All JavaScript frameworks are terrible – A case study in confirmation bias

All JavaScript frameworks are terrible – A case study in confirmation bias(medium.com)

25 points by zefei 9 years ago | 9 comments

Graht 9 years ago |

As a CS student (pointing out my inexperience), VueJS was the easiest to dive in of them all, i can't do marvelous things with it (yet, maybe) but for simple things for personal use and for learning it's super OK.

But reading articles about Front-End frameworks makes me frustrated. Should i pick Vue ? Should i abandon it for React ? Should i pick Angular 1-2 ? What is HNs' advice ?

bloomca 9 years ago | |

There is no real difference, they all tend to get ideas from each other (for instance, Vue.js 2.0 picked a lot from React). So, Vue.js is perfectly fine – if you decide to be in the front-end development, you'll pick up other frameworks later, and for your own projects Vue is perfect.

Don't try to get everything on this hype train, it is not really that important – try to stay simple (like you don't really need this server-side rendering, dedicated state management, don't try to be "functional" – especially funny that not too many understand what it actually means).

So VueJS is absolutely perfect choice, both for simple and middle-complex fields – fast, easy-to-use, declarative, not too verbose. Also don't be afraid to not to use es6 processing through babel (if you target modern browsers like Chrome, a lot of stuff just works there – http://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/), or CSS-preprocessors, they are very helpful at scale, but often overkill for small projects.

mvindahl 9 years ago | |

I'd say define some side projects and try out different stuff for rendering the UI. Start out with a rendering library, not a framework. Check out stuff like react, preact, vue, inferno, mithril and pick the one which makes the best first impression. If you learn one of these, you can pick up any of the others pretty quickly. Because they aim to do one thing well, the learning curve is not too frightening. Pull in additional stuff (e.g. redux) once it becomes clear to you that you are running into the problem that it claims to solve. But not any sooner.

As for job opportunities, don't think too hard about it. The frameworks that you'll see listed in job ads are pretty much a time shifted image of what was hot three to five years years ago since a lot of projects will have bought into one framework or the other. These days I see a lot of angular 1.x jobs, and some react jobs. In a few years I expect more react. You need solid Javascript knowledge, a lot of curiousity, and just enough buzzwords to get over the threshold, and you'll be all right.

Graht 9 years ago | | |

Thank you for your comment, it kind of eases the frustration i feel right now. I will try and train my general JS skills for time being and re-jump to Vue or use it as a Jquery replacement as i have done until now.

Traubenfuchs 9 years ago | |

Take a look at the job search websites relevant to you! If I take a look at one of my countries most prominent job website I find 224 jobs for JSF and 93 for jQuery. For perspective: 99 for ASP, React 35, Angular 55, Angular 2 37, zero for my beloved Vue.js.

Is Europe that far behind regarding front end frameworks or is JSF the hottest frontend skill in America as well?

ci5er 9 years ago | | |

If JSF == JavaServer Faces, I can't find anything (except for some generic WebSphere and some Spring Boot development) in Austin, Texas. Austin is not "America", but it's not nothing either.

pipework 9 years ago | |

Have you looked into mithril maybe?

Mc_Big_G 9 years ago |

It should be noted that unlike competitors, Ember has no corporate backer. Angular has Google in its corner. React is promoted and used by Facebook. Ember lacks this level of support.

LinkedIn has basically taken on this role as they've hired a lot of core Ember devs. Does Google even count if they don't use Angular internally for anything? (so I've heard...)

...opting for its own “Broccoli” build tool instead of industry standards like Webpack

Maybe a good criticism but, no mention of everything being built into ember cli so you don't have to piece together your own mishmash of technologies for every project? This is a serious advantage.

Also, he dismisses the convention over configuration of Ember but doesn't mention the value in a new dev being immediately up to speed on how things should be done. Hell, knowing how things should be done for devs that have been on the same team for years is valuable. Ultimate flexibility just allows you to do things differently every time a new page is developed. This is SERIOUSLY annoying and detrimental to every project.