Re:Ask HN: Will front end development ever move away from Ja...
by moron4hire on Sunday March 12, 2017 @12:40PM
(#13851483)
I don't think JavaScript is the problem. It's not the best language, but by far it's also not the worst, and there are lots of alternative tools that keep you from having to touch it. Use Opal, or Coffees riot, or ClosureScript, or Elm, or whatever else is out there; there are dozens.
What is much more concerning is the dogmatic, hyper reliance on all-encompassing frameworks, with a commensurate scrabbling for these frameworks to only be made by large corporations. It used to be that you could start a side project on your own, working at a small company, with a decent work-life balance, and grow it into a jQuery or Underscore or Prototype.js and people would even thank you for it. Now, you get people questioning whether or not you should even be allowed to exist if you aren't an official project from Mozilla, Google, or Facebook.
Just because a large corporatiom makes a thing doesn't mean it's particularly good. We've all been complaining about how Google's brain-teaser style job interviews are only effective at keeping good programmers who aren't also autodidacts out of the company. Yet out of the other corner of our mouths, we assume anything they make is great just by virtue of them "only hiring the best". I'm sorry, Angular is a pile of garbage. And I mean the rewrite that was supposed to fix all the problems of the first version. Their official documentation's setup instructions are to clone an example repo and delete the parts you don't want. This isn't just unprofessional, it's infantilising. Or the alternative is to install yet another CLI tool for what should just be a front-end library. Every single place they use decorators--which are an experimental feature in TypeScript, so Google is building a core feature on unfinalized syntax--they could have been done with superclasses instead and just kept the whole project to one paradigm. But OOP isn't sexy anymore, and you can't get overqualified PhDs to work on business issues unless there is something to overcomplicate in there. They claim you can't get the live-reloading development server to work on Windows because of something Microsoft supposedly did to block it in January. That's funny. I have no problems with my build and dev tools, and I'm running on top of the same, exact Node ecosystem. But they don't actually explain anything or link to any issue, so there is no telling what they mean.
Don't be afraid to "reinvent the wheel", and stop complaining when others do. This search for "the one, true wheel" is what is killing us. Quit trying to take jobs with companies that expect you to know React and Ember. You don't have to learn everything that is out there, and you can stay on one thing for a while. Or you can even make your own things. Your worth as a developer is not in the tools you know today, it's in your ability to learn and solve problems.
What is much more concerning is the dogmatic, hyper reliance on all-encompassing frameworks, with a commensurate scrabbling for these frameworks to only be made by large corporations. It used to be that you could start a side project on your own, working at a small company, with a decent work-life balance, and grow it into a jQuery or Underscore or Prototype.js and people would even thank you for it. Now, you get people questioning whether or not you should even be allowed to exist if you aren't an official project from Mozilla, Google, or Facebook.
Just because a large corporatiom makes a thing doesn't mean it's particularly good. We've all been complaining about how Google's brain-teaser style job interviews are only effective at keeping good programmers who aren't also autodidacts out of the company. Yet out of the other corner of our mouths, we assume anything they make is great just by virtue of them "only hiring the best". I'm sorry, Angular is a pile of garbage. And I mean the rewrite that was supposed to fix all the problems of the first version. Their official documentation's setup instructions are to clone an example repo and delete the parts you don't want. This isn't just unprofessional, it's infantilising. Or the alternative is to install yet another CLI tool for what should just be a front-end library. Every single place they use decorators--which are an experimental feature in TypeScript, so Google is building a core feature on unfinalized syntax--they could have been done with superclasses instead and just kept the whole project to one paradigm. But OOP isn't sexy anymore, and you can't get overqualified PhDs to work on business issues unless there is something to overcomplicate in there. They claim you can't get the live-reloading development server to work on Windows because of something Microsoft supposedly did to block it in January. That's funny. I have no problems with my build and dev tools, and I'm running on top of the same, exact Node ecosystem. But they don't actually explain anything or link to any issue, so there is no telling what they mean.
Don't be afraid to "reinvent the wheel", and stop complaining when others do. This search for "the one, true wheel" is what is killing us. Quit trying to take jobs with companies that expect you to know React and Ember. You don't have to learn everything that is out there, and you can stay on one thing for a while. Or you can even make your own things. Your worth as a developer is not in the tools you know today, it's in your ability to learn and solve problems.