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Stop using JavaScript for everything!

Sadeedpv🥇 on August 11, 2023

In the world of web development, JavaScript has become the go-to language for building interactive and dynamic applications. It can also be run in ...
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artydev • Edited

Those who can avoid JavaScript, know perfectly when it is worth using it🙂
Mastering Javascript is an art.
If you want to reduce memory footprints, there are many ways to do it, look at transducers, generators...
There are many gems, that are not very widespread in Javascript, look at this for example Channels

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Joshua Newell Diehl • Edited

I have the sense that there comes a time in every developer's journey when they realize that any specific technology is only as powerful as it's ability to solve the problem at hand.

JavaScript often gets away with being "good enough", and is sometimes used not because it's the best choice, but because a team is most experienced with it and project requirements demand swift delivery.

JavaScript reigns supreme within the browser, but it's strength wanes, as the OP mentions, when a solution requires optimal performance, such as in CPU-heavy processing. Additionally, JavaScript itself, without the help of libraries/apis that are written in more performant languages, simply cannot speak directly to a machine's hardware.

Even if we are to wrongfully conflate JavaScript with Node, this remains an inherent limitation of the language, as what few low-level capabilities Node offers are written in C/C++, and the user must rely on their support by the Node community.

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Sadeedpv🥇

This 👆👆💯💯

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Luke Cartwright

From a maintainability stand point, if your back end and frontend are all written in JS then that means that JavaScript developers can have good experience across the board rather than having different languages.

Same with mobile development. Write JavaScript once with react native and you have an iOS and Android app. No need to have 2 app development teams, one Java experts and the other swift experts. That's game changing I think.

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Adam Patterson

It's probably less about the code and the structure as it is about the build tools, dependencies, and even architecture.

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Charlie J Smotherman

Or use Flutter. One code base builds for mobile(IOS, Android), desktop(linux, windows, mac) and for the web. No JS needed.

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Luke Cartwright • Edited

True. But using Dart 😓🤮🤮

Typescript just is awesome

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Charlie J Smotherman

But it solves the 2 development teams, the swift expert, java expert problem you mentioned above. It gives your team one tool to use.

Dart some like it some don't.
Typescript some like it some don't.

But the real question is, is Flutter the right tool for the job?

And of course that answer will be different depending on who you ask.

Happy Coding

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Vladas Saulis

As from my experience 90% of people don't know how to use Javascript.

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overFlow

please tell us more!!!

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Vladas Saulis

My advice - start with vanilla JS (pre-ES6).

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overFlow

and the the next step should be ??
Because I do not think anyone will use Vanilla anything to hire me or am I wrong?

its weird to see how we learn vanilla CSS HTML and JS and then replace it with Frameworks.
LOL I was checking out a bit of Vue yesterday and it seemed like a redundant forceful way of trying hard to use JavaScript for no reason.

What I saw was something akin to forcing JS to do a job that can be done by CSS without the fuss and involvement of JS

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Vladas Saulis

You are right about frameworks, and Vue particulary.
But there are not so brutal frameworks, f.ex. ExtJS, but it's commercial (not totally).

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overFlow

if its like that for all frmaeworks then its gonna be pain for me to learn. im soon to take a peek into what React has to offer for Us. bu i fear meeting what I discovered in React.

When people said Frameworks. I expected Templates. You want a header?? You get different types and fonts on offer and styles. with the press of a button. You want a carousel? you get different types of kinds with pre-made functions and purposes and abilities etc...
But What I saw in Vue scared the bejezuz out of me. I saw JS being used like a middleman.

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Vladas Saulis • Edited

ExtJS does exactly like that. Link: sencha.com

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zisra

Care to elaborate?

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Vladas Saulis

Nothing to elaborate. Thousands come from React/vue and know nothing of Javascript. Then they write such articles.

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Charlie J Smotherman

If you really want to get away from JavaScript have a look at yew.

As of late I have been experimenting with yew. In a nutshell it's HTML, CSS and rust.
It's component based so if you have ever used react, or svelte then you will feel right at home the only difference is instead of using javascript you use rust.

Is it better, I don't know, but it is an interesting new way of developing and deploying websites.

Happy Coding

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Sadeedpv🥇

Wow! Why didn't I hear about this before? 🤔