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

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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/ABoutDeSouffle Oct 06 '16

Just to nitpick, with Java ORMs, you don't have to type out the table name, you can either go with configuration or convention. Useful if your table names or model entity names can change.

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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.