Hacker News Reader

Comment by stefan_ | Hacker News Reader

That's not a developers fault, that is the insane JS ecosystem. Every year, everything old breaks and everything new is different. Of course no one can keep up, develop intuition and good practices, so all that's left to do is copy. That is how learning works, only the curve never flattens (and nothing is really learned, nothing is gained).

View on HN

That's just the illusion that's created by the inexperience of most JavaScript developers. You don't have to continually learn the bleeding edge stuff. What they don't tell you (arguably, because it doesn't pay their bills) is that what you should learn is the language. Once you understand that, you can comfortably adapt to any new library/framework/whatchamacallit relatively quickly.

Most of what you've described is just peer pressure. The only reason I know that is that I shared this exact opinion until I said "this is stupid" and started doing things my own way (to much success and peace).

> Once you understand that, you can comfortably adapt to any new library/framework/whatchamacallit relatively quickly.

I disagree. If you know typescript, it's still quite a leap to be able to code with angular, and debug weird stuff where you stare at a blank page, and the back trace in the dev tools include not even a single line of code you wrote.

Also, the language isn't really enough. You need to be familiar with the tooling (npm/yarn, babel, whatever) to use most libraries; so unless you do everything from scratch, you have to deal at least with the churn of the toolchain.

Learning the language is one part, but what enables you to make an application are patterns and paradigms: inflating, mvc, mvvm, immutability, functional. These work for all languages, you learn one once, you can apply it everywhere. It just so happens that maybe every 10-20 years a paradigm replaces another. Since i started writing code in the 90s this happened maybe three times. As far as i am concerned all this ever-changing js fatigue talk is complete rubbish. Even the tooling, we're using the same tools that we used 5 years ago (Webpack, Babel, TS, React, Jest, ...). Microsoft/Apple change their platform toolkits quicker than that!

Class lifecycles being replaced by hooks is a radical but much needed change. Learning it isn't complicated and it will enable you to venture on as everything around you sheds the class based component approach. Swiftui, Vue, Svelte and ofc React are just the beginning.

I get so tired of the churn claim. Let's look over some stuff

ES6 -- 2015

jQuery -- 2006

React -- 2013

React Native -- 2015

Redux -- 2015

VueJS -- 2013

6to5 (now Babel) -- 2015

Webpack -- 2012

ESLint -- 2013

jslint -- 2002

ExpressJS -- 2010

Lodash -- 2012

UnderscoreJS (basically the same API as Lodash) -- 2009

D3 -- 2011

Blockly -- 2012

Node Red -- 2013?? (I'm not sure when IBM first released the project)

Bootstrap -- 2011

PDF.js -- 2011

WinJS -- 2012

SocketIO -- 2012

ThreeJS -- 2010

dotenv -- 2015

momentJS -- 2011

node-sass -- 2012

Winston -- 2014

yargs -- 2011

Modernizr -- 2009

Jasmine -- 2010

Mocha -- 2011

Jest -- 2015

All of these are at least 5 year old and most are 8-9 years old. Look over the most downloaded npm packages and you'll find this to be generally true for all the top packages.

Quite a few of these packages have undergone significant backward-incompatible changes over the years and are intertwined with specific version ranges of other packages. The churn complaints are caused by the cadence of this happening and how difficult it is to stay on a combination of stuff that actually works together. Babel may have been released in 2015 but nothing written back then would work in babel today. Same with webpack. I can't write something and then come back in a year and expect even an ounce of stability in my project. It's good that things keep improving but it's also exhausting having so much time spent performing upgrades and re-learning best practices in tools you were previously comfortable with.

angular.js -- 2010 - 2016

angular -- 2016

That's an example where, when you jumped on the bandwagon at the height of the hype, you were thrown into a backwards incompatible rewrite pretty quickly.

And while npm has been around for quite some time, my outsider impression is that was, for some time, basically discouraged from use, because yarn was so much better.

Compare that to Ruby on Rails -- 2004, Catalyst (Perl) -- 2005, Django (Python) 2003.

Time moves slower in enterprises, with upgrade cycles more on the scale of 3 to 10 years.

Angular 2 shared a name for marketing reasons, but was/is 100% unrelated as every major idea in Angular turned out to be bad.

Yarn solved some npm issues they refused to tackle, but npm got motivated and has now solved most of them. Meanwhile, yarn 2's release has been a disaster and has seemingly resulted in most people (myself included) moving back to npm.

I've done Rails and Django work. Rails in particular took years to migrate to the next version. I'd add that Rails has seen 6 versions in 16 years which gives around 1 major breaking upgrade every 3 years (in truth, there's been about 1 major change per year as point releases are pretty big). Likewise, wikipedia gives almost 20 major django updates (I haven't used it in several years, but point updates used to have a very big risk of breaking the project I was working on).

> Angular 2 shared a name for marketing reasons, but was/is 100% unrelated as every major idea in Angular turned out to be bad.

Be that as it may, Angular 2 meant nobody was willing to commit to any fixed time span to support Angular.js, so it basically forced everybody to migrate off of Angular.js, introducing the toil and churn we were discussing.

>Every year, everything old breaks and everything new is different.

It's great for online educators and others who monetize devs though..

The JS ecosystem almost seems like it's self promotional, where the monetization opportunities result in a higher self marketing activity of individuals on platforms like Twitter, which of course builds up hype and draws more people into it.

Nothing old broke with the introduction of hooks.

This is true, but even as a fan of hooks, I must admit that you'd be fighting a losing battle if you tried to convince your coworkers to merge your PRs with classes in them, in most places.

That is a problem with your coworkers, certainly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com