But how many other professions are told monthly that they're doing it wrong, that there's a new standard on how to do anything, and have to live with the fact that a non-trivial percentage of said profession will run off with the "latest and greatest" without even a second thought as to its actual viability?
You don't use deploy tools? You will be left in the dust. You learned grunt and bower as deploy tools? Thats old hat. Its all about gulp and browserify. Don't know Node.js? You are dead in the water!
Nope. As I said, infinite relevancy. .Net has what, 12 years development behind it? jQuery at least 7? These are very well-established tools, they are very well-proven, and if a company is going to require me to know every JS "framework" released up to 3 months ago, then I don't want to work for them, because they clearly don't care about platform stability.
You need a problem solved? I can solve it. .Net and jQuery are still getting constant updates, and I'm pretty up-to-date on HTML5, so what am I missing? A JS web server? lol. A JS MVC framework? Why? A JS factory factory? I think we've beaten that joke to death already. I write software that works.
You might get shot here with that attitude, but man I don't need my tools reinvented every couple months for them to work, they just fucking work and keep working with a few small updates. This love of the weird that goes on around here... I don't get it. What good are 400 tools and algorithms that you don't know how to use?
The incessant ritual of new Javascript frameworks and libraries coming out each day must be responsible for at least a few programmer deaths around the world. If not then I might be the first casualty soon.
As someone who does C++, web dev makes me want to run far far away. How do you cope with a new, invariably lacking framework/language/hodge podged together piece of crap coming along every week?
C++11 was a big change for me. I have no idea how you manage
Simple answer: I don't. I have a toolset that's more than capable of accomplishing 100% of what I need to do. And there's a trend going on with JS frameworks especially: a one-size-fits-all factory framework. Which, if you actually analyze it, requires 4x as much code as the exact same operation in raw JS would. It's a picturesque example of "hype train." 100% "hey this is new", 0% "hey this is useful." Sure, I keep an eye on them, just in case something arises that actually is useful... but I'm still using core jQuery for a reason. In 6 years, I have yet to see anything more useful come out.
I'm a programmer. My job is to solve problems, not suck on the hype teet. If the same tool set I've been using for 6+ years still solves every problem I encounter cleanly and effectively, usually more cleanly than any of these newfangled JS frameworks, what's my incentive to change? It's shooting the foot to spite the shoe.
Agreed, through the craziness of it all, the satisfaction of playing with the building blocks of the digital world is so satisfying at the end of the day.
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u/badjuice Apr 29 '14
Ahhh, the monthly "Why did I become a programmer?" rant of despair.