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Comment by FrancoDiaz | Hacker News Reader

The "flavor of the week" is mostly a meme. You would be fine just learning ES6, a front-end technology like Angular or React, and a bundler like Webpack. Learning Webpack is painful, but there are other choices.

The front-end is harder IMHO, but as another poster mentioned, the opportunities are tremendous.

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>> fine just learning ES6, a front-end technology like Angular (2) or React

And in 2015 you would have been just fine learning Ember or Angular 2.

And in 2014 you would have been just fine learning Angular 1 or Ember.

And in 2013 you would have been just fine learning Backbone and Ember.

And in 2012 you would have been just fine learning Knockout and Backbone...

So Ember's the right choice? :-)

No no no Ember is too old to take advantage of $featureX that you just HAVE to use. There's a couple forks like Coal or Ash that try to enable it but you're still stuck using Embers $designPatternThatWasHotShit5MinutesAgo instead of $newDesignPattern.

Ember has virtual DOM? Then no, it is wrong.

And you'll still be just fine knowing those things now. There are lots of positions out there that want Backbone and Angular 1 and Ember.

None of those technologies disappeared or stopped working.

Yes, but the point was that the poster said that "flavors of the week" is just a meme, and then said all you need to learn is two current flavors of the week.

>> You would be fine just learning ES6, a front-end technology like Angular or React, and a bundler like Webpack

In nearly every circle of developers I know, they insist you learn plain, vanilla JS first. Jumping in Angular without knowing what a JS object is, understanding how closures work, understanding callbacks, or understanding how JS's "this" works in detail. All things someone should be fluent with before they go jumping into Angular and React.

Also knowing there's a HUGE difference between Angular (which is a full MVC framework) vs. React (which is just the View part of an MVC framework) is a small, but important detail for someone just starting out.

I was assuming that JavaScript would already be known to a certain degree.

I would actually recommend React over Angular for a beginner, because (assuming Angular 2 here) they're going to have to learn Typescript too. That's a big undertaking.

A beginner could also use plain old ES5 with a JSX transpiler right in web page with React.

VueJs might be a better choice than both of those, but much more limited job opportunities.

>> I was assuming that JavaScript would already be known to a certain degree.

That's totally fair and then I would completely agree with your comment.

It's a fair assumption, but not always true, unfortunately.

This reads like it's from the original posted article

I feel the perceived "hardness/complexity" of the front-end stack is largely due to the relative less mature nature of JS / CSS / and the ever evolving toolset.

From a pure computer science perspective, I feel the data structure, algorithms leveraged on the backend side has greater complexity potential.

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