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Larson
Larson

Posted on • Updated on

Shoud I learn new stuff right away

In our software world anybody knows to learn something new everyday. But is it so?

No

Of course something new could also mean something new in your current tool-chain or so. Sites tell you to learn new languages NOW. Because why not. And to improve onself you should do that. But that does not mean to switch to anther framework or libraries.

Some advice here from me: If you are good in one language, its not that hard to learn a new one. Its hard to get expert in it. But normally you can do a pretty good job. Just learn continuously in your 2 favourite languages you use also in your professional work and it should be fine. No pressure.

Normally a new framework comes out. And there is this one feature that is realy cool. And you think. Wow it must be better as my old framework here. But look closer. New frameworks come with a huge price. Normally they are not delivering the same features and resilience as the old ones. For example. I hear a lot that fastify will replace expressjs or is better. They say its faster and easy to use (express seems hard?). And then I saw this: 'fastify-express' , an package to use Middleware in fastify. To be exactly, to use express middleware.

Many new frameworks have a Top-Down model. You get the newest features but at the beginning they don't deliver the same features you love in your old ones.

Now you could say fastify is faster then express. But look at this:
Alt Textsource: https://www.techempower.com/benchmarks/

you see fastify there? The whole point is don't trust benchmarks made by users to sell you the new framework. If you realy need the performance don't use nodejs in the first place.

To be fair here. React was a big surprise and made the development realy easy. Also does VueJS and many others. But React was used a long time before it was open sourced. And there was not nothing wrong with switching to this.

Conclusion

New stuff needs time to grow. You can wait and learn if the framework, lib or whatever is ready to use in the real world and only if you need changes, switch to it. If you're happy with your tools now, wait! If not, change but be patient and don't jump on the hype train.

You can adapt this to languages and all other stuff in your life.

if some body has some translation to real english here, send me a message. ;-)

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