... And what new things changed it the most?
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... And what new things changed it the most?
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Oldest comments (38)
In 2012, the jokes about JS being a ridiculous way to program were still fairly real. But if you hung on to that attitude, you probably got left behind.
"Ridiculous" meaning using the inconsistent language for anything other that jQuery-driven UI updates.
But since then the language has improved, the ecosystem has plowed along at breakneck pace, and TypeScript is pervasive.
It's a really different landscape now.
Framworkization, mostly.
In 2012, jQuery was a good gateway drug to JS. You didn't necessarily have to get it's syntax details, async weirdnesses or compatibility issues, but you'd still have to understand how JS worked.
Now most people learn JS through React, Vue and Angular. Those bring a very nice DX and speed with them, but devs who have no experience outside their framework are on the dry.
The same goes for HTML and CSS, by the way.
Utility-first CSS (i.e. Tailwind) was a major step in this direction — In a good way for the sake of productivity within that environment. But possibly in a not-so-good way for dependency dependence and learning.
A decade ago I found the CSS libraries available were generally worse than just writing plain old CSS with some sort of self-imposed structure. These days I think some of the new stuff is truly really awesome to use, but it's not necessarily a good thing if it reduces peoples' capacity to interact with CSS proper or write websites that don't require the build step.
This is so true... the days of adding Bootstrap (or some terrible WP theme) to your project and then having to go through sooooo many classes to overwrite them shudder. I'm so glad those days are gone.
We used to make sites with Internet Explorer in mind. (40-50% market penetration, Moz was around 30, Chrome around 10-15%). MS dictated the web in some way or other.
Now we make websites with Chrome in mind(90% is either Chrome or Webkit based, Moz is at 4% ). Google dictates the web.
10 years ago we didn't even have Promises natively. Async was handled by callbacks making for these terrible horizontal prymids of code.
2009, Node.js was released and gained in popularity quickly, which helped many JS developers to implement software that doesn't run in the browser. While this was before the last decade, I think the move of JS developers out of the browser took a few yerars.
JS engines were added to iOS and Android, so JS developers also gained access to the mobile space.
Function as a service offerings all included JS right from the start, so JS was a main participant in the serverless movement.
Web3 is basically Web2 frontends with decentralized backends, so JS plays that game too.
In terms of technical changes, the ES2015 changes gave JS quite a facelift. Promises, async/await, arrow functions, classes and a native module system made JS a more "mature" programming language.
Node.js changed the game and it's easy to think it's always been here but it hasn't
It's become ridiculously overcomplicated and over-engineered
Thanks to babel, typescript and standardization the language became not only powerful but also reliable, compared to 10 years ago.
On the framework and library side we see a huge fragmentation and as an engineer I wonder how many hours/days other people invest into choosing the right tech stack for a certain project. To me it starts to become highly unproductive unless I either stick with big names or with what I am familiar with.
ouch