The abundance of JavaScript libraries

http://joonaspajunen.com/the-abundance-of-javascript-libraries

by velmu • 11 years ago

61 46 11 years ago

georgemcbay2• 11 years ago

Probably a controversial opinion to post here (not in that I think it is unique, but rather that I think there will be a divide in people who agree strongly and those who disagree strongly), but I view the JavaScript framework/library situation as a damning indictment of how terrible the language is. A constant churn of attempts to build a solid foundation upon a bed of leaky sand, each ultimately failing because no matter how well they were engineered you can't get past the whole sand problem... and maybe the whole sand problem will solve itself by other means, but only at a very geological rate due to all of the committee politics surrounding browsers these days.

IOW, JavaScript is going to be great next year. Just like it was going to have been each year for the past 10 years or so.

orangecat• 11 years ago

Completely agree, and I say this having written mostly JavaScript professionally for the last several years. It's sad to think of the millions of engineer-hours spent trying to make JS usable for today's applications.

IOW, JavaScript is going to be great next year. Just like it was going to have been each year for the past 10 years or so.

ES6 might actually be ok, in the sense of "about as good as Python 2.3".

coldtea5• 11 years ago

IOW, JavaScript is going to be great next year. Just like it was going to have been each year for the past 10 years or so.

Well, ES6 wasn't available "the past 10 years or so", whereas it will be next year, and recent 6-to-5 transpilers make it a backwards compatible option too.

ES6 might actually be ok, in the sense of "about as good as Python 2.3".

Well, it's more ubiquitus that Python, more dynamic, more modern (if you include ES6 features), tied to a more powerful environment (the web), and beats the shit out of Python regarding execution speed.

agumonkey2• 11 years ago

I was under the impression that all dynamic languages were converging around a similar set of core principles.

  - builtin type literal
  - closures and fp idioms
  - generators
  - asynchrony
  - comprehensions

sk5t• 11 years ago

Well said. In many ways picking a direction with JS is as bad as choosing an ORM... big upfront costs, a brief honeymoon, followed by eventual remorse, and finally more costs to transition to the next thing. Sometimes the smartest move is to avoid playing the game.

raingrove• 11 years ago

True. In JS land, someone is reinventing module management, object/class model, property bindings, event handling, async helpers, and FP helpers every day.

ttty• 11 years ago

If they didn't many of the best libs wouldn't' exits today.

lhnz2• 11 years ago

Can you define this leaky sand or is just bullshit?

There is definitely a lot of churn, but slowly but surely you are seeing certain functional programming approaches winning out.

And the language is progressing so much faster than similar dynamic languages like Python.

brandonmenc2• 11 years ago

the language is progressing so much faster than

Because it was a haphazard design.

A lot of the progress is just Javascript catching up to thoughtfully designed languages like Python. That's a good and necessary thing, but the fact remains.

vectorpush• 11 years ago

I think we see so much churn in JavaScript because we've forced the weight of the entire client side web onto the back of a single language. JavaScript must satiate the technical needs of all organizations across every consumer facing device and operating system. Like all languages, JavaScript has its weaknesses, so its not surprising that we find JavaScript to be a less than optimal solution for certain types of problems, but since JavaScript is generally the only option available for scripting logic in the browser, it's pretty natural that we see an explosion of libraries and frameworks to compensate for the fact that the JavaScript hammer is the only tool that exists in the client web universe.

petjuh• 11 years ago

That's what I've been wondering - why don't the browsers add a few more scripting languages, like python? If IE didn't exist, Chrome and Firefox could do it, just for fun, they're very open to new features.

ddw5• 11 years ago

I still don't understand these "too many frameworks" articles. Is there some power out there that I don't know about that is forcing devs to use the latest framework?

We're still allowed to use what we want, no matter how new or old it is, right?

JustSomeNobody• 11 years ago

"Is there some power out there that I don't know about that is forcing devs to use the latest framework?"

Yes, It's called the Internet. People read articles about how X is the best. thing. evar. And this is perpetuated through many blog posts and, well, a lot of developers actually believe it.

ddw5• 11 years ago

If these JavaScript developers are so gullible to the newest thing it says more about them than the hype cycle.

It's not just that the language sucks in some ways but that the users of it possess so little engineering rigor that they complain about TOO MANY options.

coldtea5• 11 years ago

Is there some power out there that I don't know about that is forcing devs to use the latest framework?

Yes. Not all forcing is of the "gun pointed at you" kind.

There's also: peer pressure, fads, media coverage, changing demands from employers, etc.

oldmanjay2• 11 years ago

Demands from employers may be considered forcing. The rest, not even close.

ddw5• 11 years ago

So like everything else in life then? For instance I just saw a TV commercial that said that Miller Lite is the best beer, but my past experience knows that that is not the case. Surely we can recognize hype and advertisements when we see them.

The only valid excuse here is your employer, but in that case you should be able justify why using X is better than Y. If your non-technical manager insists that you use something that you don't want to because its hip you should be running away from that employer as quickly as possible.

chimeracoder• 11 years ago

We're still allowed to use what we want, no matter how new or old it is, right?

Yes, but that means you may be on your own to support it, which means extra up-front work as well as maintenance.

For example, keep in mind that Javascript has changed execution environments and was also originally built without the concept of simply importing other JS files. So over the years, we have had various incompatible ways of packaging and even importing modules[0]. Yes, the situation is improving, and ES6 and polyfills sort of fix this, but let me tell you, it is not fun to deal with old code that assumes a different execution environment and/or build process than the one you're using[1].

[0] e.g. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16521471/relation-betwee...

[1] I really don't want to turn this into a debate on the best way to package or import Javascript projects today - just to point out that yes, there is a cost to using old code, regardless of how good it was at the time it was written.

Silhouette• 11 years ago

Not that I disagree with your basic point, but I also see no reason to assume that using something new/trendy like React or Angular 2 will be any better a year or two from now. It has always been the case that building around a framework trades off quick initial development and having reasonable defaults for a lot of common tasks against often making more specialised tasks harder and the risk that within the lifetime of your project the framework you rely on will no longer be supported and developed as actively as it was when you first adopted it.

wwweston• 11 years ago

Sure. You're allowed to use what you want... if you don't work with/for anyone who's sure that The Way Good Developers Do Things Now is DependencyInjectAllTheThings.js or MVVMVVM.js or Reflux.js.

I mean, you're passionate about keeping your skills updated, right?

bpodgursky• 11 years ago

In Java or C++, there's a reasonable expectation that common popular libraries will keep getting updated for quite a while after you start using them... mindshare doesn't hemorrhage rapidly.

Not remotely true with JavaScript. Something which got 2k stars on gitub this year might be on the way out in a year, and you'll be stuck figuring out whether it still works with the new version of d3.js, or on the newest Chrome... and if it doesn't you have to either move on or fix it yourself.

lugg• 11 years ago

Javascript developers need to make a transition like php and others have to module based apps, where you import just the libraries you need.

With things like require its not like it would be difficult to role your own framework like you can with php and composer (+all the symfony / laravel modules)

ddw5• 11 years ago

Yes and no. Libraries like jQuery and Underscore are often the basis of new frameworks and have been solid for a while now.

Like in other languages there's some wait and see to adoption. Going all in on a project that's been on GitHub a month no matter how many stars is foolish. JS devs have to make their decisions this way.

pavlov• 11 years ago

JavaScript libraries are a bit like office politics for front-end web developers -- basically something that feels like work and "advances your career", while in truth it's just a way to avoid doing the real work with actual customers.

FlannelPancake2• 11 years ago

libraries are a bit like office politics for front-end web developers -- basically something that feels like work and "advances your career", while in truth it's just a way to avoid doing the real work with actual customers.

That's pretty scary, if true. That sounds very analogous to academic research and the "publish or perish" state of affairs in academia today.

Office politics often will advance your career in any sizable organization. That's why people engage in it. If publishing libraries is an extension of that, then we should be worried about the precedent that's setting for software development as a whole (because it'd be silly to assume that this remains siloed to front-end developers).

nostrademons2• 11 years ago

Capitalism is actually a pretty efficient antidote to that. The way it works is that as a field ossifies into one where everyone is focused on looking good rather than actually being good, the potential financial returns to defecting from the consensus social order and doing something different increase. At some point, someone's bound to say "The emperor has no clothes!", do something that people actually want, and make out like a bandit.

egfx• 11 years ago

What I'm amazed by is not the amount of javascript libraries (the more the better IMO) but the amount of under utilized ones. There are tons of awesome JS libraries, experiments and basically web toys out there without a real home.

rdudekul• 11 years ago

Couple of learnings got crystallized for me from reading the post:

1) Learn to focus on the actual ideas and patterns behind languages, libraries, methodologies & concepts, instead of implementations

2) Observe how libraries, languages, methodologies & concepts get adopted & perhaps later rejected

_greim_• 11 years ago

Given that browsers, Node, and JavaScript are all rapidly evolving, lots of churn in the library and framework space is what I'd expect to see happening, and I'd argue should happen. The problem is bigger than just the rate of churn. It's that at the same time there are lots of newcomers into the field and they don't have time to sit down and thoroughly learn the tech from the ground up. Instead, they're thrown into a JR development role and told to swim or sink. Many do swim and learn the tech in the process, but only by "weathering the storm" so to speak.

The abundance of JavaScript libraries

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