Significant JavaScript projects from 2006 to 2020
bestofjs.org
bestofjs.org
Firebug played a huge role in removing the shroud around javascript and making it approachable to a lot of people, helping them introspect others code, and improving their own code quality. After it, javascript became a beast you could tame rather than a source of endless frustration.
I don't have words to say how dreadful JS development was before that. Debugging was extraordinarily limited by default, and we all had bits and pieces of debugging functionality pieced together from a variety of projects, most of which were glorified "debug by printf" hooks which sometimes interfered with the real application logic, and you ended up having to debug your debug code instead of whatever was actually broken.
> Disclaimer
> We could have mentioned a lot of other projects: > [lines omitted] > ...but we had to make choices to keep this timeline compact.
> The 2 main constraints were:
> We wanted 20 projects because we are in 2020 > We wanted at least one project for every year between 2010 and 2020.
Reasoning kind of dumb, since this could have been a much more impactful post, but glad they laid out their reasoning. They missed some major precursors to the web we know to day -- Node Webkit existed before Electron IIRC, there's stuff like MooTools, Ember has been around basically forever (and SproutCore before that), Backbone isn't mentioned, KnockoutJS started the MVVM craze IIRC. In more recent time, they left out Parcel which is by far the easiest bundler I've ever used, JSPM & SystemJS were left out as well.
I wonder if there's a better timeline out there for the history of JS tooling.
Given the disclaimer at the end, they predicted people would be unsatisfied with the omissions... They were right
but youre right that people are unhappy with whatever you eventually leave out
Absolutely any list that omits these three technologies is fundamentally flawed. React was originally created to replace the "View" component of Backbone.
As someone who has been writing javascript for over a decade, I find this list to be really disingenuous. Putting projects like Rome, Snowpack, and Deno alongside jQuery is almost laughable. They certainly have large potential upside, but they have yet to have any significant tangible impact on the Javascript community. I'm all for them and will continue to support their development, but why not mention the projects that had genuine historic impact. Does angular really belong here twice? I'm not sure it belongs even once.
I suppose it shouldn't bug me this much.. it's just a list. But given everything the developers of these projects have given me, I'd like to see them get the credit they deserve.
Should've been called "Some old school stuff I heard about and shiny projects with lots of Github stars." Sloppy click-bait work, this.
Sure, why not.
Cool, lets see if it works out
Still, very excited to check it out!
The road to today is paved with many influential projects.
> Babel #13
> First called `5to6`, the compiler Babel helped make the
> ES6 version of JavaScript popular and was a key part of
> React success.
But it's also just an irrelevant factoid on a timeline that at first seems to be a history of influential JS projects over the past 15 years, but in reality just takes some projects that are well-known today and kind of arbitrarily arranges them.
And then it also lists 2 projects that, frankly, I've never heard of (and I try to keep pace) and speaks of them in suspiciously-glowing terms, speculating about them being significant in the future.
Fine, you can't always know today what will have had the biggest impact in 5 years, but the result is that this reads like a really bad "puff piece" ad for those two projects.
It's like when you see blog posts from some SaaS company about "best practices for <industry>", and the first few tips are either obvious or wrong, and the last few tips are "buy our product!"
MathJax might be the most significant JS project ever. It enabled something that couldn't really be done before it came along, displaying complicated equations in a readable manner.
Ace deserves at least an honorable mention. I was able to add a full-blown text editor to a CGI app with little effort. I'm pretty sure it's been around longer than VS Code and it's been used in more major projects.
I also agree about some projects should have been mentioned, at least in the disclaimer, mainly Backbone and its friend Underscore because at the beginning of 2010s, it was a kind of standard to build clean apps in the browser, using a MVC pattern.
In addition of the Rising Stars projects https://risingstars.js.org/ that provides an overview by year, this timeline was the first attempt to provide a big picture about the landscape of the 10 last years, I will try to create something more thorough soon.
How about Enyo the predecessor of React? If there was no Enyo there would be no React since a team member on Facebook was originally inspired by it ... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enyo_(software)
How about PhoneGap? A Javascript library that allowed you to write native mobile apps for the first time.
Gmail - 2004 Google maps - 2005
These were the things that really woke us up that js is a game changer.
Both had significant impacts on the JS developer-experience.
So you might use it with your React app to get rid of eslint, webpack & jest (at some point, it's not there yet).
Svelte however is an entirely new framework which is fundamentally different from react/vue/angular in some very interesting ways (which I won't get in to here).
> Rome is a linter, compiler, bundler, and more for JavaScript, TypeScript, JSON, HTML, Markdown, and CSS.
> Rome is designed to replace Babel, ESLint, Webpack, Prettier, Jest, and others.