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What is happening with the web stack now is a sort of renaissance with an unprecedented pace of activity. It's easy to feel overwhelmed, which is why I started

What is happening with the web stack now is a sort of renaissance with an unprecedented pace of activity. It's easy to feel overwhelmed, which is why I started a local meetup group that has now grown to 800+ members, all wondering the same thing: where do we start and what is worth investing our time in? Through conversations and presentations we learn what has worked well for others. Gradually, I expect the "storm, norm, perform" cycle to work its way out in the JavaScript community as consensus starts to build around which tools and frameworks are best. That is already happening to some extent. I don't think bemoaning the state of rapid innovation in the web stack is terribly useful; rather we need experienced developers (unbiased ones, preferably) to curate their collection of JS tools and resources and publish it for the benefit of others. One of the talks I've been wanting to give for a while is simply a "3000 ft survey of the JS landscape" or similar - mapping out the territory in terms of client-side MVC, server side JS, build tools, static code analyzers and tracers, libraries, etc. (If anybody knows of existing efforts to curate such a list, I'd love to know about them)...

napoleond 12y ago
Exactly. "Oh no! Too many people are publishing their code! Developers have too many excellent options (along with many awful ones)!" It's true that our community could use a renewed focus around best practices, and it's true that the stack itself is way more complicated than it needs to be. In that sense, I don't disagree with the point of this article at all, but it's important to remember that when things grow organically they will tend to get messy, and the alternative (somehow structured growth, governing bodies, etc) is far worse.
- coldtea 12y ago
  >Exactly. "Oh no! Too many people are publishing their code! Developers have too many excellent options (along with many awful ones)!" I fail to see the "many excellent options". Awful ones are, on the other hand, abundant. And even those that are decent have the other issues the article mentions: they are short-lived, with developers soon moving to the next shiny thing etc.
- tracker1 12y ago
  Organic growth tends to have a lot of weeds, insects and other hazards. I've been loosely following a lot of projects for several years now... it's hard to even keep a broad awareness at this point. That doesn't even count the platform/systems tooling that I'd honestly rather not think about... Chef, Puppet, now Ansible... Hadoop, MongoDB, RethinkDB, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Redis, Couch, etc... Hapi, Express, Koa ... NGINX, HTTP2/SPDY, Varnish, etc... Cloud-VMs, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, Joyent, Linode, Digital Ocean... OpenStack, Varnish, Docker ... It goes on, and on... there's too much to keep up with awareness of... let alone what needs to be dug into at this point. It's honestly a bit overwhelming. I just want to get back to whelmed... I'd really like to be doing more time coding, which right now, I'm spending more time on platform stuff... evaluating packages in npm/github isn't so bad.. much more than that, it gets interesting.
smrtinsert 12y ago
I can't possibly count the number of times people have tried to create such lists. I feel like it's every other day. Javascript is definitely in danger. I feel like its just hurtling down a trajectory of becoming the assembly of the web. The library churn is not helping.
- drderidder 12y ago
  I'm thinking of things like TodoMVC. There's an abandoned list on nodejs.org that categorizes many of the earliest npm modules. A lot of those modules have matured and are still in use. MicroJS.com is another one I'd probably reference. Curation is a problem in most languages, especially popular ones. Java definitely has the same problem, and anyone wanting to develop native cross-platform apps is faced with similar bewildering choices.
- wtbob 12y ago
  > I feel like its just hurtling down a trajectory of becoming the assembly of the web. IMHO that's the best possible thing which could happen to it. JavaScript is a hideous, ugly, horrible, broken language. But so is machine code, and it doesn't matter because I can write in real languages and let a Sufficiently Intelligent Compiler™ figure out how to encode my program. If I could write in a real language and have it compiled to JavaScript, I'd be a lot happier about writing browser-based apps. (I'm still not happy about every single web page demanding executable code in order to, e.g., display a blog entry, but that's a different issue)
  - pldpld 12y ago
    You can! https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript, https://github.com/swannodette/om https://github.com/swannodette/om
yaddayadda 12y ago
Some of the storm, norm, perform can be figured out by looking on the stats on different repositories (e.g. https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=language%3AJavaScript+and+stars%3A%3E100+and+updated%3A%3E2014-12-01&ref=searchresults&s=stars&type=Repositories&utf8=%E2%9C%93 https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=language%3AJavaScript+and...). I think a good attempt at providing a "3000 ft survey of the JS landscape" is http://alpha.ideavis.co/529cc5f http://alpha.ideavis.co/529cc5f I'd love to see an automated tool that could aggregate stats from a range of JavaScript repositories (e.g. GitHub, NPM, Bower) into something like Dustin's graphic.
raquo 12y ago
There are A LOT of curated lists on github for JS and everything else, for example: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sorrycc/awesome-javascript https://github.com/sorrycc/awesome-javascript

napoleond 12y ago

Exactly. "Oh no! Too many people are publishing their code! Developers have too many excellent options (along with many awful ones)!" It's true that our community could use a renewed focus around best practices, and it's true that the stack itself is way more complicated than it needs to be. In that sense, I don't disagree with the point of this article at all, but it's important to remember that when things grow organically they will tend to get messy, and the alternative (somehow structured growth, governing bodies, etc) is far worse.

coldtea 12y ago
>Exactly. "Oh no! Too many people are publishing their code! Developers have too many excellent options (along with many awful ones)!" I fail to see the "many excellent options". Awful ones are, on the other hand, abundant. And even those that are decent have the other issues the article mentions: they are short-lived, with developers soon moving to the next shiny thing etc.
tracker1 12y ago
Organic growth tends to have a lot of weeds, insects and other hazards. I've been loosely following a lot of projects for several years now... it's hard to even keep a broad awareness at this point. That doesn't even count the platform/systems tooling that I'd honestly rather not think about... Chef, Puppet, now Ansible... Hadoop, MongoDB, RethinkDB, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Redis, Couch, etc... Hapi, Express, Koa ... NGINX, HTTP2/SPDY, Varnish, etc... Cloud-VMs, Azure, Amazon, Rackspace, Joyent, Linode, Digital Ocean... OpenStack, Varnish, Docker ... It goes on, and on... there's too much to keep up with awareness of... let alone what needs to be dug into at this point. It's honestly a bit overwhelming. I just want to get back to whelmed... I'd really like to be doing more time coding, which right now, I'm spending more time on platform stuff... evaluating packages in npm/github isn't so bad.. much more than that, it gets interesting.

smrtinsert 12y ago

I can't possibly count the number of times people have tried to create such lists. I feel like it's every other day. Javascript is definitely in danger. I feel like its just hurtling down a trajectory of becoming the assembly of the web. The library churn is not helping.

drderidder 12y ago
I'm thinking of things like TodoMVC. There's an abandoned list on nodejs.org that categorizes many of the earliest npm modules. A lot of those modules have matured and are still in use. MicroJS.com is another one I'd probably reference. Curation is a problem in most languages, especially popular ones. Java definitely has the same problem, and anyone wanting to develop native cross-platform apps is faced with similar bewildering choices.
wtbob 12y ago
> I feel like its just hurtling down a trajectory of becoming the assembly of the web. IMHO that's the best possible thing which could happen to it. JavaScript is a hideous, ugly, horrible, broken language. But so is machine code, and it doesn't matter because I can write in real languages and let a Sufficiently Intelligent Compiler™ figure out how to encode my program. If I could write in a real language and have it compiled to JavaScript, I'd be a lot happier about writing browser-based apps. (I'm still not happy about every single web page demanding executable code in order to, e.g., display a blog entry, but that's a different issue)
- pldpld 12y ago
  You can! https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript https://github.com/clojure/clojurescript, https://github.com/swannodette/om https://github.com/swannodette/om

yaddayadda 12y ago

Some of the storm, norm, perform can be figured out by looking on the stats on different repositories (e.g. https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=language%3AJavaScript+and+stars%3A%3E100+and+updated%3A%3E2014-12-01&ref=searchresults&s=stars&type=Repositories&utf8=%E2%9C%93 https://github.com/search?o=desc&q=language%3AJavaScript+and...). I think a good attempt at providing a "3000 ft survey of the JS landscape" is http://alpha.ideavis.co/529cc5f http://alpha.ideavis.co/529cc5f I'd love to see an automated tool that could aggregate stats from a range of JavaScript repositories (e.g. GitHub, NPM, Bower) into something like Dustin's graphic.

raquo 12y ago

There are A LOT of curated lists on github for JS and everything else, for example: https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sindresorhus/awesome https://github.com/sorrycc/awesome-javascript https://github.com/sorrycc/awesome-javascript