Things I want to see in JavaScript and Front end development in 2023

> First, it’s really easy to ignore the beta docs and end up learning class components. She wasn’t happy when I explained to her that what she had just learned is pretty out of date and not at all what the ecosystem uses

I was just about to start learning through the tutorials on React's site. Are they still outdated? If so, what's a good up to date tutorial I can use?

What does your eslint config look like? AirBnB’s config is the worst offender for nitpicks

> First, it’s really easy to ignore the beta docs and end up learning class components. She wasn’t happy when I explained to her that what she had just learned is pretty out of date and not at all what the ecosystem uses.

Yeah, that's an absolutely terrible experience.

Why can't there be a modicum of stability in the ecosystem?

The JavaScript ecosystem seems uniquely poor at this docs inconsistency stuff. It’s almost like someone lowered the bar one day, and then everyone else learned from that low bar and all think that their behaviour makes any sense whatsoever.

I’ve been tinkering with a lot of mainstream JS frameworks and they pretty much all have their version of this problem.

Next has their new App Directory stuff going on with its own beta docs site. It’s been a few weeks since I looked, so I can’t remember the specifics, but the messaging on the new and old docs sites was not good enough for me to immediately grok what was going on. It also made Googling near impossible.

We got our long-awaited next major version of Nuxt not long ago, too. They seemingly decided that they could just change domains, put a little banner up on the old site, and make the problem go away. Again, makes Googling incredibly hard. I found myself having to remember the design and domain of the old and new sites to know if I’d accidentally stumbled on old documentation. I really want to make Nuxt work for me, but this docs experience left a bad taste in my mouth, a very specific “pre-production” taste, which is really unfortunate given Nuxt’s cadence with v3 stability.

React was about as bad as Next. I found myself bouncing between the stable and beta docs consistently. All the messaging around the stability and supported use cases for Suspense is just…way too impenetrable. I’m a seasoned web application developer. I’m confident that the majority of this isn’t a “me” problem.

The only docs experience I’ve had that comes close to addressing the issue appropriately is the Vue documentation. There’s a nice big switch at the top that switches the docs from favouring the old-school vs composition APIs.

Of course, the underlying problem is React and Vue so solidly keeping their foot in both camps. This is just an outcome of that.

I try my absolute hardest to enter the JS ecosystem with the most open of minds, and there are plenty of people working in this space that are certainly much smarter than me. I just get the impression that there are too many people that don’t have experience with other language ecosystems, or that have long since forgotten what they’re like, to the point where they’re blind to these sorts of DX shortcomings. The React Hooks / Composition API hard-left-turn smells JUST enough like Python 2 / 3 et al that I’m pretty confident in my estimate of how it’s all going to go down. History repeats, or whatever.

> There’s a lint rule about naming the error parameter in catch “error”, not “err” or “e”. Who cares about this shit???

That is certainly in the less important end of the linting rules spectrum. Nonetheless, conventions like these add up in larger codebases in my experience. The more consistency you have with things that repeat a lot across the code improve readability quite much because the brain is able to do more chunking over time.

Of course this doesn't matter that much when you are learning a language or a framework and only have a couple of files.

Are class components really considered out of date? I still prefer writing those compared to functional components. Vue is also moving in that direction with their composite API.

I think it’s why I like Svelte, it’s just JavaScript.

> I would like to see more money flowing toward open source creators and maintainers. It's terrible that companies use the OSS that's built on the backs of people that do not receive remuneration for their efforts.

Support them directly, then, if they offer the means to do so. Corporations don't pay the creators of open source software because by definition they don't have to. They also tend not to contribute back to projects, have a habit of abusing licenses and stealing code, and have an outsized influence on the community (see Google/Chromium's de facto control of web standards.)

With VC backing open source work, at some point there's going to be a big demand to monetize all the users of that software they put all that money into. We haven't seen the result of that yet, but we will, and it's not going to be pretty. The main players that I've seen here are Gatsby, Vercel, Apollo GraphQL, and more – it _will_ happen. Those edge networks they're selling aren't going to have that hockey-stick growth that VCs are looking for, so what next?

PS: Thanks! I have a blog entry about why I ended up choosing Astro as well. I was just playing around with it and it sort of stuck because it was so fast and easy.

Or something that goes in the complete opposite direction if it does it well. This is why I found Parcel really exciting to work with after battling with Webpack for so many years. I haven’t used it at work yet so part of my good luck could be the simplistic nature of what I was using it with, but the project was certainly at the “this is a useful production-grade thing” level, and I know what I’d have to do to get there with Webpack, and it’s far from “nothing”. I appreciate the desire for low-level tooling, especially given how rocky it’s been for the past decade. I’m very cautiously optimistic about the chances of the ecosystem, esp. browser functionality, soon getting to the point where getting one’s hands dirty with this stuff only makes sense in esoteric cases.

esbuild https://esbuild.github.io/ I usually write my bundling progmatically with it now.

Matter of opinion though. I decided a few months ago to try some different frameworks and libraries etc. I had a project in mind that was more than trivial. I did like sveltekit. I do like vue. But I can't get over how much further and faster I was able to get up and running with react.

With svelte I ran into an issue, I'm sorry it was a few months ago and I forget exactly what it was. I spent hours trying to get around it, and then read online others had the same issue and it just wasn't catered for. Whatever it was, it was frustrating enough that I just gave up.

I tried a bunch of different libraries as well. One nice thing about react is that you get to choose from a variety of interesting state managers on top. Yes, svelte just worked (except when it didn't) but actually the constraints of each state library helped with structure.

I'll look at svelte again next year, but if I was starting a new product right now I'd go for what works, has the best ecosystem and most familiarity with developers - react. The alternatives have some pros but are not yet compelling enough (excepting some more server side driven solutions but that's out of context).

Nah, React is quite simple. It doesn't have much complexity to it as a base library. Yes hooks have some gotchas but once you understand their design (that they are functions with a built-in memory of lifecycle state), they're easy to grasp. Svelte and Vue on the other hand, they have multiple ways of doing things and have their own HTML DSL. You couldn't pay me to write another v-for or #if again.

Have you already read the RFC? https://github.com/reactjs/rfcs/blob/main/text/0188-server-c...

Also, Next does have beta docs on using RSC, not their internal details too much, which would be enough for 90% of the cases of practically using them.

https://beta.nextjs.org/docs/rendering/server-and-client-com...

What’s the appeal of react server? I don’t get it.

I just found out this framework on the day my pet civet died.his name was Happy and he was 3 years old.