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Comment by geebee | Hacker News Reader

Great write up.

It sounds like an interesting but probably relatively common situation these - relatively experienced developers, but inexperienced where it comes to the front end, who are accustomed to working in a non-javascript language. In this case, sounds like it's python.

Sounds like their senior developers, who previously worked in Python, will now be doing at least 50% of their work in javascript.

If you have to do this, it sounds from this article that Ember is a good way to go. On a related note: I'm so bummed that this is the trend in languages. Just so bummed. Python and Ruby are really nice languages. To have to switch from that to Javascript feels like a big step back in developer happiness.

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I'm a very experienced Front-End developer and a lot of the tooling questions still hit us in the ass. A few years ago we switched from a Backbone framework to React based with Reflux and Browserify. Within 6-8 months the mindshare switched to Redux and Webpack and now we're on to those. But its days to weeks to gain full understanding of those (Webpack is a slog) Unless your constantly keeping up to date every time you start a new project right now you're back to the drawing board on the current state of the React ecosystem.

I love React, I'm bullish on React-Native as well for a lot of use cases. I'll be happier once the community starts to lock in a bit better on a more consistent stack and I'm totally okay with their choice of Ember (curious on why this over Angular if they're doing a follow up ;-)

If you started with React a few years ago, then React would have been brand spanking new, so change shouldn't have been too surprising then.

The question is, have things stabilized now? There's some evidence it has: Redux & Webpack have had the mindshare for almost 2 years now. But a lot of people now recommend mobx over redux, the redux plugin situation is still evolving, react-router seems to have finally got things right with version 4, et cetera.

That being said, I think the above sounds more pessimistic than it really is. For example, redux vs mobx is really two different use cases IMO.

> For example, redux vs mobx is really two different use cases IMO.

I wouldn't go that far, I'd say it's different ways of thinking about the same problem. Crucially, switching out your Redux stores/sagas for MobX stores should be a drop-in replacement for the most part. Actions are still actions, and stores are still stores. The only/main difference is that for MobX a reducer and an action are the same thing.

When you say "Redux plugin system", what specifically are you referring to?

I imagine packages that bridge react components with redux (react-redux, react-router-redux, redux-forms, redux-immutable). But I'm not sure to be honest.

nice, can't wait to replace mobx with something new next year

> On a related note: I'm so bummed that this is the trend in languages. Just so bummed. Python and Ruby are really nice languages. To have to switch from that to Javascript feels like a big step back in developer happiness.

Speaking as a Python developer who needed to pick up JS and maintain two Ember codebases this year, getting to know JS has actually been a pleasure. I was dreading it and I cursed it for a while. But using ES6 with Ember has been... pretty nice. There are objectively bad parts of it - some that are historical baggage, others that are just unfortunate (undefined and null!!). Oddities aside, I find it nimble and fun. I like Douglas Crockford's characterization of JS as "a LISP in C's clothing".

Make sure they are using Typescript/ES6. JavaScript still has some oddities in behavior but I actually prefer some aspects of the language design now compared to python.

> To have to switch from that to Javascript feels like a big step back in developer happiness.

That's why we use TypeScript.

I've been using Python for well over a decade and despise Javascript. TypeScript is incredible. React is pure goodness. React + TypeScript is really cool to work with and doesn't feel like a step back in dev happiness.

Of course I miss the Python ecosystem there, but the JS ecosystem itself is improving thanks to Facebook mostly (yarn...). At this point the main complaint I have in that ecosystem is the three layers of transpiling which are causing backtraces to be unreadable.

Also, I'm unhappy about Python's half-assed move towards not-really-static typing. Optional typing is, and has always been, where it's at. Did I mention I love typescript?

Shoutout to react+typescript. Did you see the recent tools library post on here?

https://github.com/palantir/blueprint

Hello there from the Flow camp.

There's a hope in webassembly

Very interesting, I read a bit about it. Up to now, I was mainly watching systems like volt. A bit too cutting edge for me right now, but I love what they're doing. I'm hesitant to make tech predictions, since what usually happens is something you didn't see coming all, but I'm still figuring transpiled ruby/python/whateveryoulike to javascript will emerge.

I'll dig more into webassembly when I get the chance.

Can we admit that we hope wasm kills JavaScript yet?

That'll probably never catch on. Front end dev already have 10 frameworks and 5 browsers to worry about. Let's not add 10 more languages for a total of 500 different combinations.

500 combinations of what? Other platforms too have n languages and n frameworks and so on. We'll be fine.

I'm quite sure it will catch on with Apple, Google, Mozilla and Microsoft working on it.

I'm intrigued by the server side Swift frameworks coming out right now. If they could replace JS on the server and browser that could be interesting.

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