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I’ve got quite a lot of experience with non-IT enterprise, in Denmark, and almost nobody uses those fancy new technologies around here. Over the past few years everything has moved to typescript (typically with react, but some angular remains from older decisions), dotnet, Java, php or c++.

That’s basically it. The only job listing to even mention things like Rust in the region where I live in the past 5 years is Google, and they list it as “nice to have” on a recurrent phd position for c++ development.

Python is obviously a thing, but not so much for software development, but typically requires you to be a statistician first and then maybe capable of writing a little Python second.

So there is probably a bit of a disconnect between what is hip and what puts food on the table for a lot of us.

You’re probably on to a lot of it too. I recently got back into development, returning from a stint in management, project management and enterprise architecture and I’ve grown quite fond of typescript and the node environment.

It’s obviously a place where you can cause a lot of harm if you brute-force-program 100% or the time all of the time, but it’s also a place where you can create some great business value faster than I’ve ever experienced elsewhere. I mean, I can do things faster in Python but only until whatever I’m doing outgrows what I’m capable of keeping in my head.

That being said. Looking at the previous 20 years of getting to running office365 in your browser, sort of explains why people have been working so hard to come up with newer and smarter things, doesn’t it?

For the vast majority of us, however, the boring old languages are likely going to be around long after we retire, and as such, the “popularity” measures in these articles is probably not something to pay too much attention to.

While non-IT enterprise is a big job marked, I guess the HN crowd leans towards the startup scene. There are plenty of python/django and ruby on rails and node companies in copenhagen :-)

Oh this is very true. There are actually a few django and Ruby on Rails jobs open in my area (region midt) on a fairly regular basis. There are a lot of node jobs as well as most things have moved to have some sort of TypeScript front end.

I’m not sure those really count as “new and hipster”, however, I mean the person I was replying to was lamenting “react” being old. ;)

There is no "popularity" tab? There's a "satisfaction" tab which basically tells you nothing.

The "usage" tab tells us what really matters - that in the last 3 years essentially nothing has changed despite the hype. Angular/Vue/React/Express dominate.

Next.js, SvelteKit and so on are backend frameworks for sure, giving you an http server, routing, authentication, data loading. It’s just a slightly different toolkit than you’d get from traditional frameworks (an ORM, job scheduling, etc). Express indeed hardly qualifies.

As a long-time frontend developer, I find Angular pretty bad, but I understand it feels fine if you come from .NET/Java or another “enterprise-y” environment.

Hm, it seems like SvelteKit has grown in functionality since I last checked, fair enough.

I stopped filling in this survey last year because of the above, and the data breach [0]. It's a very skewed demographic filling it out.

0. https://dev.to/sachagreif/disclosing-a-state-of-javascriptst...

Initially I also had the impression that Next.JS/Remix/SvelteKit shouldn't be considered as backend frameworks but, after using it for a little while, noticed that it, indeed, replaces the use of something else even if you just want to create API routes.

Overall, I find the experience similar to something like Ruby-on-Rails/Django, which I usually also consider as "backend frameworks".

For me, these new frameworks are one of the reasons that, for me, React has never been better.

It's always driven by hype, or maybe groupthink. Every year I feel bad for the Ember contributors when this thing comes out cuz the respondents boldly claim Ember's bad while also admitting they've never used it and have no interest trying it. The clear mark of a popularity contest.

Do they say Ember is bad, or that they just haven't used it and have no interest in trying it?

They provide a 2d grid for positive/negative sentiment crossed with have/not used. So there's a quadrant of negative sentiment + have not used that Ember dominates the corner of! It's a weird set of beliefs to hold - hating an unknown - and even weirder to care enough to fill out that part of the survey.

I think it makes most sense to look at the "I've used it, wouldn't use it again" rather than "I haven't used it, not interested in using it". Those breakdowns are quite revealing in fact for both React and Vue.

I mean. It’s a poll. Its express purpose is measuring popularity at a point in time. I can’t imagine what else would be expected.

It's based on polling, and I don't think people that are content with what they use are the demographic that fills in these things; it's the people that are interested in a broad range of things, in shiny new tech (magpie developers).

e.g. Angular is a framework that a company invests in long-term, 5-10 year periods.

React is becoming a boring technology and that's a good thing.

I went from building dummy projects in vue2 to production ready apps in react(next actually) because of the giant community it has, in particular in the web3 world. Boring or not, if it has better support/resources it's a logical better choice

“Satisfaction” basically means “hype”. That’s why solid and svelte are lower in “usage” rankings while Angular is second in usage.

Only Vite has great satisfaction (98%) and decent usage (30%).

Agreed. Recently started a new project with react and it's awesome. Especially in combination with tailwindcss and vite. Very little code. Fast to production.

All the popular react libraries feel very mature, have zero vulnerabilities (at least according to npm) and are easily integrated.

It was a blast!

Hey guys, undergraduate here. After reading this thread, I doubt myself about my current studying. I'm a CS student. Normally, I'd be graduated and will be on my way into IT industry as an intern right now. But a lot of things happened in my country, Myanmar. I'm now self studying various things like react, django. My question is am I doing right thing learning those shiney tech, or which ones am I supposed to be doing for? What skills would you expect from people like me? Graduating will not be happening so soon with the country's situation right now. Originally, I'm thinking to post on ask hn but anyway.

Django and react are not what I would call "shiny tech" these days. React is a mature and widely used technology now. You are investing in learning solid technologies there.

Once you have a solid grounding in React, I would highly recommend picking up some TypeScript and node.js. Those three go together a lot, at least where I live (Netherlands). If you know all three, there are tons of opportunities for both permanent and freelance positions.

Thanks, that helps a lot. After spending some time on hn, I find most people here hate react and spa. And I thought I got manipulated by online blogs or so. I'm planning to do as you said. Thanks again.

Keep in mind that the whole point of this survey is to ask developers what they really think of the tools that are currently getting the most “hype”.

> This year it feels the most like it’s driven by hype (and marketing, hi Vercel!)

A few developer YouTubers I used to enjoy watching have all jumped on board this train and are now only making videos about products built by companies that are paying them.

And they're looking at closing the bubble up more cross-referencing specifically survey takers' closed-source Twitter and GitHub accounts, leaving out the privacy-conscience and open-source fundamentalists that don't use these platforms but have a worthwhile opinion that should be represented and heard.

Nah, Angular is that bad

What do you consider "that bad" in Angular?

I could rant for a while, but a few things off the top of my head: over-architected, overly complex, sometimes bad tooling (karma, protractor), tons of old issues (though they’ve been working to clean this up lately), big time inner platform effect (the templating feels like a language to itself), slow compilation, RxJS is generally overkill, Reactive forms is untyped(!) and clunky, and the “included batteries” are sometimes later removed leaving you to figure it out yourself, such as with protractor and eslint. If I’m just gonna figure it out, why not use React anyway and get a much simpler framework?

That said, for a team or teams with lots of apps where a consistent structure provides real benefits in getting up to speed, I can appreciate that some of angular’s enforced structure could be helpful.

Angular is simpler for me than React. I don truly understand the hate. I can built applications fasters in angular than React. I still use React sometimes, but I always go back to Angular.

> […] Astro are not "back end frameworks" unless you define tech by what marketing copy people have written

I can’t speak to SvelteKit, but I don’t think Astro even markets itself as such. Last I checked it doesn’t even support SSR (though it appears to be in development).

To say that React is only popular because it was "new" and "shiny" is laughable. It took years to get to the point where it is now.