How it feels to learn JS in 2016 2023
How it feels to learn JS in 2016 2023
<em>No </em><a href="https://hackernoon.com/tagged/javascript" target="_blank"><em>JavaScript</em></a><em> frameworks were created during the writing of this article.</em>
I learned "pure" JS back in 2013, when HTML5 was brand new, and I still don't get most of the stuff going on nowadays.
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Always confused when I see memes like this
You learn js, then you learn a bit about ts and pick react/vue if you want to do frontend or nodejs if you're into backend. Then you do something basic, like a barebones twitter clone, weather app, etc. By the point when you're 80% done, you will know most important parts of the ecosystem naturally
After that, learning all the supporting libraries/frameworks is super simple since next is just superset around react, same for nuxt. Solid, svelte, fresh etc are just different flavors of react. Even vue is looking like react this days with composition api, simply because they nailed the simplicity and dev comfort. Average dev will never face weird js/ts parts or confusing libraries because most of their day to day job will be moving buttons and looking how to persist user basket in browser storage...
Sure there are a lot of libraries and ways to do stuff, but 90% of them are irrelevant, only-for-hobby or simply dead and unused since 2010. Knowing ts+(react|vue)+(vuex|redux-tk|mobx)+(styled|tailwind) will land someone a basic job where they can progress and expand their knowledge lol
The joke is that nearly everything these libraries/frameworks do is complicate what used to be simple
All these things are solving different problems and you absolutely don't have to use them if they complicate your current workflow.
I can't imagine making a high interval trading app, things like notion or figma without modern libraries.
jQuery only gets you so far before you will wake up in unmaintainable hell where your team has to re-invent the wheel
You don't need any of that, not even jquery, to display static content, or even to make a decent commerce page (shopping, booking, tickets). I would wager the vast majority of the internet does not need to work like Figma or Notion (or old timey chatrooms, for that matter), with real time changes being sent to all connected sessions.
Yes, that is true. But actually it’s more than that: you don’t need a dev to display static content or a decent commerce page anymore. Square space and it’s competitors give more options at a better value to the layman than devs using PHP or jQuery could hope to these days. We have the simple websites, so frameworks very specifically target productivity and maintainability for complex web apps.
This is not true. The higher complexity of frameworks is unarguable, but it reflects the higher complexity of modern web apps. The reality is that React/Vue/Svelte achieve things that are simply infeasible with e.g. the LAMP stack or jQuery.
well, they are theoretically feasible, but practically infeasible
What happened was, up until the early 2010s a lot of frontend developers were essentially designers who could write HTML/CSS templates, but not programs. When the industry shifted to client side SPAs they couldn't follow, so there was a big backlash against the new "complicated" tooling, even though it's no more complicated than any other domain.
I always wanted to write a response post, "How it feels to learn JavaScript in 1996". Because yes, webpack is harder than flat JS files. But you have 1 billion tutorial videos to help you do it, and open source project skeletons to start you off, and Q&A sites to fix your problems for you.
Some of us learned JS before YouTube or StackOverflow or even W3Schools existed. When I got my first job browsers didn't even have developer tools! If your code didn't work you just had to guess why!
I tried to learn React, but it was unnatural for me, but then senior front dev at my workplace suggested Vue. I remember Vue's options api being too weird to even try it.
Then I discovered there's composition api and fell in love with it. React's flow without its weird quirks.
I think Svelte is next step towards feeling as natural as possible.