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I've been reading the comments, and sorry, I can't help it. Every time I read about (or try) some trendy thing in JS/Front-end world, I feel irritated and sad. Every single "big promise" hype that supposed to help us to "fix" issues with front-end development adds more complexity and frustration. jQuery was awesome, then "okay", then become bad, then later really, really bad. Same with Backbone. Same with Angular and Web components. Then Coffescript, Livescript, GorillaScript, IcedCoffeeScript and other "x-cripts", Dart, Typescript and Flow, Traceur and Babel. Then Grunt, Gulp, Browserify, WebPack. React came, and we got Flux, Redux, Redux Saga, MobX. And then some stuff that's actually not too bad for whatever reasons gets mostly ignored, e.g. Meteor, Ember, Cycle.js.

I think fundamentally something deeply wrong with all that, and I don't know when and how we're going actually to fix it. After years of trying, I finally decided enough is enough and started looking for deferentially alternative solutions. I like Purescript and Elm. ReasonML looks promising. Currently, I'm using Clojurescript. It is not a silver bullet, but it is an astonishingly practical choice. I know - it won't work for everyone. The majority would dismiss it almost immediately (mostly for the wrong reasons).

I'm not advocating for it. I'm just saying that I feel Typescript is not that magical pill that makes everything better. If you follow @garybernhardt on Twitter, I think he may feel the same.

1 comments

So you have seen the JS world progressing and feel sad about that they haven't just found out the "best way" from the beginning? I think it's marvelous how fast JS moves and outdated solutions are phased out in new projects for better and more reliable methods (although I admit some JS developers pick the wrong tools for wrong reasons). The act of having to constantly learn and think about a better way of doing things has at least kept me sharp and meticulously pondering the pros and cons of each way of doing things.

Sure the churn can be discouraging and if you wanted to be able to write the same way with same tools to retirement I wonder why you'd even consider doing frontend development. I am quite happy with the tools I use (Typescript, React, Mobx, StyledComponents) and have felt no need to change for something else. They are tools I am very productive with, and all the developers I've worked with have been able to get quickly on track with using them. No huge mental leap from JS to TS as with functional languages like Clojure or Elm.

Although it's my opinion that, JS itself should be eventually be phased out for something better for majority of frontend software. It just has too much old baggage so it would be best to just switch for something new completely. However, there's something mysteriously intriguing about JS in that allows so great flexibility, in good and bad, that not just any language can replace it. But nowadays I don't do much complaining about JS stuff anymore. I have found my sweet spot and I'm mostly just busy getting stuff done and there's things far worse in programming than how "bad JS is".