For real, the current js landscape seems like a mix of two very distinct components:
- js itself which was worse and now is, ahem, less worse. npm kinda fits this bill as well
- solid libs and technologies made by people who know what they're doing (React, Angular, TS, etc). Of course, those are not perfect, but you can see the engineering behind.
- a mishmash of "works for me" crap done by people who feel like importing left-pad
Angular is really bad. So is Redux. They are some of the worst over engineering projects I've seen.
Typescript is really cool, but no one on that team cares about "compile times". Of course what I actually mean is "type checking time".
There are very few good things on npm.
React has the right idea (The DOM is slow, so let's put a "virtual dom" infront of it so we minimze our interaction with the DOM), but the implementation could be a lot simpler (and smaller). See "preact" for example. But I'd go further and question the whole "Class components" and "function components" and "hooks". Why not just functions that take arbitrary arguments and return a vdom tree? You can easily add constructs for caching return values if none of the inputs changed since the previous run (some system like the 'observables' from Knockout or 'atoms' from Jotai/Recoil).
esbuild is really great, it completely changed my development experience. The interesting thing is it's not written in Javascript at all. It's written in Go.
- js itself which was worse and now is, ahem, less worse. npm kinda fits this bill as well
- solid libs and technologies made by people who know what they're doing (React, Angular, TS, etc). Of course, those are not perfect, but you can see the engineering behind.
- a mishmash of "works for me" crap done by people who feel like importing left-pad