The Vanilla JavaScript Toolkit | Hacker News Reader

The Vanilla JavaScript Toolkit

vanillajstoolkit.com

56 pointsfavourable23 comments

I've been using a lot of vanilla JS recently, as I've decided not to go for the usual React/Vue etc stuff. I'm mindblown by how much functionality they added in vJS, and I keep discovering new stuff on MDN every day. I suggest to everyone who's looking for frameworks/libraries for a certain task to check MDN first, as the implementation might be already present in the core!

Similarly, you can get surprisingly far with just vanilla HTML and CSS these days. You might not even need JS for certain web apps.

http://vanilla-js.com/

> Vanilla JS is a fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework for building incredible, powerful JavaScript applications.

Not entirely relevant or particularly useful but never gets old

The latest generation of engineers will be spared the pain of searching for how to do something in JavaScript and only getting answers involving jQuery.

Though that was probably more of an indictment of the lacking state of JS in those days than it was anything else.

The first thing I see is a big ad for a newsletter...

At least try to charm me with some good stuff and then ask for my mail...

The pages in the site have a lot of value; each page does have an email signup form at the bottom. The entry page on the site probably needs a little bit more content (like explaining the methods and libraries pages, etc) to feel a bit less like a landing page.

I saw the header immediately followed by the newsletter sign up and initially thought that there was content in between those two sections that failed to load.

It's very clear he's looking for engagement. He submitted last back in December, too. The podcast has only been around a few months. Like dude, give it a rest. Allow stuff to build organically, too; word of mouth.

Not sure what you mean. To me, it looks like the last submission of that link was in December 2021 (so 1+ year ago), and their podcast launched in 2018 (98 episodes since).

As another pointed out, it's been more than 3 months, but even if not, once every 3 months isn't terrible. Many spam their sites more often than that. Getting past the home page, the site looks to me like it has a ton of value.

I wish that Javascript was a proper language that included a Date type that was actually useful, and came with batteries included (like Python for example) so you could do something useful with it without having to find the latest popular library to do something with it.

I also wish that there were other languages running on the browser. Today JS is only popular because it has no competition.

Basically every language has been competing with JavaScript for at least a decade. Maybe even two decades. Tons of languages target the JS runtime, there have been countless languages that are syntactic sugar over JS, and dozens if not hundreds of attempts to build a browser dev experience that was better than JS. The only continuity is that JS is still around and well. And this is all just recent stuff. What about the attempts for other languages supported in the browser from 20+ years ago? People have been competing against JS for as long as JS has existed. The reality is JS is really useful

JavaScript will soon have Temporal as a Date replacement.

https://tc39.es/proposal-temporal/docs/

And until then, I am happy to use JSJoda, which is very similar to both that proposal, and java.time https://js-joda.github.io/js-joda/

I'm curious, what features do you find useful in Python (to call it "batteries included"), that you can't find in JS?

is it still common practice to use "var"?

I think "let" and "const" are preferable

Doesn't const also get optimized better?

I don’t see a good reason to use it. When I want to change a value later I use let at the top of the appropriate block, otherwise const. The code reads nicer that way.

No, but it's still useful in those rare instances in which you really need broader than block scoping.

Even then I still think it's clearer to put a `let` in the outer scope instead of putting a `var` in one of the inner scopes.

No, var should never be used.

... because var is function-scoped, not block-scoped like let.

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