
  This post just remembered me of this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/245062/whats-the-difference-between-javascript-and-java http://stackoverflow.com/questions/245062/whats-the-differen...
• jimejim 12y ago
  Can we all just agree that premature patterns is similar to premature optimization and move on?
• inglor 12y ago
  What's the fuss? JavaScript attracts people who complain about solutions to problems they don't understand
• ColdHawaiian 12y ago
  > Start thinking for yourselves, ditch this shit before it’s too late and learn how to write some actual fucking code. The information is out there, you can do it. If you need handholding with factories and providers and service provider factories then consider that the world doesn’t need your bullshit code and go and get a job you’re actually good at. Stop ruining it for the rest of us. It's unfortunate that this post was written in a provocative manner with a very inflammatory tone, because once you look past its rant-y nature, I think it raises an interesting argument. From what I could tell, the gist of the post seems to be that instead of relying on someone else's pre-made, out-of-the-box general framework solution (which you have to heavily configure to your specific needs, and is so complicated that you end up needing to hire highly trained consultants), you can create simpler, more elegant solutions simply by writing them yourself from scratch. I'm not going to agree nor disagree with that argument, I'm only trying to state what I think the gist of it is.
• Zelphyr 12y ago
  Came here expecting to be annoyed at yet another post suggesting we use yet another framework. Pleased to see to see a reasonably cogent (if not a little overly antagonistic) example of why all these frameworks are crap.