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Comment by av9 | Hacker News Reader

Not having a job is my worst nightmare. Realizing your skills are being undercut by a fresh college grad who can get enough pats on the back while skidding along with code that works. Realizing the language you cradled has now become outdated and the other engineers that have found out the new next 9 years of hotness are too good for you to compete with. Having to interview for a new job and realizing that you can't pass the white board questions because you have fallen behind with the expectations of young blood. That's my nightmare, becoming irrelevant.

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As much as I hate to say it: it's a healthy nightmare. I have it too, though I came to development late in my career (My career was more managing technologists in IT depts, but I turned out to be good with Oracle and PostgreSQL and other development tasks and now get more requests for that... which pays as well and is more fun to boot).

When I was young, I would go into interviews sometimes where the other candidates where there in the lobby, too. Some were older and clearly had been in technology a long time... but never advanced past where they were in their "prime" as you made small talk. They weren't going to get the job nor should they have. They allowed themselves to become as relevant as token ring.

As technologists we have to keep ourselves current. That keeping up with the kids is really part of our profession: the technology evolves quickly and so must we. But this is the part I like about technology work. There's always something next to keep things fresh. A new technology, a new architectural style, new needs, unsolvable problems that become solvable. Our profession doesn't tolerate coasting. Good.

Other professions have this same problem, just not at our speed. The proverbial buggy whip makers had to evolve with changing realities... they just had more time to see the inevitable.

(As an aside, I play poker with a dedicated COBOL developer in his mid-50s... so sometimes you can make old school pay, too :-) ).

Even if it makes sense for a single company not to hire an old developer, we are losing so much values as an industry if we invest all this money into teaching valuable lessons to devs, then throwing them away and letting newer kids make the same mistakes.

Yes and no. A guy/gal who spent a decade or two dealing with RPG on a 400 will have judgments contextually relevant to that technology environment. His experience and judgments will have limited applicability to say microservice based architectures on AWS. Yes there will be some generalities that will apply everywhere, but probably not enough to make up for the deficiencies of limited experiences outside of that 400 comfort zone. In fact, some of that prior experience may well prove harmful rather than beneficial in a different environment with different strengths and weaknesses.

Unfortunately technology is unlike some professions like, say, warehouse management or construction where techniques evolve with time, but there are more commonalities from one decade to the next. Technology sees highly disruptive change and so I would still argue that without keeping current in your knowledge, your experience has a very short half-life.

No it isn't, it really isn't. Take any website you like, it's a form for you to enter data to be stored into a database, and reports you can run to see this data. Facebook, Amazon, you name it. So it displays in a web browser rather than a 3270 terminal, that's the only difference, and it's a trivial one.

Incidentally, what you call "microservices on AWS" is architecturally identical to how mainframes worked in the 1970s, you would do it with CICS. Much of the computer science, algorithms and datastructures, in every day use, were discovered in the 70s if not before. So either you have very limited experience of technology, or this is just ageism.

Well said, I stumbled across virtualization in the early 2000s and rediscovered what had been invented in the 60s. In the 80si created a compression algorithm only to find out it had been invented in the 60s. When I was under 30 I assumed everyone over 30 was brilliant and the often were. People under 30 today assume everyone over 30 is an idiot.

If you want to take generalities sure, nothing ever changes. We store data, we use electricity, etc. I can generalize away any detail and make myself look clever, too, but I also know the operating realities of those technologies of which I spoke involve details which are not so trivially disposed of and in practice they matter. Are there analogs between these technologies? Can we see echos of the green screen paradigm when we load a web page? Sure. But that's a long stretch from saying that implementation details are close enough to even say a majority of the information relevant from the old 400 days.

As for me, I've run AS/400 shops (back when it was the AS400, but we did use newfangled 5250 emulators), been responsible for development in companies implementing highly distributed client/server based products, and most recently I've been involved in developing back end systems for web and iPhone applications (and, yes, on AWS in microservicey ways). I've been around technology plenty. I can tell you, too, that my early mistakes with AWS were precisely because I allowed my prior monolithic systems experience take too much precedence in my judgments when I first approached it. It was not the same. I needed to learn the new lessons; perhaps my only advantage was I recognized it quickly and recovered.

It's not ageism, however, but a realism that recognizes that not all experience is the same or applicable to every situation: it takes continuous professional development to make that experience worth a shit. However, I can understand why you'd be a little overly defensive in your response however... being a developer of a certain age. Don't worry. I'm about the same age as you, as are many of my colleagues, and I don't think we're too worried about finding work.

If you can persuade your customers every few years that they need to reinvent the wheel and call the same things by new buzzwords, then you are all set for a lucrative career, you are correct. But sooner or later the wheels will come off this gravy train. I'll be fine - will you?

You didn't address any of your parents points there, and instead make vague "you're doomed" threats.

Lot of reading comprehension problems here.

1) That's not a threat, if you think it is then call the Internet Police - they have a hashtag #hnwatch just for that

2) He is simply wrong that experience doesn't carry forwards. To use my Amazon example, the value in that business is understanding how people buy books and how a logistics operation to deliver them works. I don't know what technology Amazon actually uses in their warehouses but it's nothing that couldn't be done with terminals and line printers, I'll bet dollars to donuts, and nothing that would be unfamiliar to anyone working in the logistics field in the 70s.

It's nightmarish because you can't control it - software is driven by fashion. You can carefully choose a good technology, patiently master it, then find there's no demand anymore because a technology that's worse in every objective measure, is getting all the blog posts and retweets this year, and all the people into it are reinventing the wheel you knew 20 or 30 years ago, all of them claiming to be innovating and inventing new stuff. Like the people who knew Smalltalk in the 90s and were poised to take software engineering to the next level but got stomped on by Java, say. Or the Perl people who were finally getting their act together with Modern Perl before they were stabbed in the back by the Perl 6 camp. There are dozens of examples. Sometimes it comes back around but if you knew ML in the 70s there was an awfully long wait for F# to go semi-mainstream...

I'm a grad getting in to webdev, and I find this fascinating - is it really that bad? Every company I've interviewed at so far has been lenient as long as you know how to solve a problem in a somewhat relevant lang/tech.

I don't find it an issue at all, but I also do follow the current technology trends, at least to the level where I can talk about them intelligently.

Yes, no qualification. I've been part of the hiring process several times. Unless you're exceptional, hiring is brutal for older devs.

I would worry about it and I'm only close to 30 but I'm self employed now.

I am 44 years old. I go on an interview binge every couple of years or so, because I normally work remotely from home and I get bored with not having anyone to talk to (professionally). The last time I went on a series of interviews (in Dublin at the end of June 2015) I got about four NOs and six YESes. I think I'm a very good programmer but not an exceptional one :)

I think it's more like Uncle Bob says: the number of programmer has doubled every five years. A consequence of that is that those of us who were in it for a long time (30 years in my case) appear to be surrounded by a sea of youngsters with no clue. Personally, I realized recently that not only I don't have a fear of losing my job - I'm starting to find it strange when others tell me about it. (I'm re-reading Clarke Ching's Rolling Rocks Downhill and I find it harder to empathize with the protagonist than it was a few years ago.)

How do you handle the clueless? How do you handle the director of development who wrote the system the company is based on yet refuses to learn anything about relational dbs or why storing megabytes of data in the session makes it impossible to scale?

I leave. This is related to the "not being afraid of not finding a new job" :)

I have done it twice in the last five years - in both cases because I wasn't allowed to improve the quality of the code. In the first case, it was because "the client isn't paying for that, they're paying for features". In the second case, because "that code was written by the NY office and they're going to be upset if we change it".

Consider that an industry with a high churn is always looking for fresh meat. The analogy to fashion is no coincidence.

I've found a trick that works for me: if tech is less than 5 years old and not some industry standard I can safely ignore it. Once it passes the 5 year mark I'll spend time on it.

I have been learning new technologies pretty much continuously. It's not impossible, especially if you follow sites like Hacker News, to keep a finger on the direction of the industry, and then try to stay on top of the next new hot technology of the year.

But I hear you on the "worse" technology sometimes winning. You mentioned Java; it was worse than just about all other major contenders, and is only finally losing popularity.

On a current technology fad: React seems to be designed to ignore 40 years of accumulated software best practices. [1] Separation of concerns? Who needs that any more? And the rationale for it is that it allows teams of 100 developers work together on an app. Open standards? Nah, how about lock-in to custom language extensions that will prevent you from migrating your code to the next web standard! Much better.

And how many app teams have 100 or more active developers? Probably fewer than a dozen, and I submit that none of them probably should. Certainly not the Facebook app: It has a lot of features, but not that many features, and yet it has a 150Mb footprint. When I hear things like that, I can't help but fill in "junior" or "mediocre" in front of "developers." React helps to prevent people from breaking each others' code when you have bloated development teams filled with junior developers. React has some cool ideas, but all told I think it's a step backward for software engineering, and certainly isn't as much of a help for small teams, especially if you want to have a CSS/SCSS/LESS expert styling your product without having to dig through JSX files, for instance.

The Java rationale was similar, IMO: You can use the Java abstractions to allow lots of mediocre developers to make contributions to a product without breaking each others' code. At least not as frequently as when they can poke right into random data structures and change things arbitrarily. If it weren't for Google's decision to require Java for Android, I think Java would be relegated to big company web backend development.

I do like React's idea of the Virtual DOM for optimization, but you can get that without using React. [2] React Native is great for using native components and driving them from JavaScript, but it's also not the only game in town. [3]

Back to the original point, though: You can stay on top of the Hot New Technologies, but when there are good technical reasons to use alternate technologies, stay on top of those as well. And then explain clearly to your clients (or employers) why the current fad is a fad, and how to get the key benefits of that stack without its drawbacks. Oh, and choose clients (or employers) who will listen to strong technical arguments. :)

[1] https://www.pandastrike.com/posts/20150311-react-bad-idea

[2] https://github.com/Matt-Esch/virtual-dom

[3] https://www.nativescript.org/

For me new has to be new. I learnt Tcl/Tk back in the 90s because I could rapidly develop a GUI on X11 but then started to use Tcl as a general purpose scripting language. Then I look at Ruby and Lua and Node.js and I think, what can any of these do that Tcl doesn't, just as well and usually better? E.g. all the async stuff in Node is old news in the Tcl world. Then I look at people who flock to the latest thing always and I think do I want to work in a world where every project it someone's first in an immature technology, or maintenance in a dead-end technology? That doesn't sound very satisfying to me, I want to get the foundations right and build on top of them, not build on shifting sands.

> On a current technology fad: React seems to be designed to ignore 40 years of accumulated software best practices. [1] Separation of concerns? Who needs that any more? And the rationale for it is that it allows teams of 100 developers work together on an app. Open standards? Nah, how about lock-in to custom language extensions that will prevent you from migrating your code to the next web standard! Much better.

That's some strawman right here. First, JSX is optional. Sencondly, JSX is open. You may disagree whether it's a standard or not, but you know what? If tomorrow you end up with a large codebase where you want to get rid of JSX, you just apply a JSX transpiler on your existing codebase. Problem solved. As for separation of concerns, you have a little bit more of a case. React does allow you to put business logic in your views... just like 99% percent of templating languages out there. But React does not force you to do that. You can have only the minimum amount of logic you need, and put most of your frontend business logic in your store.

It's not just about the JSX part. That's a piece of the larger problem: The fact that the HTML & CSS are being built up in JavaScript at all. This troubles me at a deep level, and no matter the approach you use, it won't likely be portable to another framework.

Templates using a "handlebars" syntax are pretty portable with minor tweaks, in general.

This happened because CSS and HTML are a totally broken model, useless for writing larger applications. They don't provide any sort of modularity / encapsulation - everything is in the open, present inside one big giant namespace with class names colliding with other class names and styles cascading through / being inherited by everything you want or don't want.

Web Components / HTML Imports kind of solve this though, but they're still not there. http://caniuse.com/#search=components

JavaScript has lexical scope, and that pretty much solves everything. CSS styles are now local variables and need to be passed around. Components are not just a dump of HTML, but opaque functions - their inner structure cannot be (accidentaly) accessed by outside components. Ah - finally, a sensible programming model.

Just imagine what would be possible if CSS class names were lexical, not global strings - and you could import them into HTML (perhaps with renaming). How big of a change that would be in terms of making things easier to separate.

Well... React users got tired of imagining things :) http://glenmaddern.com/articles/css-modules

Of course Web Components solve it by reinventing all the possible wheels. Tim forbid that we get standard lexical scope and parameter passing.

Well, you're only building raw HTML for your lower-level components (in JSX or in Javascript). The difference with standard templating is that this considerably more composable. In this regard, it's not very different from custom directives in Angular (from what I can see, I don't do Angular). And from my point of view, having this mix is much preferable to the traditional HTML templating + jQuery soup.

You can't escape the fact that any non-trivial rendering needs some logic. If you don't let yourself get carried away, you get the exact amount of logic you need for your component in a reusable package. As someone currently porting a codebase from the dark ages of the web to React, I have difficulty expressing how nice that feels.

I agree that it sucks when the "worse" technology wins, but your points on why React is an example of one of these "worse" technologies are seriously misinformed regarding its shortcomings and have largely glossed over some of its most significant merits over existing technology.

> React seems to be designed to ignore 40 years of accumulated software best practices.

Best practices in software is not set in stone. Sometimes you need to break from existing best practices of the past in order to arrive at truly powerful new approaches to solving problems that may not seem intuitive at first, but eventually manage to redefine best practices through their technical merits.

The Virtual DOM and re-rendering on every change is one such approach popularized by React, but it's definitely not the only one, nor is it even the most significant one, in my humble opinion.

Before React, mutable models was the only game in town. Angular imposed mutable models, Ember imposed mutable models, Backbone imposed mutable models, your average custom ad-hoc JQuery framework probably also imposed mutable models. Everyone blindly followed this "best practice" simply because this was the status quo ever since the earliest days of UI development.

React is the first JS UI framework that does not impose a mutable model. And as a result, the ClojureScript community was able to build on top of it and show the world that change detection can be implemented as a constant-time reference comparison when immutable models are used [1]. The immutable models approach was highly unintuitive (who'd have thought using immutable data structures in your model could make your app faster than using mutable data structures, which are intrinsically faster), but its results are clearly evident, and enables nothing short of a quantum leap in UI performance.

[1] http://swannodette.github.io/2013/12/17/the-future-of-javasc...

> Separation of concerns? Who needs that any more?

Your definition of separation of concerns seems to be the need to keep templates, styling and logic in separate files, which seems like a rather superficial distinction to me, to be honest. In any case, as mercurial already mentioned, JSX is completely optional, and React easily allows for you to keep your templates in a separate file from your logic and your styles.

Ironically enough considering your rather petty criticism, React and Flux-inspired architectures like Redux have in fact popularized a much more important separation of concern: the separation of application state vs operations on the application state.

This new separation of concern, along with Flux's insistence on a unidirectional data flow, has removed much incidental complexity from app state management, and enabled a whole new generation of developer tooling like component localized hot-reloading and time-traveling debugging [2].

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xsSnOQynTHs

And this is the essence of why React has won over the likes of Angular, Ember, and Backbone. Developers have always been able to build great applications, even in the frameworks that come before React. But React and Flux-like architectures allows developers to manage complexity significantly better than in other frameworks that come before it.

This is why "it allows teams of 100 developers work together on an app". And as a front-end developer who has worked never worked in such 100 developer teams, and only on solo projects and in projects with small 2-10 dev teams, I can state with confidence that I can reap much of the same benefits of this reduced complexity. In fact, I probably benefit even more from this reduced complexity because as a solo/small-team developer, my complexity budget is absolutely tiny compared to what bigger teams can afford.

> Open standards? Nah, how about lock-in to custom language extensions that will prevent you from migrating your code to the next web standard!

The standardization process on the open web is painstakingly slow compared to the rate at which new technology is generally adopted and refined. This slow, methodical approach allows standardization committees plenty of time and input to think about every standard being proposed, but it's also one of the main reasons why very few libraries, even those with standardization as the end goal, begins as some kind of standard proposal.

It is much easier to gain traction as a standard if you already have an established implementation in a library/framework that is mature and well-adopted, and can demonstrate the merits of your approach. This is the approach taken by projects like TypeScript, and it's probably safe to assume that many aspects of React will be integrated into various standard tracks in the not too distant future.

>Ironically enough considering your rather petty criticism,

A lot of your response seems to be emotionally laden. Bad form.

>Redux

I've been reading about Redux, and as soon as another app project comes along for me to try it out, I'm planning to give it a try.

As I've said more than once in this thread, to a large degree my own opinion is still forming on this topic. React does things that feel to me like "bad code smells," but it's possible that I need to adapt to the New Way of Thinking.

>And this is the essence of why React has won over the likes of Angular, Ember, and Backbone. Developers have always been able to build great applications, even in the frameworks that come before React. But React and Flux-like architectures allows developers to manage complexity significantly better than in other frameworks that come before it.

I've been writing software -- mostly games -- since I had to use assembly language for everything. Having a language (Java!) or framework (in this case React) explicitly protect me from myself almost always ends up slowing me down and slowing down the resulting app (yes, even React [1]).

Despite this I'm probably going to give React a real try at some point, even if it's in a toy project. I've been coding for 35 years, and it doesn't take me long to get the flavor of a new technology and its limitations when I finally stick my teeth in. It's all about finding the time...

[1] https://aerotwist.com/blog/react-plus-performance-equals-wha...

> A lot of your response seems to be emotionally laden. Bad form.

You're definitely right, I apologize for that. I cringed at parts of the post myself when I went back and read it again, but by then it was too late to edit.

> I've been writing software -- mostly games -- since I had to use assembly language for everything. Having a language (Java!) or framework (in this case React) explicitly protect me from myself almost always ends up slowing me down and slowing down the resulting app (yes, even React [1]).

Yes, micro-optimized, low-level code will always have an edge in terms of absolute raw performance, but there's a huge cognitive overhead involved with working with code like that, and you simply can't afford to do it on your entire codebase if you want to build new features and make changes quickly. What frameworks like React offers is a way to architect your application in such a way that makes it amenable to global optimizations that obsoletes entire classes of performance optimizations that you'd otherwise have to micro-optimize by hand on a case-by-case basis. This gives you more time to actually work on features and more time to thoroughly profile your code and micro-optimize the parts that actually lie on critical paths in your app.

Regarding your linked article:

If you take a look at the Vanilla benchmark, you can see the rendering time out-pacing JS compute time as we approach the 1200 mark, whereas for the React benchmark, the rendering time essentially stays constant. This is one example of a global optimization at work: the Virtual DOM spares us from having to micro-optimize DOM rendering for all of our components.

Regarding the JS performance scaling characteristics, I believe it probably has something to do with this:

> Did you set shouldComponentUpdate to false? Yeah that would definitely improve matters here, unless I need to update something like a “last updated” message on a per-photo basis. It seems to then become a case of planning your components for React, which is fair enough, but then I feel like that wouldn’t be any different if you were planning for Vanilla DOM updates, either. It’s the same thing: you always need to plan for your architecture.

This brings me to another example for a global optimization that React enables (this one doesn't come by default in React, but it's the first JS framework that made it possible): the use of immutable data in change detection. This allows you to implement shouldComponentUpdate as a single reference check for every component across your app. The change detection for the state array in the example would then become a constant time operation rather than the much more complex deep object comparison that React had to perform in the example, which is probably the root cause of the poor JS compute performance scaling as the number of photos increased. I strongly recommend taking a look at the first link in my original post if you're interested in more details.

>Yes, micro-optimized, low-level code will always have an edge in terms of absolute raw performance, but there's a huge cognitive overhead involved with working with code like that

I disagree. Code written to be optimized for a particular use case may itself be challenging to follow, but using it, if it's just a component and has a well documented API, doesn't have to be difficult at all. The Vanilla code in that benchmark article wasn't particularly hard to understand, for instance, and it could be wrapped in a Web Component to isolate the complexity.

Think about OpenGL/WebGL and the complexity and math and parallelization and optimization tricks that API conceals. At this point writing pixel shaders is almost easy, and yet they enable insane levels of parallel math with very little cognitive load.

I've written game SDKs that concealed a lot of complexity and yet were easy to use [1], so my gut reaction is to want to start with generic components that don't restrict what I can do, and then build up a DSL that is very easy to reason about that the app is assembled from. Based on my development history, I'm also likely to be making apps that are more than simple CRUD (with real-time interactive features, including games), so my personal requirements and point of view may be a bit different than the typical front-end developer.

>I strongly recommend taking a look at the first link in my original post if you're interested in more details.

OK, I'll take a look.

[1] Look at the listings for "Playground Game Engine"; the list is incomplete, but it gives you an idea: http://www.mobygames.com/developer/sheet/view/developerId,13...

> I disagree. Code written to be optimized for a particular use case may itself be challenging to follow, but using it, if it's just a component and has a well documented API, doesn't have to be difficult at all. The Vanilla code in that benchmark article wasn't particularly hard to understand, for instance, and it could be wrapped in a Web Component to isolate the complexity.

I don't think we actually disagree. =)

By "working with code like that", I meant actually writing, understanding and changing micro-optimized, low-level code. Your example of building on top of a micro-optimized, lower-level SDK is the perfect example of a global optimization that alleviates some of the need for tedious, case-by-case micro-optimization from the code that uses it.

I'm just saying that micro-optimizing every single piece of code case-by-case is not the best use of our time, and that we should opt for global optimizations where ever possible, and that React and Flux-inspired architectures like Redux can enable some very practical global optimizations.

Seperations of concerns can be interpreted in multiple ways. You could say that the concern of one React component is to render one particular part of a view based on data. Or: "convert data to a view".

In for instance Angular you have the template seperated from the controller or directive. But in what way does that really help you? The controller and the template are inseperable. The variables inside of the template corrospond directly to the variables in the scope of the controller. You cannot see what the template is doing without having the controller next to it. In React you really see how the view is built up, without any magic.

The points you make on React make me really wonder if you did your research.

Yes I've been "doing my research." I've done everything but write an entire app in React, but I only have so much time.

I don't see Angular great either, for what it's worth, so please don't think that I'm holding Angular up as a "better" solution. Both are heavy in the wrong ways. I got roped into using Angular because of its popularity, but I'm actively looking for a more solid and optimized replacement. React should be exciting to me as an option, but the more I read about it, the more wrong it feels. I just listened to a couple of the React creators on a podcast, for instance, and what they were saying about cross-platform development in the podcast is just demonstrably wrong. Source: I've been writing cross-platform apps for 20 years (mobile for the last 8 years or so).

As for Angular 2.0: I'm reserving judgment on that until it stabilizes, though it looks better.

I'm personally at least partly on the fence about whether the HTML template Really Should Be Separate, to be honest. My first exposure to Polymer was at 0.5, and the way that Polymer did things seemed profoundly wrong as well. I haven't tried again with Polymer 1.0, but I feel like using Polymer and React with all of their standard idioms will make an app less flexible rather than more. And React performance on mobile simply isn't good enough for complex apps [1]; for sufficiently simple apps, why should I even care what framework I use? Even back when Zuckerberg was claiming that HTML5 apps couldn't perform at native speed, Sencha showed them that, yes, they can, if they're done right. [2]

Where I still feel uncomfortable about spreading HTML into all the components, embedded in the JavaScript that instantiates them, is that it feels entirely too much like what people did with OOP when taking it to extremes. You end up with objects calling objects calling objects calling virtual functions calling whatever...and unless you've got a debugger open and you're stepping through the code as it runs, it's almost impossible to actually reason about the code, or even to understand how it all hooks together, unless you understand the entire execution path.

With HTML templates, you can look and see the overall app layout -- what goes where, how the hierarchy is shaped, what components are being instantiated, etc. -- without having to run the app and call up a DOM tree to see what really happened. When you embed the HTML in components, and those components rely on other components, you pretty much need to run the app and step through everything to see what gets instantiated where, and then you need to dig through the code to understand why.

To me it resonates as a "bad code smell." [3] I've been cranking out code for thirty years now, so I've got a certain amount of experience with code. And I'm still willing to admit that my gut reaction may be wrong, but I may have to write an app in that style to see if it confirms my bias, or if it actually feels OK in practice. It wouldn't be the first time I'd changed my opinion on a topic (see: OOP above, which I was one of the worst abusers of at one time).

I think that there is a place for isolated web components, but that the place is for things like the Google Map Component, or any component with nontrivial complexity like that, that really needs to be developed in isolation and/or is intended to be used in unrelated projects, and isn't expecting to be styled based on a global stylesheet. For self-contained complexity in components, the component idea is great, and for that why not use the web standard?

CSS being done in React-JavaScript for basically all components strikes me as a misfeature. First, it breaks the syntax for anyone who's done styling before (in a way that, for instance, SCSS doesn't). Second, it limits you in what styling tools you can use: There are tons of tools like Compass, Bourbon, and Susy that add useful styling functionality to your apps, and using React you've cut yourself off from such support (or waiting for React plug-ins to be created). Third, when styling is isolated to a particular group of files, you can drop in a different group of files and restyle your app.

P.S. I'm creating these various Walls Of Text in part because I'm trying to solidify my own thoughts on the matter. Feel free to ignore if what I've said doesn't hold any value for you, but writing it does hold value for me. Thanks for your comments.

[1] https://aerotwist.com/blog/react-plus-performance-equals-wha...

[2] https://www.sencha.com/blog/the-making-of-fastbook-an-html5-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_smell

While separation of concerns is certainly good to have, Have we traditionally been using this in the right way ? I think not.

In particular separation should be enforced among components which is what React encourages, not between facets of the same entity as we have practiced since the beginning. Coupling of styling and behavior with associated markup is pretty much inevitable for web applications and decoupling those just reduces the cohesion.

I have posted a more elaborate answer in my blog [1], but finally I do appreciate your suggestion to rationally vet new technologies before jumping onto the bandwagon.

[1] http://lorefnon.me/2015/11/22/an-answer-to-react-is-the-new-...

Alternative links:

[2] http://lhorie.github.io/mithril/ (using its own virtual Dom); I think there are other implementations around, too.

[3] http://cycle.js.org/ (have a native driver)

FYI.

I've heard good things about Mithril performance. I'll need to take a look.

Virtual DOM as a panacea may be overrated, though. Maybe React's just isn't fast enough, but if you use another way to keep track of what parts of the DOM to change, simply pushing things into the DOM can be WAY faster than using a Virtual DOM. [1]

Cycle.JS still hits my "HTML in code BAD" reaction. An example from the front page:

      .map(name =>
        h('div', [
          h('label', 'Name:'),
          h('input.field', {attributes: {type: 'text'}}),
          h('h1', 'Hello ' + name)
        ])

So we're again mixing HTML and JavaScript, and in this case we're also reinventing the syntax. If you're going to mix HTML with JavaScript, at least using standard HTML syntax seems like a better solution.

A lot of popular frameworks are using this generated HTML approach, though (including apparently Mithril). I'm still trying to figure out if my negative reaction is justified.

[1] https://aerotwist.com/blog/react-plus-performance-equals-wha...

This is such a superficial aspect of the framework that it's really not worth discussing. You need to go deeper to learn it properly, and only then give verdict. In ClojureScript (Om, Reagent, etc), you have the same HTML building pieces with code. Also in Elm you use normal Elm functions, not a HTMLish DSL. Also, nowadays in Cycle.js we use the more friendly syntax:

      .map(name =>
        div([
          label('Name:'),
          input('.field', {attributes: {type: 'text'}}),
          h1('Hello ' + name)
        ])
      )

Which was inspired by elm-html https://github.com/evancz/elm-html .

It’s no more "HTML" in your JavaScript than if you do `document.createElement('div')`.

`h` is method that returns a JavaScript object; not HTML.

I don't use document.createElement('div') in any but very rare situations either.

> "HTML in code BAD" reaction

That's what it is, just an automatic reaction without any real practical argument. Do yourself a favour and "unlearn" that. Open your mind. You're doing yourself a huge disservice by turning away from new ideas with these knee-jerk reactions. Working with views as functions of data gives you much more than it takes away.

I'm considering doing exactly that (unlearning the reaction). Too many people are agreeing with you for me to ignore it.

On the other hand, every time I turn around I think of more things that it "takes away." This time it's an entire category of tool: The visual layout editor. I like it when my code can be data-driven, and data-driven using a standard format that can be saved using a (visual) tool.

I especially like it when my artists can tweak the page layout for me, but I don't like the idea of giving the artists files full of JavaScript or JSX to tweak.

Are there artist-friendly tools that can edit the layout of a React site/app, where the JSX can be modified in-place using the tool? It doesn't strike me as an impossible-to-solve problem, but it could be tricky to do well.

I used to describe myself as a web standards evangelist ten years ago and my first instinct when I saw React (both because of JSX and because it was from Facebook) was to laugh and shake my head (until I decided to "give it five minutes" and found out I was wrong) so I hope my perspective could make some sense to you.

Just to clarify: React is not about killing the separation of concerns. React is about one thing: converting application state to a component tree and rendering that component tree to the DOM via highly optimised diffing.

At the base level, React turns state into component trees. Similarly, Redux is only about managing state and changes to that state. These are fairly straightforward ideas but having them as clearly defined building blocks with an extremely straightforward API (Redux moreso than React but in the trivial case a React component as of 0.14 can be a plain old pure function) radically simplifies application development.

I'll say it again: application development. I haven't said anything about HTML and CSS yet. This is as relevant to the web as it is to native application development and it's not an accident that React has been decoupled from ReactDOM with the latter now being merely the implementation detail of going the last mile and rendering things to the DOM (or to HTML strings) and maintaining DOM bindings and diffs.

A quick interlude: JSX is not HTML. It looks like XML and in many examples it has HTML tag names in it, but it's not HTML -- nor is it XML for that matter. It's just (entirely optional but very useful once you get over the initial visceral discomfort) syntactic sugar for defining component trees (not DOM subtrees). The syntax is obviously based on XML but it is a lot simpler and the familiarity obviously helps.

One thing most people don't understand about React (not least because React isn't vocal enough about it -- just like Flux wasn't vocal enough about certain concepts until Redux came along and showcased why they're important and useful) is that you can and should distinguish between presentational components and application logic.

If you use Redux (or Flux -- but with Flux there's the problem that most things called Flux aren't actually Flux because nobody really understood it) most of your components will be entirely presentational and the logic will live outside the components except for a few so-called "containers" which are just extremely thin wrappers.

So with React+Redux you then have your component structure living in React components and your logic living in a few functions that describe transitions of the immutable application state plus a few "containers" that just describe how the state is applied to the API of the few "smart" components that actually need interaction.

Sure, HTML strings intuitively feel more appropriate for describing these components and Web Components definitely look more "HTML-like" in that regard, but at the end of the day you're still writing something XML-like with made up elements (whether they're Web Components or React "components") that needs to be processed by JavaScript before being turned into the actual DOM.

One major change React brings to the table that isn't spoken nearly as much of as it should be is that React can be used to render applications to HTML, without the DOM, on the server. This usually gets mentioned in the context of "load times" or "SEO friendliness" but it's a pretty significant property of React.

Not only can React on the client "seamlessly" re-use the server-rendered DOM and attach itself like a jQuery plugin would but being able to render the application (and using Redux: render it with an arbitrary state) means you can truly embrace the idea of progressive enhancement without giving up the comfort of web application tooling.

Some years ago there was a lot of hype (well, not as much by a long stretch but some hype nevertheless) around the idea of making web apps work without JS (YUI[0] allowing server-side rendering of JS web apps and PJAX[1] enabling web sites to behave more like apps). Instead of mucking around with client-side templates you would render pages on the server and then intercept internal links to fetch and inject only the bits that changed between the current page and the next.

React+Redux is basically PJAX, but it's also the polar oppsite. Instead of rendering everything using server-side technologies, you render everything using client-side technologies. And instead of offloading re-renders to the server you keep them in the client when possible (where they can be further optimised thanks to DOM diffing).

Let me restate that: React+Redux allows you to build "Rich Internet Applications" in a way that makes it possible to support JavaScript-free fallbacks out of the box. There's nothing stopping developers from making the HTML output of their React apps richly semantic and accessible either (even though that represents the Eternal War of the web).

The idea is not new[2] but with React it's not only achievable but easily achievable. And unlike Web Components it only needs existing technologies that are widely supported (it even works in IE8).

The PandaStrike article you linked is not a rebuttal of React. It's a rebuttal of traditional client-side web applications. It doesn't matter whether they are built with Angular or Backbone or React -- the arguments are mostly universal. The difference is that React is the only option today that (despite not having HTML "templates") allows developers to do something smarter.

Of course React is a land grab. Every open source project is. But it's not an attack on the Open Web anymore than jQuery was an attack on the Open Web before querySelectorAll or XMLHttpRequest landed in a spec. That you're no longer writing straight-up HTML in a text file doesn't mean you're no better off than if you were using GWT[3].

And who says Web Components are the Right Choice just because they're becoming part of the native platform? Sometimes the thing we think we want[4] isn't what we really need[5], even if it's on track to become a standard.

[0] http://ajaxian.com/archives/server-side-rendering-with-yui-o...

[1] http://pjax.herokuapp.com/

[2] http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2010/09/30/render-first-js-...

[3] http://www.gwtproject.org/gettingstarted.html

[4] http://readwrite.com/2014/07/24/object-observe-javascript-ap...

[5] http://www.infoq.com/news/2015/11/object-observe-withdrawn

I would claim the antidote to this is specializing in a domain and not in a language.

Absolutely. This is kind of what I was getting at in my comment elsewhere on this post about forms and reports. If you know the data needed by a given industry, how it originates, how it is used, who all the people/roles are and what they need and how they interact, then you can safely ride each technological fad as it happens.

> Like the people who knew Smalltalk in the 90s and were poised to take software engineering to the next level but got stomped on by Java, say.

Side-tidbit: considering the way you said that it sounds like you might already know this, but some guys working on a variant of Smalltalk called Strongtalk were temporarily whisked off of that project and commissioned by Sun to write Java.

I understand that full compiler and VM source are now under the BSD license. It was last poked in '06. It probably needs cleaning up.

The code is ancient and crufty and only runs on Windows. It also only supports IA32, so no IA64 or ARM. There's been some motion towards building it on Linux; I don't know whether this got anywhere.

StrongTalk's a JIT, so it's going to be painful to port, unfortunately. And JITs have moved on a long way since then. I'd really like it to be resurrected and brought into the modern age, but in all honestly I think it's just dead.

That's really sad.

Thinking about what you said gave me an idea.

Real-world native languages fall out of use forever on a daily basis. Linguistic historians want to preserve the unique attributes of these languages, because they each tell a story and add to the character of humanity's history.

Computer languages share some of these attributes in a broad sense, but these must also be offset with the technical merit(s) of the language in question: if a language's foundational concepts have become outdated, continuing to use that language outside of a job description is a liability.

However, if a language's fundamental design is still interesting, but the low-level technologies used to implement it have fallen out of favor (for example, targeting IA32, or only functioning on an obsolete processor, etc) that language will also still become effectively "dead," and arguably unfairly so.

It could be said that there are language designers and language implementers. The designers have sufficient scope in their mental model to sweep across the domain of language design and implementation and distill that into a functioning codebase. Implementors, on the other hand, just want to fulfil a spec.

I wonder what would happen if there were a website out there that listing all "dead but worthy" languages along with instructions on how to get them running? Does anything out there like this exist?

I'm envisaging students, language enthusiasts, etc, modernizing these old language specifications - which would allow the community to readily reasses the technical merits of the language in question. It might ultimately be demoted again, but we'd have a reasonable, modern justification of why.

This is a beautiful post, so poignant and so true.

I've found the solution (for me at least), while I love spending time on new tech, is focusing on being a "solution provider" rather than focusing on specific technology. The moment you stop including the name of specific tech on your resume and start describing how you helped solve X problem that saved/made the company Y amount of money instead, you open the door to positions that may be as hands on (or not, depending on what you want), but that pay better and where the interviews are not focused on tech trivia at all.

Same here, I think that will come soon when we realise most of our jobs run on credit and not profit and the "demand" for engineering is essentially based on crap shoots. I'm genuinely scared and haven't been able to shake this feeling. It keeps me bothered at night.

> Having to interview for a new job and realizing that you can't pass the white board questions because you have fallen behind with the expectations of young blood. That's my nightmare, becoming irrelevant.

I'd like to think that interviewing for positions that aren't entirely focused on new-hotness still leans on heavily trod areas of CS. Data structures, sorting and searching.

A large portion of modern dev jobs are either CRUD apps or data munging. Knowledge of algos are not necessary for those for those domains.

It always amuses me when I'm interviewing for some vanilla web app job and they start pitching maths questions. It's filtering on the wrong criteria.

No, they are filtering on the criteria of "recently revised this stuff for an exam" i.e. "we want cheap and easy to exploit 23-year-olds but we can't say that in front of HR".

This. So much. And by any chance if you are stuck in some kind of "corporate only" domain (ex: telecom, insurance etc) with "system/non-web competency" like C/C++/Linux, your job market narrows down further. Its not impossible to find a job, but your job market becomes very niche. When people say just read up on tech etc, they forget the fact that, most employers are looking for professional experience in that area. Doubt if contributing to OSS, side projects can help convince the employers otherwise !

Do you love coding?

If you don't, just find something else.

On top of what have been said, there are two important advantages over young people that old devs should have. The first advantage is that compared to young people your advantage is your long experience in Computer Science. For instance: you should have a better understanding of your stack, you have mastered a lot of the basics of CS with several paradigms in different programming languages, databases SQL/NoSQL, etc... You may have a little bit of knowledge around the edge of your stack and outside...

For the second advantage it depends where you want to do. If you want to stay a dev and only code then the best thing to do is to master your stack and learn complex things. By doing that you differentiate yourself and increase the barrier of entry. So for instance to learn C++, AWS, Machine Learning, Hadoop ecosystem, webgl... Depending your field and what can be the next big hard thing with it.

Else, the other way is to go up in the hierarchy to be a team leader and maybe to go higher. At first you have been (or should) start to learn how to manage people. You should know how to lead your team when things are doing well but also when things are at the worst. Sometimes you have deadlines that are hard to meet. Sometimes the stress is at the maximum, financially the company is not doing well, or goals and ideas diverge... It's all the experience you need to get to be able to manage these situations and start to be a great leader.

Also you -may- start to learn to master git to be a team leader, to be able to fix the problems, and manage the repo for the code reviews. Another point should be to increase your communication skill, every day by talking with your team, by enjoying to write well written emails and speeches. These books [1] are a good start. And also a last point that I think is important is to start to get financial skills with things like financial management, accounting, and if possible to be able to do simple DCFs...

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Style-4th-William-Strunk/dp/0...

http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-30th-Anniversary-Nonficti...

http://www.amazon.com/Pitch-Anything-Innovative-Presenting-P...

Legacy aint gonna maintain itself ;)

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