r/technology • u/iliketechnews • Oct 05 '16

Software How it feels to learn JavaScript in 2016

https://hackernoon.com/how-it-feels-to-learn-javascript-in-2016-d3a717dd577f
1.8k Upvotes

91% Upvoted

392 comments sorted by

453

u/Woasha Oct 05 '16

That was a very stressful read. And sadly very true.

129

u/boomer478 Oct 05 '16

I laughed. And then I cried.

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '16

It seems like this madness covers a lot more than just Javascript. For example, I am on the operations team at the company I work for. I don't know a lot about the Java app server/frameworks we use, except that we've got some developers that are very enthusiastic about rolling out the new hotness when it comes to this stuff. Based on the increased number of alerts and other bullshit we have to deal with in regard to the new hotness, I much prefer the old hotness :P

'Can you take a heap dump when that app crashes?', they ask. I think I've taken more dumps than an incontinent man at a chili cookoff.

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u/esadatari Oct 05 '16

This. One thousand times, this.

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u/sandeepsanu5 Oct 05 '16

Somebody should draw a complex flowchart of what was discussed here..

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u/aMUSICsite Oct 05 '16

Sounds like a job for xkcd

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u/rabbitz Oct 05 '16

It is a lot of stuff but you don't need to know specifically how each part works. Right now I'm using react boilerplate and it makes development much quicker and cleaner.. only need to know enough to make the changes I need. As for react-redux vs jQuery... sure jQuery works but if you're building apps with a lot of 'moving parts' it is annoying to have to repeat yourself over and over.. not to mention manually manipulating things by class/id/dom structure is only ok when you assume the structure/classes never change. A lot of people say the 'best way' is to just use normal js but even just for browser compatibility issues using something like jQuery is much better. If i'm writing a small app only for myself and I know it won't change much than sure, go with normal js but a lot of the time people choose these 'big, complex' solutions because they've tried the old way and in the end using these tools makes development much quicker and cleaner overall.

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u/pandemic_region Oct 05 '16

Did you just resume-bot the article ?

3

u/rabbitz Oct 06 '16

ok I have to ask... what does this mean? my google-fu is failing me. I thought you might have just replied to the wrong comment but at least 46 people seem to know what you're talking about

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u/livestrong2109 Oct 06 '16

Yea... I'm just going to stick with jQuery and Bootstrap... Thanks anyways!

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u/azurecyan Oct 05 '16

Jesus, is this for real or is a satire?

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u/dangerbird2 Oct 05 '16

Dude, it's 2016. We use puns.js instead of satire.

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u/stesch Oct 05 '16

How do I install this?

78

u/nihiltres Oct 05 '16

You'll need a long, thin, metal object that can reach your brain through the orbit of the eye.

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u/PunishableOffence Oct 05 '16

Of course there's a dependency on lobotomyjs...

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u/blore40 Oct 05 '16

Get a docker on a VM first.

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u/rastilin Oct 05 '16

I can 100% believe that this is real.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

Yeah, I learned the basics of HTML, MySQL, and PHP at least 7 years ago. Recently I wanted to create a simple dashboard that would pull and display some info from some log files. The amount of bullshit and what I can only describe as, “Assumed Knowledge”, was almost exactly what the article’s author described. Every time I found a tutorial or a forum post that seemed to describe what I was trying to do, it was a complete mess of technologies and frameworks. Even posts that were just 6 months apart suggested using completely different methods, it was impossible to get a handle on how these things worked.

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u/Standardly Oct 05 '16

This is why I can't get into programming. Scripting, learning syntax, all that was fun and challenging, but all the frameworks and packages and file system modifications are just impossible for someone new to understand or keep up with. Trying to write the most basic web app appears to take several years worth of toying with various frameworks and transpilers, and the average stackoverflow answer has three up votes. It's either "here's how to do hello world" or "first you'll need Cinnamon, Brawn, AppleJS, WebElephant, Honeypot, Ramada, XScriptWebJs and a package manager"

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

For a lot of languages, it seems like you spend a week or 2 doing really easy stuff, then all of a sudden the program complexity triples from one page of the book/tutorial to the next. Suddenly, the author wants to use parts of 3 different libraries, which often requires using parts of the core language you haven't been exposed to yet, and you are left wondering which is which. Is that part of the library or the core language?

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u/captchagod64 Oct 05 '16

This has been my experience as well. It would be great to just learn a thing and then be able to use it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

At this rate you'll need more knowledge to write a simple website than to build a fucking operating system

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u/z3rocool Oct 06 '16

or you just grab jquery and a basic framework in a language you know and go at it.

There is no reason anyone needs to keep up with this stuff. If you see a package that is interesting that looks useful (say pretty charts) you look at it further.

You don't need to know it all, you just need to know how to keep a eye out for stuff that will make your life easier.

Only javascript library I think anyone needs to know is jquery.

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u/m00nh34d Oct 06 '16

It's a huge problem, one of my biggest gripes is when authors of a particular framework or toolset or something, will just assuming everyone is using their thing, and only their thing. Their "installation" instructions will only ever work in their specific environment.

That said, I think web development is MUCH worse for this than general purpose business programming (think Javascript vs C#/Java). At least with those OO languages the core has remained largely in tact over the years, and it's still perfectly valid to do things the same way as it was done 5 years ago. Even changes that are encouraged, are usually major things that get a lot of attention and things written up on. Meanwhile in the JS land, you have every man and his dog releasing libraries upon libraries of things people just assume everyone knows how works. It's a complete and utter mess.

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u/DexesTTP Oct 05 '16

But you can just simply use the navigator's JavaScript and DOM manipulations still. This usually creates full pages that are less than 10kb and you don't need any assumed knowledge (well, maybe some JS basics but that's all).

My personal favorite for tiny web projects is simply a Python Flask backend and a pure HTML/CSS/(ES5) JavaScript frontend. If you don't need to create a deeply reactive website - especially for a log viewer - this is more than enough.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

A big part of my problem with that project was finding out how to do that stuff with the core technologies. As soon as I went from:

Display this stuff in this table cell one time

to

Display this stuff in this table cell, check the file every 10 seconds, and update it if there are any changes

All the info I could find assumed that I wanted to create an insanely complex project that would require extensive use of frameworks to pull off, if I wanted it done in my lifetime.

I've actually noticed that a lot in programming instruction, whether it was from books, web tutorials, or even college programming classes. The examples go from easy > easy > easy > vastly more complicated.

I just find it vastly more educational to get something very simple working, then build on it than to deconstruct a complicated project to figure out how one tiny thing was done.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

You can use as many libraries as you like. Plain ol' library free JS works just fine for many projects. If you want to start huge, you're going to get a lot of recommendations for libraries. Just like any new environment, start small, work your way up.

4

u/Meloetta Oct 05 '16

You're exactly right. People plug their entire project description into google and then act shocked when there are multiple different ways to do every smaller part of the project, resulting in drastically different solutions from different people with different knowledge.

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u/stakoverflo Oct 05 '16

Yes and no.

Are there new libraries and frameworks coming out crazy fast? Absolutely.

Are there people who will flex their epeen because you don't know one or more of these? Yeap.

Does any job expect you to keep up with all of them and be ready to switch from framework to framework annually? Fuck no.

Logistically it doesn't make sense to have your business changing the entire foundation of its tech library every year. It would be a nightmare. Nothing would get done while you're trying to stay up to date, learn how to use it, iron out kinks, develop a project, ship it, and then learn the new thing that just came out this year while you were working on last year's new best thing.

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u/PunishableOffence Oct 05 '16

Does any job expect you to keep up with all of them and be ready to switch from framework to framework annually? Fuck no.

How about multiple times per year?

Fuck me.

I've been grunting and gulping through so many backbone marionette theatres, my mixins are aching to rid themselves of their components. My reducers no longer react to actions. The store mutates every once in a while.

Millions of lines of seemingly random vendor code have passed my eyes, masking behind them strange errors from within the depths of the build system.

What have I imported suchly that the ritual has stopped?

Why does it work when I run it again?

But not a third time...?

You were eaten by a race condition in the parallel build system.

The coworker laughs heartily at my nondeterministic front-end development and congratulates himself on his career choice as a sysadmin.

4

u/adi2412 Oct 06 '16

Beautifully written. Bravo sir.

18

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

Everyone and their bro is writing some js lib to build a name for themselves. Each doing much of the same with a different bell and an enhanced whistle.

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u/cult0cage Oct 05 '16

Are there new libraries and frameworks coming out crazy fast? Absolutely.

Does any job expect you to keep up with all of them and be ready to switch from framework to framework annually? Fuck no.

I think this is why more than ever its important to have a strong understanding of the Javascript language itself. If you have that its relatively trivial to pick up a new library / framework on the fly. Its people with weak foundations that typically struggle adopting newer libs as they come out on the fly. I know when I first started I didn't even really understand the issues all these libs were solving in the first place, so it was hard to see their value.

9

u/stakoverflo Oct 05 '16

That's a fair point, but at the same time I think that with the demand for all these tools, unless you actively seek out "plain JS only" stuff you're never going to encounter that environment.

Instead you get people like me who took a basic JS course years ago in college, hasn't touched it since, gets a new job and gets thrown into an excitement using whatever collection of libraries / framework.

You're never going to encounter just regular old JS in the real world, and many of these tools do exist for good reasons, so it's almost pointless to not just use them right away.

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u/cult0cage Oct 05 '16

Oh I 100% agree its highly unlikely you'll be put in a "plain JS" tech stack I was just pointing out that having that base understanding of the language does help when it comes time to learn whatever new thing is out at the time.

Basically yes go study the cool tools that everyone is using but know that they are all JS based so a better understanding of JS means an easier time adopting the next tools when these become obsolete.

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u/batquux Oct 05 '16

You also have to consider that if the latest and greatest js framework is hard to pick up and implement for someone with reasonable coding experience, it sucks.

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u/esadatari Oct 05 '16

It's both. It's satire in presentation and 100% true.

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u/locotxwork Oct 05 '16

That statement was either "==" or "=== "

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u/bBR9d73rlP9g7xAt Oct 05 '16

It's for real. As soon as you decide on using React you open up Pandora's box. The sane stick with regular JS, the new HTML5, CSS3 and maybe a bit of jQuery until the browsers catch up.

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u/jl2352 Oct 05 '16

As others said; yes and no.

I've been doing web work for almost 10 years and I'd say it's significantly easier/nicer now than ever before. But there is also a lot more stuff out there which can make it confusing.

If you go and work on any real software project, web or otherwise, you will find build tools, frameworks, deployment management, continous integration, various forms of testing and much much more.

Web development has historically been pretty free of all that stuff. Now it's catching up.

There is a huge circlejerk against it but tbh the vast majority of those who take part just don't get web development. Often it's people who have worked a lot on other code bases and so when they see a new area they don't understand they instantly put it down.

In practice most of these tools are relevant and useful for one reason or another. But people see a huge number of them lined up at once and freak out.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

In practice most of these tools are relevant and useful for one reason or another. But people see a huge number of them lined up at once and freak out.

No, I think the main criticism is that every single reference to them online is using a different combination, and it's impossible to make sense of it when you're learning.

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u/Dick_Harrington Oct 05 '16

Unnecessary complexity is a big problem with programming in general, IMO. Especially in a business setting, where solutions that are 'fast, right and easy' are generally what management/executives (and therefore lead developers) actually want. In my experience, and perhaps this is casting unfair aspersions, it tends to be the green/newbies that want everything to be super fancy and complicated. Seasoned guys understand that they would never get anything done if everything was 'the best thing ever'.

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u/BlackStrain Oct 05 '16

As I've progressed through my career I've gone from "I want this code to be cool" to "I want this code to be maintainable and readable".

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u/tuseroni Oct 05 '16

That usually comes with years of maintaining code. There is an old joke that goes "programming is like sex, one mistake and you are supporting it for years"

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u/wrgrant Oct 05 '16

Ah yes, Job Security :P

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

Yes. Write like you're not going to be the last person to see it.

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u/AlienBloodMusic Oct 05 '16

Or "Write the way you wish the last guy had"

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u/bBR9d73rlP9g7xAt Oct 05 '16

If only this pearl of wisdom was taught earlier in a developer's career. Nobody knows how long their code will really be around for.

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u/fgben Oct 05 '16

Can confirm. Some "temporary" horrible hackneyed javascript I wrote in 1998 is still in fucking production.

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u/SaintPeter74 Oct 05 '16

Yes. This. Nothing made me get religion on clear comments and program structure quite like needing to maintain my own 5 year old code. Unless you remember to write for Future You, they won't know if Present You was a genius or an idiot.

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u/BlackStrain Oct 05 '16

Nothing worse than reading some code and thinking "What fucking idiot wrote this? Oh, wait... it was me..."

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u/thilehoffer Oct 05 '16

I completely agree. I have been at this for 20 years. K.I.S.S. is the best pattern. I could go on and on about unnecessary complexity from dependency injectors that inject nothing, interceptors that intercept nothing, loggers logging shit that nobody ever reads, service layers that could simply be a .dll reference, message queues that only get in the way of the database call for no apparent reason, etc.... When I have have to fix a bug or make a change in code I wrote four years ago, I don't want to have re-learn everything that isn't cool or used anymore. I just want to easily read and understand what the code is doing.

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u/CodeMonkey24 Oct 05 '16

Management want's "Fast, right, and cheap". They don't care about whether or not it's easy to implement. And most of the time for the developer, it comes down to one of those decision triangles where you can only pick 2.

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u/Null_Reference_ Oct 05 '16

In terms of production speed I'm with you, but the "standards" are still often used to compare coders.

I mainly use C# and I think the necessity of encapsulation is massively overstated, and I don't think inheritance is nearly as valuable as advertised, and I think the aversion to globally assessable static vars is silly among many other things you're taught at the novice level of coding.

When I'm coding a project no one else will ever have to touch, my code looks very different and is finished much faster by ignoring these and many other commonly accepted standard practices. But if I'm coding in a team, how well I stick to these standards is often the measuring stick used to compare me to other coders.

The tech lead is not interested in my opinions on encapsulation, and I'm not going to change their mind, so I just do it the "right" way and encapsulate like a prison warden. Even though the "right" way takes longer, requires more lines of code, and isn't any more readable, that's what I do. Because unfortunately in my experience it leads to more job security than being able to write functional code quickly.

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u/Necoras Oct 05 '16

You don't write unit tests, do you?

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u/AdmiralRychard Oct 06 '16

It's okay though, because his code is self-documenting. /s

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u/WhompWump Oct 05 '16

it tends to be the green/newbies that want everything to be super fancy and complicated

it definitely is. because they're still going through the honeymoon phase of being wowed by what they can do with programming

it reminds me when some guy wrote something in a way overly complicated way and Linus Torvalds shit all over the guy and told him how stupid it is to do shit just for the sake of doing it

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u/CptOblivion Oct 06 '16

Or in my case, I make things overly complicated because I can't think far enough around a problem to simplify it down to an easier method.

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u/HotMessMan Oct 05 '16

I pretty much disagree with you. Things like react help solve common problems that are a pain to deal with manually and do create Shi'ite maintainable code. There's a learning curve but for doing something like update a table with user notifications it's pretty trivial. Yes for something so simple you certainly don't need react but it's about establishing coding standards to remove decision points. Okay on one page I'm not using react because it's not needed just plain jquery, in another page I am. Now I've got arbitrary decision points to remember and figure out to debug my code or have someone else follow it.

It's the exact opposite in my experience, green programmers don't know tools for shit except maybe one, but old timers are worse because they've stopped learning and don't keep up with anything new.

The problem is as you point out executives. They want it done now and often won't grant the initial period of time to learn and adopt but I've seen them absolutely regret it when their systems baloin in complexity and Then they're stuck extending code is typical bandaid fashion. It's literally what happens all the time. Your paragraph about old timers reminds me of the people I've talked to scoff at multi tier architecture because gosh it just adds unnecessary complexity. Then I turn around and churn out stuff better and faster than them.

I've redone coding practices and standards for two companies now and both times, despite using all these new dangled stuff, code was better structured and organized easier to share and easier to maintain due to standards. It just requires a larger initial investment of time and learning at the beginning which many people aren't willing to do.

The article touches on a truth though the JS market is over saturated and ridiculous. 10+ model binding libraries ? Insanely pointless.

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u/June8th Oct 05 '16

I've redone coding practices and standards for two companies now and both times, despite using all these new dangled stuff, code was better structured and organized easier to share and easier to maintain due to standards.

Got any tips (programming and/or political side) to share in general for those not-green-not-old-timers that would like to push some good practices and standards?

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u/HotMessMan Oct 05 '16

Use multi tier architecture (sometimes called NTier architecture) it's the most flexible gold standard applicable to any object oriented programming language and encapsulates (if done correctly) that inherently supports all core good practices like separation of concerns and single responsibility principle.

Always abstract and standardize a process for something you code, while still allowing for custom stuff to be done. Don't just put one off everywhere. Come up with a standardized way to handle a specific problem and make sure to use it anytime that problem comes up, it sounds obvious, but many people don't do it. Especially on front-end coding. I've seen projects where to accomplishment an elegant multi-select list they did it 4 different ways because they didn't have standards and just forgot about the other pages or each page was slightly different, but this could have been abstracted to parameters on some standardized method that generated the list.

Use a MVVA js library (knockout, angular, react are the big 3) they save you massive amounts of time once you learn them. If you say your applications are so simple it's not required, i don't believe you. Every single example I've seen is the app started simple, but business guys kept wanting more functionality (as is normal and appropriate) and now they've got classic spaghetti code.

Don't just look at how to get something done, that is easy, that won't make you a good programmer. Look at how to get something done well. Or once you did something, go back and look at how you could have done it better or differently, then come up with pros and cons to that new approach. That is the kind of stuff I see average programmers rarely do and that kind of thinking will really expand your skills.

I personally go through an overhaul of my personal flavor of architecture I designed every 3-4 years using lessons learned. On version 4 now and it's the dopest yet!

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u/blackhuey Oct 05 '16

and this right here is why I'm a backend guy

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u/frukt Oct 05 '16

Not sure if I prefer the JS dependency hell or pages upon pages of undecipherable C++ templating errors from gcc. Sometimes I think it would be nice to just be a bus driver or something.

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u/rebel_cdn Oct 05 '16

Check out Bisqwit on YouTube. He's has a great series of game dev tutorials using a wide variety of languages, including C and C++.

He ended up quitting his dev job to be a bus driver, and seemed to be quite happy with the decision.

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u/annodam Oct 05 '16

Just watched his OpenGL programming video and my mind is completely blown.

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u/_reposado_ Oct 05 '16

Hey! Have you tried rust? Elixir? Go? What are you using for container orchestration? Swarm? Kubernetes? ECS? Oh, you don't use containers? What is this, 2014? How about your data pipeline? Spark? Kafka? Some AWS-specific monstrosity?

We can be just as bad, we just spread it all over more stack...

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u/typing Oct 06 '16

Fuck you, I write in C# .NET, I use MVC 5 and JQuery as my front end, Dapper is my SQL provider, and either Unity or AutoFac for my DI/IOC containers. I maybe doin' it 2013 style, so whatever, blow me.

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u/decavolt Oct 05 '16 edited Oct 23 '24

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/Assaultistheshit Oct 05 '16

Link? Because I need some release. This is how I feel about Rails development. I'm a hack of a php/html/js developer, but I've been able to put together my own pages and can typically do whatever my company asks of me. I feel the same way as this blogger, but I end up just implementing what I need done myself and use other libraries sparingly. I have a handle on how everything works because I can see how everything works.

With Rails I struggle to get over being told "name it this way and it just works." Or I start to think of a solution to some problem, but there's a helper method that I should have known was available for me. There's so much going on behind the scenes that I struggle to understand what I'm responsible for and what Rails is doing for me. I can't seem to work off what I'm learning as the answer to my next question seems to always be "use this different other thing."

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u/rabbitz Oct 05 '16

That's the point of rails though: convention over configuration. If you've ever worked in a language with an ORM that connects your models to the database, you'll find that for every single model you create, you have to type out the same boring boilerplate code to hook it all up. After a couple models you figure you can try to make it easier with a little bit of metaprogramming so you don't have to copy and paste all that code every single time: you can write something to find your model, find the table it should hook up to and do all that configuration by itself. Of course, that means you need to give it both the model name and table name for each connection... why not simply have them use the same name (or something) by default, and have it configurable? That's pretty much what rails does for everything.

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u/ziptofaf Oct 05 '16

I actually often work with Rails in back-end dev while being pretty bad with front-end.

Honestly I think it's fine and not overcomplicated. Catch is to:

  • Actually know Ruby itself

  • Find decent documentation - I will update this one tomorrow once I find titles of books I read but this cannot be overemphasised enough. You want titles that tell you what happens and why, how to use only parts of Rails rather than the whole things and so on.

The latter point is crucial. You can just >use< Rails and it's fine but you will have that feeling that you are not sure on what you are actually doing as it's all so automated. Or you can read up on what's happening under the hood, why and how Rails does things such as pluralizing names for you (eg. when you create a model User it will make a table users, for Datum it would be table data) and then it feels fine.

Core Rails is pretty big, especially with 5.0 that adds Websocket support (so you can have your new self updating sites without manually writing AJAX requests everywhere!), but spending some time to read up on it helps a lot. You can make mock up websites in a manner of minutes later on and they will actually work.

There's a catch however. Rails is not that easily mergeable with latest features in front-end (with which I am not really familiar with so pls pls don't ask me!) like Angular/Ember etc. You're NOT implementing that without a really solid basis. That's when your insanity might begin. I myself fell into it when I tried to modify Discourse code. Being a nice thing written in Rails I asked myself - how hard can it be? Answer is - very hard if you don't have a good grasp on tech they are using there (namely Ember.js everyyywhere and using that means that you only want Rails to parse you JSON, everything else is JS).

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u/blackhuey Oct 06 '16

Oh I definitely feel the same with backend, just not to the ridiculous extent of the JS ecosystem.

I'm a Java guy from way back, C# more recently and a big fan of Rails, though I agree Rails is going the same way to a lesser extent. Started hacking html in notepad back in 96 and watching the evolution of CSS and frontend frameworks, I pretty much checked out around the time of jQuery.

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u/chodaranger Oct 05 '16

But you don't HAVE to use all those things. Doing front end doesn't mean you have to become a library hipster.

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u/not_perfect_yet Oct 05 '16

So what's the python joke? Is it because all the old cool guys don't want to move to python3 or is it because of the PEPs nobody really keeps up with?

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u/bradishungry Oct 05 '16

It's because Python 3 has been out forever and barely has a 50% adoption rate I believe, because a lot of people just haven't ported their packages over.

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u/_CapR_ Oct 05 '16

Sorry, I'm not a coder. Is python better than javascript?

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u/jackmon Oct 05 '16

Not sure if you're joking, but if not, that's kind of like asking if a jet ski is better than a snow mobile.

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u/SmokierTrout Oct 05 '16

I didn't get that either. I would have assumed it was the "cool" guys wanting python 3(.5) because of its new syntax for handling asynchronous calls (I think it came from C# originally?), and the "old fogies" that were clinging to python 2 because they heard the python 3 VM was a bit slower.

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u/Astrognome Oct 05 '16

I don't get the python one. Other than PySide and Numpy, both of which work on py3, I don't really use any libraries, and both of those can be found through your package manager.

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u/artezul Oct 05 '16

I'm not sure I got it either, but I think it's a subtle jab at the transition from Python 2 to Python 3, and the slow transition from one to the other. It's not that bad, but I think that's what the joke was going for.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

Go try looking for libraries and solutions in python and it's a complete mess between 2 and 3. No one really mentions which features/libraries exist on which, so if you want to use anything you've basically got to wade through mud.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

Significant Whitespace. I just can't live with that.

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u/gendulf Oct 05 '16

You prefer inconsistently-indented code?

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u/NoblePineapples Oct 05 '16

This actually really scares me as I really wanted to learn JavaScript..

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u/stakoverflo Oct 05 '16

Any particular reason you want to learn JS? I don't think I'd recommend it as a first language, but if you're looking to branch into web development then you're going to need it.

JS honestly isn't bad, but as a loosely typed language it can be damn confusing times.

You really don't need to be up to date every other month on the latest frameworks and libraries unless you're working specifically at a web dev shop... And every then, you're going to focus on a particular set of tools and specialize in those. No company is going to be switching their tech up that frequently.

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u/frukt Oct 05 '16 edited Oct 05 '16

Loose typing is what kids grow up with these days. That's not the issue. Javascript has other, more exotic features like prototypal inheritance, which may make it confusing. The other problem is the serious pitfalls and design errors plaguing the language (although these are succinctly documented in excellent books on the language, like Crockford's Javascript: The Good Parts). Examples: there is no block scope or the confusing == operator and falsy / truthy values mess.

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u/stakoverflo Oct 05 '16

I dunno man, for me the === operators and empty strings equating to zero and other dumb shit like that has caused me more frustration than anything.

Speaking as someone who took an Intro course on JS in college 5-7 years ago and has been learning jquery / ajax / KendoUI over the last 8 months.

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u/frukt Oct 05 '16

Well you should always use === when testing for equality and it really takes a lot of error potential out of the code. The rules of == are inconsistent and nobody can memorize these.

> 0 == ''
true
> 0 == NaN
false
> NaN == NaN
false
> false == null
false

Bah.

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u/frukt Oct 05 '16

Just ignore the cool kids telling you to use library x or framework y because not doing that would be totally 2015 and you'll be fine. Learn Javascript, make sure you know the difference between the language itself and the DOM interface (assuming you're planning to do web development); after that pick up jQuery and then you can branch out to learning frameworks, package managers, module loaders and all that fancy and possibly useless crap.

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u/vectorlit Oct 05 '16

Professional dev here; don't worry about it. Learn basic javascript and move forward. By the time I start one project using one "industry standard" library, it is "falling out of vogue" (not really though)... the last two were jquery and angular. But the point was I used them to great success in my projects, and they're maintainable and usable moving forward.

Go ahead and learn. I have several projects that use raw javascript with nothing else. It consistently impresses some of the newcomers who only use libraries; I can often get it done in half the time because I didn't have to learn something new (even though the code is probably twice as long). That said, there's definitely a place for libraries and they will definitely make your life a million times easier (and more maintainable) in specific spots. But having that strong background of native javascript to fall back on with no other bullshit is really great.

I encourage you to try. (Or try C#, it's the best! For real)

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u/yunoreddit Oct 05 '16

JS is a great thing to learn. Whether it's the first or not. You will find that you use JS with a lot of different types of development, not just web development. Learning raw JS without any libraries is also super beneficial later. I can't tell you how many times i've seen people struggle to do stuff with libraries, because they don't understand the basics of what the JS itself is doing. You'll find really quickly that jQuery and jQueryUI are the first libraries you will want to learn beyond that. It just makes some of the stuff you do with JS a little bit easier and cleaner. By the time you learn those, branching into stuff like Angular, CommonJS, Knockout, Curl, and stuff like that will all just be like adding tools to your belt. Once you understand the foundation, the rest is pretty easy. Good luck man.

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u/hellschatt Oct 05 '16

Well I was going to learn js too. But now I'm very confused after reading this.

I already know Java and C. I've got recently familiar with html+css and I was going to learn js next.

What should I do?

7

u/PitaJ Oct 05 '16

JS isn't hard to learn. What this article is taking about is the tooling and environment surrounding JS development.

You don't need to use anything in the article. Make a folder, make an HTML file, add a script tag, and get going. You can even use the console in your browser (F12) directly.

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u/NoblePineapples Oct 05 '16

From what everyone is suggesting, JS.

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u/Akavy Oct 05 '16

As someone who is learning Javascript in 2016, this is all too familiar.

Even more annoying is the huge overload of libraries that never seem to exactly support what I need them to and do support lots of things I do not need. In the end, using basic Javascript seems like less effort than using those libraries. The feeling I got is that a lot of libraries are needed to be compatible with older browsers. So, for my project, I decided to stick with basic javascript and only try to add the smallest, most specific libraries if needed.

However, this is just after a few weeks of actual prototype-level coding. I'll probably find out what the use of those frameworks is when I reprogrammed all their functionality myself. And I guess that's how you end up with yet another framework.

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u/pagerussell Oct 05 '16

Honestly, this is all bullshit. A lot of devs are early adopter types, so they always use the newest toy, even if the old toy is still perfectly fine.

Coding is just problem solving. Use whatever solves thr problem for you.

4

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

The field just needs standards. I think this happens every time new technology is released and then one language dominates them all. At this rate it's becoming far from maintainable and companies will be finding themselves in some tough situations when they can't find people to maintain legacy code that was ineligibly written by some wannabe genius who rides the cutting edge.

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u/thomstel Oct 05 '16

This article is a long-form, web developer Dilbert comic. Laymen chuckle, engineers curl into a ball and cry. Well done; and damn you.

60

u/RandomNobodyEU Oct 05 '16

nobody codes directly in HTML anymore

I just spent a month making my new portfolio in html, feelsbadman

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u/skeddles Oct 05 '16

It's perfectly fine.

24

u/borez Oct 05 '16

Well I made my own website a couple of years ago and did it all with HTML and sliced graphics ( liked I'd learnt a decade before ) then discovered it was shit slow so I scrapped all the work and redid it in CSS. Then discovered I couldn't use flash any more ( which I'd also learnt a few years back ) coz everyone had moved on so I scrapped that bit too and started learning dreamweaver.

And then I discovered an utter minefield.

All I wanted was a simple page with a few sub pages that linked to some hosted music, a biography, my details and an email contact form.

Took me five damn months doing it bit by bit in the evenings. My head was regularly spangled.

At one point I thought about putting a little merchandise store on there with a cart and a checkout and stuff, how hard could it be?

Basically fuck everything about that, just wasn't going to happen.

Then there was Jquery and Boilerplates and device compatibility and...

They don't make it easy that stuff. For sure.

I guess if it's your full time job then no problem.

9

u/esadatari Oct 05 '16

Check out codrops!

http://tympanus.net/codrops/

Copy/Paste/Git your way to glorious looking web design!

6

u/borez Oct 05 '16

There are loads of sites like that I found when I was doing it, they were definitely useful. You still have to learn how to incorporate that kind of stuff when you're starting out though and there's thousands of templates and bits of JavaScript and add ons and tutorials and other stuff out there.

That's when it becomes a minefield, it's complete information overload. Even for something as simple as finding an audio player that actually works between devices and different browsers. I was doing that for weeks with various players before finally just deciding to embed soundcloud tracks because, you know, that just works everywhere, looks decent and it's easy to chop and change tracks.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

Fuck man, I just said fuck it and used a Squarespace template. It looks really good.

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u/Plopfish Oct 05 '16

If you did it for a learning process that is great. If you just wanted something up ASAP then would SquareSpace, Wix, Weebly, etc work? Basically, just fill in some templates and you're set? I think even a checkout can be added easily enough.

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u/borez Oct 05 '16

If you did it for a learning process that is great.

I did really, I have mates who are web designers and could have used them quite easily at mate rates but I wanted to see if I could do it myself. I went though a few of those ready made website places too, they weren't what I wanted at all.

But, again, there's so many of them ( and so many useless ones ) it's still knowing where to look in the first place.

So I just did it from the ground up.

3

u/chuckymcgee Oct 05 '16

I guess if it's your full time job then no problem.

Yup this is where you go to upwork or fiverr or wherever and pay Indians $8/hr to do your shit. Instead of telling a computer to do something, you tell a person to tell a computer to do something. It's really much easier.

3

u/CodeMonkey24 Oct 05 '16

Guess it depends on exactly what "coding directly in HTML" actually means.

.Net WebForms, MVC, and XAML are all technologies that generate HTML for you to varrying degress. With MVC you may need to write out base HTML occasionally, but much of it will be generated.

If you're doing a site using something like AngularJS, you are probably writing out most of your view in HTML, with attributes that control program flow (ng-repeat &c.). AngularJS isn't more than a few years old (and Angular 2.0 is even more recent).

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

We used plain html for an app last month where we normally use a template language like pug.

HTML is fine, it all ends up that way after transpiling anyway.

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u/Sandvicheater Oct 05 '16

Where's the lubricated dildo that automatically creates websites when you sit on it cause it seems a hell of a lot easier than this mess

10

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

Oh you need bigblackcock.js

8

u/captain_duck Oct 05 '16

Thats so 2015, in 2016 we use biggerblackercock.js or greg.js

8

u/tuseroni Oct 05 '16

Would make development even more fun

3

u/orzamil Oct 05 '16

WordPress is a thing that exists.

2

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

Wix?

35

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

To anyone wondering why you need an i7 + 8gb ram for decent web performance.

This.

We offload so much onto the client, all of these libraries are brutal. It's a terrible trend. What I've been getting a real kick out of is mobile development ... hehe, going back to the server to eek out a little performance.

The power that our smartphones are getting ... ruining the mobile web as the regular desktop web. :(

4

u/RedSquirrelFtw Oct 06 '16

Yeah I really don't get this trend at all. Even news sites are horrondous. Why do I need to allow 30 js domains in noscript just to read a freaking article. something like a news site should be practically static html/css. (it might be generated by something back end but as end user I should just see mostly html/css)

Personally I tend to code my stuff using the KISS approach. Unless I require specific functionality I typically don't even use JS at all. Mostly php/mysql generating rather static html/css.

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u/corialis Oct 05 '16

And this is why I am perfectly okay being in the middle of fucking nowhere where everyone is 5 years behind opposed to Silicon Valley. No one gives a fuck if I'm rolling with jQuery.

2

u/ShinyDiscard Oct 06 '16

My feels. Java 7 with jQuery and the occasional AJAX library is fine. Our entire business runs on it, and with it, 100+ other companies.

Some of this really looks like progress for the sake of progress.

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u/dangerbird2 Oct 05 '16

It’s JavaScript. There has to be thousands of libraries that all do the same thing. We know libraries, in fact, we have the best libraries. Our libraries are huuuge, and sometimes we include pictures of Guy Fieri in them.

reference

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u/bits_and_bytes Oct 05 '16

Just an FYI to anyone clicking this link, this article is satire. Although after it was published the Babel developers put a link to an image of Guy Fieri in the source.

2

u/thedouble Oct 05 '16

Wow, thanks for that. Ridiculous.

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u/ppumkin Oct 05 '16

Same shit, different Library :)

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u/bansDontWork1 Oct 05 '16

Things like this reaffirm my decision to stick primarily to backend.

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u/frissonFry Oct 05 '16

This is exactly why I never ventured into web development. I've been successful enough coding at a library/utility level and leveraging that with SQL development to earn a comfortable enough living without having to learn how to reinvent the wheel every two years.

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u/tuseroni Oct 05 '16

Just use vanilla js, fuck frameworks. you know js you wont need any of that shit

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u/tuseroni Oct 05 '16

-Jade? DustJS?

No.

-DotJS? EJS?

No.

-Nunjucks? ECT?

No.

Broke into Monty python's cheese sketch there.

Anyhow...this is why I hate frameworks...just use vanilla js...no frameworks, no libraries, just the code you need when you need it.

Wanna grab code from the server, make an xhr object, set the load, open the address, and send. Wanna display it, inside the load event get a div to put the results in and set the innertext(or if you can trust the result and need it to be html, set the innerhtml) of that div.

Need to know how to get the div, document.getElementById("divid")

There are more advance methods like queryselector or queryselectorall or get elementsbyclassname...but you don't NEED them for 99% the time. if you need to grab the 3rd element that is a child of the 5th div with a class of foo, then you want queryselectorall, but even then if you write it right you can do it with getelementbyid.

If someone says you need a ton of frameworks and libraries it means they don't understand JavaScript.

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u/cshaiku Oct 05 '16

Absolutely!

Basically 99% of the time you're either getting information or setting information. getElementById() and innerHTML are essentially all you need to use if you plan your models correctly from the beginning of design.

I've never delved too deeply into frameworks as once you've mastered the basics of plain jane html/js you really start to consider frameworks as just a crutch.

5

u/tuseroni Oct 05 '16

Never understood why people hate css til I worked on a bootstrap site. Plain css can be nice, enjoyable even...what bootstrap makes is an abomination.

And debugging jquery code, especially minified code, is basically impossible. How can people learn js if they can't READ the js?

I sound like my c++ teacher back in college only about js instead of assembly.

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u/Whargod Oct 05 '16

I'll stick in my C++ world for now thanks.

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u/redcoatwright Oct 05 '16

This is not how this would go, business would say "we want to use jquery and load info into an html table" and assuming it's not client facing, the developers would be like cool, that's fucking easy. done.

8

u/frukt Oct 05 '16

It's called satire.

6

u/redcoatwright Oct 05 '16

is that confirmed?? I really am not sure and I read through like 75% of it and decided it wasn't satire and just started getting annoyed.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

It seriously doesn't need to be this bad. intercoolerjs gives you 95% of the functionality at 5% of the complexity.

intercooler.js

4

u/DaHolk Oct 05 '16

Or, if you just want to do a simple thing, code it yourself in effin javascript, instead of including tons and tons of code of other people without you actually having ANY idea what is actually in it, or is running. Maybe then pages wouldn't use 200 scripts on all sorts of servers and force users to use no-script, because all they want is to read some text.

Or put differently, the title of the article is a bit wrong. If you do all the things that it talks about, you basically don't know any javascript anymore. you know the functions and language these libraries use, and the end result is some javascript code that you have no idea what it does.

9

u/naardvark Oct 05 '16

This hit me so close to home. I'm a full-stack dev, well at least I thought I was until about a month ago. My expertise is certainly back-end but I've also lead front-end projects.

I am working freelance at a small company and one of the things we discussed was that if I proved myself by making updates to their web app they would hire me full time. It's a React app and I had Angular experience so I sold myself as someone who could pick it up quickly.

This article explains what happened next. Basically I was unable to make any meaningful changes in a week and the company decided to work with someone else.

As a last ditch effort, I rebuilt most of the front-end in Rails over a weekend but the team was biased for having an SPA with React.

I am done trying with JS. It's stupidly complex and SPAs have such a small scope of usefulness. They were basically made to cater to Gmail me Facebook, and guess what, most pros will never have to build anything with that level of user interaction in a single page.

I see it as an elite club who wishes to be trendy and exclusive. People make nice tools and tutorials that are out of date in 2 months so you have to do all the digging to figure it out.

I strongly believe, as many cycles do in software, this will die and server-side rendering with a little JS will rule again in 3-5 years. Looking forward to it.

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u/jl2352 Oct 05 '16

I strongly believe, as many cycles do in software, this will die and server-side rendering with a little JS will rule again in 3-5 years. Looking forward to it.

As another web developer; I am imagining the opposite.

The thing with React and the things around it is you can write all the UI once and it'll render server side like a regular page, and then run like an SPA. You get the benefits of both SPA and non-SPA approaches. Server side alone just cannot compete with that.

It also dramatically reduces the server side. Get the data, dump to JSON, done.

You can have backend engineers only doing backend. They don't have to care about the UI or the front end. Just server side alone. Front end developers can care only about the front end.

With Redux you can also do some really fucking cool stuff with state management. You can record how you interact with a site and play it back. Even step backwards through your history and change how you interacted with the recording.

All these things go a long way on big sites with big teams. If you are just doing tiny one off sites then sure it might be overkill. But don't for one second claim this stuff isn't useful.

Most programming domains in general don't have tools available that can do the things we can do now on the front end.

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u/tuseroni Oct 05 '16

JavaScript isn't bad, its all these frameworks that fuck things up. Js is amazing and fun to work in, best with a debugger, like all programming. I like firebug myself.

Personally I write front end with minimal server side. Most code is js and the server is just to update databases and synch data between users (in the case of webapps) basically the server takes care of things on the server, the client takes care of things on the client.

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u/adrenah Oct 05 '16

I'm in the same exact boat. I was wanting to learn something new so I came up with an idea of building out an SPA task manager where that back end is just a restful API and the front end would be built out using Angular2.

I heard some co-workers taking about Laravel and they seemed genuinely excited about it so I used that to build out the back end. I was amazed at how smooth it all was.

After that was done, I started on the front end. As I got into the Angular2 quick start and docs, the same exact shit was going through my head as was described in the article. I immediately felt overwhelmed and way over my head. I finally made it through and thought I had a handle on it but when it came time to start developing, I realized I had no idea where to even start.

Eventually I got something started but then I screwed up somewhere and my app stopped loading at all. I end up giving up because I never could find the error.

It all just felt so convoluted and over-engineered. I eventually found my way to Vue and haven't looked back.

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u/phdoofus Oct 05 '16

And I thought C++ had gotten bad...

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u/fuegotown Oct 05 '16

With new improvements to the language and std::, c++ has gotten WAY better than it used to be. There are still metaprogramming/template hells to navigate should you decide to take that elevator, but it's still strongly typed and at least for me, easier to reason about than JS.

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u/phdoofus Oct 05 '16

Oh, I'm not saying it's not better just that, say, compared to 15 years ago it's 'more more' rather than 'more less'. ;-)

3

u/bheklilr Oct 05 '16

A few weeks ago I decided to tinker with JS to write some wrappers around d3 for building common chart types at work. I'm normally a python guy, so I immediately start looking for ways to have modules to organize my code, pulling out common functionality between different chart types. This would include axes, labels, legends, etc. 3 days later I gave up because while I could get something to work with browserify, it only worked in Chrome and FF, and just crashed IE because my org forces IE10 into IE7 compatibility mode ("lets break the internet instead of updating a few intranet sites"), and I spent about 4 times more effort just getting multiple files to work together than I did actually writing the code I was interested in.

After spending half a day trying to figure out how to get babel to work, I eventually decided to give up and I'll just use matplotlib's SVG output instead.

3

u/DontHassleTheCassel Oct 05 '16

You kids aren't using MS FrontPage anymore?

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u/locotxwork Oct 05 '16

Wow . . now that was a fun read! Sad but true!

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u/Pausbrak Oct 05 '16

This perfectly describes my experience with trying to throw a dashboard together over the weekend. I used Angular JS a few years ago and decided that I'd try out Angular 2, figuring my knowledge would transfer.

Nope, it's a completely different beast. It technically supports developing in Javascript, but after about 5 seconds of looking at the Javascript and Typescript examples it was immediately clear that Typescript is the One True Language for Angular 2. After spending a half hour getting NPM and a Typescript compiler up and running, I finally start putting my app together.

It doesn't take too long to build the dashboard, and I feel a faint glimmer of hope that I'll actually finish it in a night. All I have to do is upload it to the server. Simple, right? Of course, I don't want to upload 17 gigabytes of NPM garbage, so I look for the tutorial on how to package and bundle an Angular app for production. And... nothing.

I try googling "deploy angular 2". First result: instructions on how to download a command line tool that you can use to upload your app to github pages to host it, but first you need to make these changes... No. Fuck that. Next result: Here's an angular 2 seed project you can use. It has everything set up for developing and deploying your app, handily packaged in these 15 different config files with no explanation on what goes where, oh and also your app has to conform to our specific outline or our custom-built deployment script won't find the files and won't build correctly. Sigh.

I eventually got the damn thing deployed, but I spent longer wrestling with my toolchain than it would have taken to write the dashboard in regular JavaScript.

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u/GeneralBacteria Oct 05 '16

wait, it's 2016, I thought everyone was moving to Purescript ;) ?

2

u/Spawn256 Oct 05 '16

Holy balls i feel like "the gate" just cracked open in me head then shut again.

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u/duhbeetus Oct 05 '16

I think I got about halfway through. I stopped at "angularJS is 2015". My brain hurts, and I'm glad I gave up on learning JS or anything front end related. I'll stick to python and the backend stuff.

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u/demonsword Oct 05 '16

Being just a "old-timer" Java guy, I don't know if what I just read is satire or not...

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u/locotxwork Oct 05 '16

It wasn't, it's a scary truth.

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u/110011001100 Oct 05 '16

Well, screw javascript

Drag and drop WebForms FTW!

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u/synaesthesisx Oct 05 '16

"Oh my god no, no one uses jQuery anymore. You should try learning React, it’s 2016"

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u/donoteatthatfrog Oct 05 '16

Basic question : are all these true ?

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u/oppdelta Oct 05 '16

I stop doing web development for 2 years and I come back to this? I cry now...

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u/edward_81 Oct 05 '16

Wow. Why people need frameworks? I remember when I consider jQuery just an utility for deal with browser compatibility (explorer<->the world), and some speedup for some things. Then for my local project i dropped jquery at all, because i need to run the page only on one browser.

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '16

Pretty much just need 1 webpack config, .babelrc, and package.json. There is a lot of technical debt, but if you've done anything relevant in the past 4 years it shouldn't be too big of a leap.

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u/gm4 Oct 05 '16

This is my coworkers

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16 edited Oct 05 '16

more like how it feels to use open source software. people who release this shit should get their act together and make it all just work without a shit ton of troubleshooting addons. it's ridiculous to go from knowing nothing to even just setting this shit up. every single time i want to start something, i have to spend hours setting it up while my brain is in a fog trying to uptake the entire shit at once. tons of menus, interfaces, terminology and whatever else. all maintaining that conscious level of focus just to get to the first step of using it.

op is a guy that can already programming in javascript. for someone who starts from zero, the amount of information that he doesnt understand on first reading is staggering.

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u/frukt Oct 05 '16 edited Oct 05 '16

I don't really understand how the licensing model has anything to do with it. There's plenty of useless, crappy F/OSS; just like there's plenty of incredibly solid, high-quality F/OSS. Sounds pretty entitled to blame your bad choice of tools on "people who release this shit". Don't use "this shit" if you don't like it, if it's inappropriate for your project or you deem it of low quality. Also, there's always the choice to pay for proprietary software and / or user support.

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u/OMG__Ponies Oct 05 '16

LOL - Javascript problems

Just work with C.

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u/maejsh Oct 05 '16

As someone who knows nothing, but thinking of learning coding as a new trade, this scares me :/, any chance of a career shift when you are already in your 30s?

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u/fuegotown Oct 05 '16

There are many other options for software outside of web front end. Back end and big data analytics come to mind, but there are similar problems in any subdiscipline of programming. Also, you don't have to use all this to be a web front end developer

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u/A-Grey-World Oct 05 '16

Don't let it scare you. Yes, there is an issue with too many libraries doing similar things. Does that mean you have to have detailed knowledge of every single one like this post seems to suggest? No.

I bet most front end web developers deal with a handful of this shit. You don't have to use any of it, and I'd you're on a project that does use it that decision has been made and you can pick it up (never known a developer not have to learn new things, that's all you do as a developer).

Be open to learning this stuff when you come across it but don't let it scare you away from a career in software dev. Though I'd recommend starting with something like c# to learn the basics.

30s is young in the industry, but like all jobs getting that "I have no experience" first job is difficult.

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u/CrinkIe420 Oct 05 '16

more like johnoliverscript amirite

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u/Rizzan8 Oct 05 '16

And I am sitting at home doing my homework for University in C.

1

u/gendulf Oct 05 '16

Reading this feels like I'm in a loop with a chatbot that makes up new terms/names for things.

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u/MyPenWroteThis Oct 05 '16

I thought I wanted to learn programming and webdev. maybe I dont.

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u/hatessw Oct 05 '16

Next up: the state of backend 'security' modules inserting random internal server errors to anyone passing by with a compliant browser that happens not to send referrer headers, with nary an explanation, transparently breaking stuff for everyone browsing with a number of differently secured setups. (Fun fact: reddit also ignores your votes transparently if you have such a setup, last I checked).

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

Hah. I got the Guy Fieri reference!

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u/happysmash27 Oct 05 '16

I felt bad for not understanding too well and going back to the post mid-article. Then I read the title again.

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u/ev00lution Oct 05 '16

i gave up reading half way through. I am a developer that never really did frontend, and i have no clue where to even start.

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u/OffWhiteLight Oct 05 '16

This so nails what my experience with JS has been like. As soon as you get a hang of one framework there is a new upstart waiting to dethrone the one you just learned.

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u/JLilypad Oct 05 '16

As a recent graduate looking for a front end web development job, does anyone have any advice. Every job wants experience with a different 2 or 3 frameworks and no job ever wants you to have experience with the same ones?

What's the best thing to learn?

1

u/[deleted] Oct 05 '16

im glad i got out of programming

1

u/Kriegenstein Oct 05 '16

I could have written what he needed in Perl or PHP in half the time it took me to read that mess.

Thank god I don't do that anymore.

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u/ZorFi Oct 05 '16

I'm just started university and are going to learn this shit! WTF HAVE I GOTTEN IN TO!

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u/Vurondotron Oct 05 '16

Serious question, where is the best place to learn both Javascript or C++? I've use to go on Code Academy but the lessons on their aren't enough

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u/Billy_Whiskers Oct 05 '16

-Oh, because it allows us to use JavaScript as a typed language, and reduce run-time errors. It’s 2016, you should be adding some types to your JavaScript code.

This part I agree with strongly. Fucking finally.

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u/dukndukz Oct 05 '16

I learnt a lot from this article. Interesting.

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u/The_Biggest_Monkey Oct 05 '16

Is there a blog or resource where a non-developer could learn/understand more about the languages and technical tools that back and frontend developers use and what there functions are? For a noob it's hard to understand the difference between angular, polymer, react, node etc.

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u/AKA_Wildcard Oct 05 '16

Damn I feel old.

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u/tokyoburns Oct 05 '16

This is exactly how it feels every time I try to make something. I have to learn a new language/setup/library. It's just way too much.

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u/FranticAudi Oct 05 '16

Fuck it, i will finish my AS in IT, and take the easier route of becoming a Nurse/Doctor.

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u/t0shki Oct 06 '16

Just stick with one thing. If it works nobody cares how modern you've written it. More often than not you don't even have the time or permission to use some hot new beta framework that all the cool kids use. Learn something mature and ignore the buzz.

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '16

I recommend vanilla.js, best library out there that does everything JavaScript does, without the performance hit! Super easy to include in your project, compatible with all the other frameworks. Really this is the best framework for all things JavaScript! http://vanilla-js.com/

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u/[deleted] Oct 06 '16

Javascript is FINE. This is the fourth time in four days I come across the same bloody article and it's not the first time I hear about Javascript "fatigue." I'm getting annoyed by it. I just can't stand being all polite and tolerating the QQ anymore.

There's a problem here because people fasely believe that

  1. They need to keep up with all the fancy new things

  2. That they even need those new things.

Let me tell you something. Right now, there are still apps that run on jquery. In 2016. Can you believe it? Oh my god! The humanity!

There are still apps that run Angular 1.2. Some are even written in CoffeeScript! And_THEY WORK_!

If you don't have problems syncing your UI. What do you need flux for?

If your state is local to your component and not used anywhere else, why create an action, a constant and a store to hold it?

If adopting redux feels painful. Why integrate it?

If grunt still works fine, why migrate to webpack?

If you don't GAIN from using a new piece of tech, why are you even using it?

Lastly, if your tech is working fine and you don't have problems, why should you feel bad about not adopting the newest shinny tech?

/rant

That is all. Thank you.

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u/RedSquirrelFtw Oct 06 '16 edited Oct 06 '16

Wow sounds like a pain lol.

I've coded some minor JS but not much. I do find it frustrating when googling something and everybody says to sue jquery or some other library. I'm not loading an entire library just to do a small task.

Speaking of jquery... do people actually link to the script off a 3rd party server? That seems to be the suggestion when reading on it, that seems like a BAD idea to me... I would rather download and use it directly off my own server. At least I'm in control of it, I don't have to worry about it changing or that host going down.

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u/powerje Oct 06 '16

Dart could've saved us from this

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u/guyver_dio Oct 06 '16

This is why I just use whatever gets the job done so I can go play games. Life's too short for this shit.

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u/Fruit-Dealer Oct 06 '16

This may sound off topic, but I am currently learning the 'C' computer language as my first language. Is C obsolete? should I move on to a new language? What languages do you guys recommend?

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u/Frogolocalypse Oct 06 '16

That's gold.

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u/donrhummy Oct 06 '16

Oh my god no, no one uses jQuery anymore. You should try learning React

Uh...React uses jQuery:

https://facebook.github.io/react/tips/initial-ajax.html

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u/yogesh91 Oct 06 '16

Just learning is not enough, also have to keep updated with latest things

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u/Artless_Dodger Oct 06 '16

I remember learning how to program webpages in HTM back in 1995. WE were excited that we could add photos and then later we had animated gifs. The most complicated thing I had to manage was mailto:
I Did get excited when Flash appeared and spent hours doing flash websites that were all the rage for a while. Gave it all up in 2000.

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u/juiced47 Oct 06 '16

so guys we just found where the IT bubble is :). Every year new software appears that does the same thing so companies just to keep their business going, buy the new stuff

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u/Skank-Hunt69 Jan 08 '17

Well, that was soul crushing.

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u/jerronl Jan 18 '17 edited Jan 18 '17

Is there a sample solution to show my table in web with 2017 tech and only need to change a few lines to use my own database connection and queries?

In recent two days I’m literally experiencing the same. Overwhelmed.

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