[HN Gopher] JavaScript Rising Stars 2020
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       JavaScript Rising Stars 2020
        
       Author : michaelrambeau
       Score  : 49 points
       Date   : 2021-01-13 21:35 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (risingstars.js.org)
 (TXT) w3m dump (risingstars.js.org)
        
       | root-z wrote:
       | I come from a JVM/Python background, so not familiar with JS
       | ecosystem at all. How do people decide what to use when there are
       | 5 most popular libraries/frameworks in each category. Not saying
       | the diversity is a bad thing. Just wondering how people make
       | these choices when starting a new project.
        
         | ZephyrBlu wrote:
         | My 2c:
         | 
         | 1) Surrounding ecosystem. This is one of the reason React is so
         | popular. The community and ecosystem of React packages is
         | extremely large.
         | 
         | 2) Personal preference. There really isn't much difference
         | between React/Vue/Angular in terms of getting the job done
         | (Same with most good libraries), so either you pick a library
         | because you need a very specific piece of functionality from
         | it, or you pick it because you/your team/your org prefers it.
        
         | christophilus wrote:
         | If all else is equal, I opt for the smallest contender (in
         | terms of minified size). I also check the dependency graph and
         | nope out if it's unreasonably large.
        
       | nefitty wrote:
       | I'm currently organizing a roadmap for improving my full-stack
       | skills. I work in JS with Node and React.
       | 
       | Does anyone have any opinion on whether I should spend time
       | learning Deno and Typescript instead of digging deeper into what
       | I already know? I find it hard to tell if Deno will start showing
       | up in job descriptions in a few years, or if Node is so
       | entrenched that it would only distract me from building on my
       | current skills.
        
         | albertgoeswoof wrote:
         | Typescript will completely change your productivity and is a
         | massive game changer for JS. You don't even have to learn much
         | for it to add massive value.
        
           | mywittyname wrote:
           | Any good resource recommendations.
        
             | albertgoeswoof wrote:
             | https://github.com/bitjson/typescript-starter
        
             | pdevr wrote:
             | Youtube videos:
             | 
             | 1. Clement Mihailescu has a good summary done in less than
             | fifteen minutes.
             | 
             | 2. FreeCodeCamp.org has a long video.
        
           | franklyt wrote:
           | I'm a huge fan, but I also think that merely leveraging type
           | checking with jsdoc is powerful.
           | 
           | It also keeps me more honest because I'm not going through
           | the trouble of typing a parameter or variable just to make it
           | any.
        
         | qudat wrote:
         | I'm not sure there's much to learn with Deno. It's typescript
         | with a different import syntax, package management, and a
         | different standard library.
         | 
         | Learn how to use Typescript, it's pervasive in the JS ecosystem
         | and very easy to learn now.
        
         | throw_m239339 wrote:
         | Definitely learn Typescript type annotations/compilation
         | pipeline.
        
         | brendanmc6 wrote:
         | Master typescript and you will be rewarded greatly! It is a
         | fantastic tool with a very high level of adoption already. It
         | makes React significantly easier to write and refactor. You
         | won't ever go back to plain .js!
         | 
         | Deno is not relevant enough, I would wager 99.99% of the
         | existing projects you might find yourself working on in the
         | next few years will be using node somewhere in the stack. It
         | shouldn't be hard to pick up deno when it eventually does show
         | up.
        
           | gutino wrote:
           | Now is possible to use many NPM packages in Deno, find out on
           | the Web
        
           | nicoburns wrote:
           | Yes, this. Use TypeScript with Node and/or React.
        
             | bavell wrote:
             | Agreed, TS is a big productivity boost and is here to stay,
             | definitely worth investing time into if you want to get
             | further into JS ecosystem.
             | 
             | You can safely ignore Deno for the time being.
        
         | christiansakai wrote:
         | Deno is still incompatible with JS ecosystem
        
           | gutino wrote:
           | Now is possible to use many NPM packages in Deno, find out on
           | the Web
        
         | capableweb wrote:
         | If you only ever worked in JS (browser and/or server), branch
         | out. Try different things instead, it'll make you a better JS
         | developer (and better developer in general) if you try to learn
         | things that are far out from your current skill set. If you're
         | into types, go for Haskell or Erlang. If you're into dynamic
         | runtimes, go for Clojure or Smalltalk.
        
       | shruubi wrote:
       | I honestly thought when they said "rising stars" they meant new,
       | awesome projects. Instead it's the same old stuff everyone knows
       | ranked on a metric that is tenuous at best.
        
         | _nothing wrote:
         | Yeah, I wouldn't really consider many of these to be "rising
         | stars". There were definitely some interesting libraries on
         | here that I'd only heard mention of or not at all, but in what
         | world are Angular or Node.js or even React "rising stars"?
        
       | ibejoeb wrote:
       | Anyone using React Query in production?
       | 
       | I've got ongoing projects using redux+axios, apollo client, and
       | roll-your-own data fetch hooks. No clear winner in my book. React
       | Query looks neat but have yet to try it.
        
         | acemarke wrote:
         | React Query is pretty cool. I haven't used it in my own
         | projects, but based on all the discussion I've seen, it looks
         | like a solid choice.
         | 
         | Meanwhile, we in the Redux team recently published an alpha
         | library that we've dubbed "RTK Query" [0]. It takes inspiration
         | from data fetching libraries like React Query, SWR, Apollo, and
         | Urql, and provides similar sophisticated data fetching and
         | caching capabilities. But, it's built on top of Redux Toolkit,
         | which enables integration with the rest of the Redux addon
         | ecosystem and the Redux DevTools. Once we've finalized the
         | design of the new APIs, we're going to merge them back into
         | Redux Toolkit itself, so that they'll just be additional
         | exports from Redux Toolkit. I'm really excited about how this
         | will let Redux users simplify their code, and wrote a comment
         | over on Reddit today about how RTK Query changes things for
         | Redux users [1].
         | 
         | [0] https://rtk-query-docs.netlify.app
         | 
         | [1]
         | https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/kw9cr3/recently_pi...
        
         | sillycon-valley wrote:
         | Also checkout SWR https://swr.vercel.app/
        
       | albertgoeswoof wrote:
       | I shunned the JS world for a while after jumping on the Meteor
       | bandwagon a few years ago and seeing it just fizzle out to a boat
       | load of outdated and unsupported dependencies. Rails was just so
       | much more productive and easy for solo work.
       | 
       | But recently I built a couple of services in typescript and the
       | ecosystem seems to have stabilised a lot, my productivity was
       | super high and I'm majorly impressed.
        
         | austincheney wrote:
         | It's almost a reflection of framework trends, which is not
         | interesting.
        
         | agumonkey wrote:
         | what was your ts stack ? vue ? react ?
        
       | coding123 wrote:
       | https://2020.stateofjs.com/en-US/ is a bit more useful.
        
         | bori5 wrote:
         | As someone who hasn't touched JavaScript much since the 90's I
         | found the original article linked quite useful as straight away
         | I was able to see the relevant tech stack cf. the 2020 link.
        
       | rayrag wrote:
       | Similar summaries:
       | 
       | https://2020.stateofjs.com/en-US/
       | 
       | https://2020.stateofcss.com/en-US/
       | 
       | https://uxtools.co/survey-2020/
        
       | davedx wrote:
       | As a somewhat fad averse engineer who has more or less settled
       | into his own preferred toolchain for FE and BE JavaScript, I plan
       | to invest some time in next.js, tailwind and emotion soon ish.
       | Great to see the state of the art still being pushed. Might see
       | how feasible porting my existing nodejs projects to deno is too.
        
         | qudat wrote:
         | We use tailwind in production at the company I work for and it
         | works well enough.
         | 
         | I'd also recommend looking into https://chakra-ui.com/
        
         | christophilus wrote:
         | I tried a deno port, but lack of crypto support was a
         | showstopper. I think I could've done it if not for that. It's
         | quite a lot nicer than node, though, and I definitely will give
         | it another go when it's further along.
        
         | ljoshua wrote:
         | I quite enjoy Tailwind, and have used it in several production
         | projects.
         | 
         | When using Tailwind, don't forget that it is not _only_ to be
         | used as a utility-like CSS framework, but is also intended to
         | build your _own_ CSS systems. You can customize it and build
         | your own classes using the `@apply` directive and other tools
         | so that you don 't copy/paste the same utility classes all over
         | the place, but instead use CSS as we used to back in the good
         | ol' days, with custom classes. :)
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | stocktech wrote:
       | Surprising not to see EmberJS listed in the front end frameworks.
       | Did it not make top 20 or was it an oversight?
        
         | phaedryx wrote:
         | While EmberJS is a solid framework, I don't think it is a
         | "rising star"
        
           | stocktech wrote:
           | Sure, but by that logic React and Angular shouldn't be there
           | either.
        
         | everybodyknows wrote:
         | Does not deserve downvote. Guidelines:
         | 
         | >Have curious conversation
         | 
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        
       | underwater wrote:
       | The JavaScript community has a huge problem with hype and
       | churning libraries unnecessarily.
       | 
       | Using a metric like "number of new stars" just exacerbates that
       | problem. It neither tells you about libraries are undiscovered
       | gems, or libraries which are proven, stable and reliable.
       | 
       | It's simply a measure of which libraries are well into their hype
       | curve.
        
         | tamrix wrote:
         | This is what tech and programming is to some people. It's about
         | knowing the latest and greatest tech trends. And they'll often
         | brag about the ones they know to others who don't know them.
         | 
         | Some call them brogrammers. For their hipster-like approach to
         | programming.
         | 
         | Believe it or not, a lot of them are on hackernews so they'll
         | probably get super offended by this post.
        
       | dstick wrote:
       | Glad to see that hitching my ride to the Vue.js bandwagon seems
       | to be paying off
        
         | phaedryx wrote:
         | I've used Backbone, Angular, React, Stimulus, etc. and I've
         | finally hit on Vue. I've been using Vue 3 for the past couple
         | of months and it really hits the sweet spot for me.
         | 
         | This section (https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/comparison.html#With-
         | MobX) is what got me interested: "...the React + MobX workflow
         | can be thought of as a more verbose Vue, so if you're using
         | that combination and are enjoying it, jumping into Vue is
         | probably the next logical step"
        
       | capableweb wrote:
       | Worth noting that this is just measuring the amount of stars a
       | project has, not if you absolutely, must learn this today to stay
       | current. Libraries and frameworks comes and goes, it's your base
       | knowledge you need to improve upon, not specific APIs offered by
       | easy-to-consume libraries and frameworks. Learn them, adopt their
       | best ideas, throw away the rest, pick the right tool for the job,
       | probably the best tool is not the tool you're currently most
       | familiar with, if you rank your choices based on GitHub stars
       | anyway. People use stars for all kinds of purposes, don't extract
       | "It's valuable" because of that.
        
       | nicoburns wrote:
       | Definitely watching esbuild (basically babel but implemented in
       | Go) and SWC (the same, but in Rust). Compile times cut from 47s
       | to less than 1 second speak for themselves!
        
         | christophilus wrote:
         | I'm using it on my current project. Loving it.
        
       | preommr wrote:
       | Shame that parcel is below the fold for build tools. It's a
       | really great build tool.
       | 
       | Also, those performance benchmarks for esbuild are highly
       | misleading. Parcel has a much faster update speed but they're
       | comparing startup speed. Also, why disable caching? It seems
       | highly contrived.
        
       | megous wrote:
       | No QuickJS? That surely has to be a one of the more interesting
       | new/rising projects in the compiler category last year.
       | 
       | It even has enough stars to place it in the middle of the top 5
       | in the compiler category, despite not even being
       | distributed/developed via github. And it gained them in just 3
       | months.
       | 
       | https://github.com/bellard/quickjs
        
         | danbolt wrote:
         | QuickJS is _crazy_ embeddable too, being written in C89 and
         | only a few source /header files. You might need to work around
         | a few situations if your platform doesn't have all of libc but
         | otherwise it's incredibly accommodating.
        
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       (page generated 2021-01-13 23:01 UTC)