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Comment by papaf | Hacker News Reader

creating complex UIs using things like WinForms, QT, GTK, Cocoa, etc SUCKS

I think that this depends on your background. Personally, I would rather do a UI in QT than Javascript. I like that Qt supports high level components such as trees:

  https://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qtwidgets-itemviews-simpletreemodel-example.html

With Qt I can also use a lot of the experience that I gained 5 years ago on a UI today. Any Javascript UI experience that I picked up 5 years ago is obsolete.

It annoys me when people say something sucks without taking the time to understand it.

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"Any Javascript UI experience that I picked up 5 years ago is obsolete."

That is only true in the sense that your Python 2.x experience didn't translate into your Python 3.x experience. That is, I think the overlap is similar on a language level. The difference lies in the libs/frameworks.

No its nothing like a minor language change. This actually happened to me and my Javascript UI experience (Jquery) is obsolete in the world of React and Angular or whatever the flavour of the month is.

Python's transition from 2 to 3 was anything but "minor"... further, jquery was designed and developed for a completely different reason than React or Angular at a different time in the evolution of the web. Your jquery knowledge still works I promise... the thing is there are better options.

> Python's transition from 2 to 3 was anything but "minor"

For the purpose of this discussion — carrying learned knowledge forward — it was minor.

If you learned Javascript and not jQuery then your experience is just as relevant today, with the main difference being that Javascript has had a lot of improvements since then (e.g. myArray.includes vs myArray.indexOf(x) != -1).

Even jQuery is still helpful if you think of how it's accessing the DOM rather than just a set of magic functions to make things happen.

If you know Javascript you can learn Angular or React or Vue fairly quickly.

What does obsolte mean actually? Today you still can build web app by jQuery.

Obsolete does not mean you cannot use your knowledge anymore. It means that community are shifting interested into new thing, maybe for better or for worse.

In this case, I do not think stick with JQuery or old framework for 5 years is productive for programming. If that happen to any community I would say that is a downside, not an upside.

Except for that fact that community and newly graduated junior developer are ahead of me in something. I can live with that

> I would rather do a UI in QT than Javascript.

This has nothing to do with Javascript. It's much easier to do complicated UI using a web browser's layout engine than it is using one of the above frameworks. For really simple stuff, yes it's about the same, maybe even easier with native UI, but if you ever need to do something outside of buttons and lists, things will get ugly fast. On a browser on the other hand, you can very quickly implement any component you can think of using well-documented CSS rules.

CSS rules still have a lot to improve compared with XAML styles, triggers and best of all, modularity.

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