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Comment by pfooti | Hacker News Reader

You can still write an Express, Jade, haml, whatever app like it is 2011. The js world moves fast, but the old libraries are still out there. Plenty of people writing jquery or knockout code.

Web dev has a fast cycle time, mainly (imo) because products are created and used and discarded quickly - lots of websites are short-lived one offs. So, naturally, there's churn.

And as to what my sibling commenter said, I agree. I'm starting to move from angular 1 to 2, and 2 is better. It has some downright amazing features, and the tooling is quite excellent. That's why, personally, I'm learning the new thing.

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I'm starting to move from angular 1 to 2, and 2 is better.

Angular 4, you mean (or just "Angular").

I'm still in the Rails/Bootstrap/jQuery camp. When you need something quick, that will function, and not look like shit - you really can't beat this option. It's also easy to teach junior developers, and they strengthen on the fundamentals first.

Needing something quick is subjective honestly. Personally I could build you a service worker that makes your app offline capable and throw in React components on whatever pages you need, or setup a whole React / vue / vanilla js / whatever app structure in 30 minutes thanks to the time I've spent investigating good packages to use. So I'd say there's many options that are great and it's sad to see people here in this thread (not you) complain that there's so much js churn when isn't the whole reason We are developers because we have a passion for constant learning and building cool things?

It is true and you are correct t but as a JS novice it is very hard to know which things are good and which are just new junk.I love learning and mastering things as much as the next individual. (BTW I have moved to Vue when I need a fancier front end and Love it). I guess my complaint, if you can call it that, is that it is hard to find the good stuff and easy to spend hours fighting node packages and Packers and get nowhere.

It keeps coming down to finding the right resources and not wasting time on the bad projects. And that's totally valid.

We need some sort of js beginner walk through that has a section for each step in the process and explains the solutions and differences between projects.

ex: step 1 is language fundamentals, step 2 dom manipulation step 3 bundlers and why you need them. Step 4 frameworks and libraries to build your frontend. Something like this would be useful but I don't know if anyone is building something like this for beginners :/

Very true. Yet as a manager leading a team of mainly backend engineers who don't have lots of interest in front-end development - we need a toolchain that is easy to pick up, easy to understand the fundamentals, and easy to train interns or junior devs on.

Of course - it also helps I understand that tech stack enough to efficiently explain it to younger engineers. That said - these three technologies have a LOT of material on the web and consensus on that tech has helped my folks build things "more right" more often, without having to do all the nuanced consideration themselves.

When it comes to X resources, Y time, and Z goals, it's all about the right tool.

I think many people give JS shit because it isn't always the right tool - but people choose it anyway due to hotness/hype/vague advantages.

So I'd agree its a mix of skill, resources, and goal. Arguably another manager with amazing React skillsets could do the same thing with a different stack. I'd love to see that guy in action, especially if he can have a more productive team for the choices.

But for us - most UI Frontends are fancy buttons on backend service APIS, or stupid CRUD. Rails does this with confidence.

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