I'm getting pretty jaded with the JS ecosystem as a whole. I don't want to have to learn new (effectively throwaway) technologies every few months because, fundamentally, I'm interested in building valuable products, not in learning technologies as an end in itself. Or, in other words, I have better and more interesting things to do.
Also, this endless churning is not how you develop expertise. The way things are at the moment you've just about learned to work with the quirks of one framework and then you have to pick up another one.
It's completely ridiculous, especially when in a lot of cases the benefits of one technology over another similar technology are pretty marginal.
I mean, come on: can you honestly say that Brunch is a quantum leap on from WebPack (or vice versa), or that WebPack is a quantum leap over Gulp (or, again, vice versa)? I don't think so.
By contrast, you become an expert by sticking with things and developing deep understanding. I've therefore reached the point where I'm only interested in the browser APIs and JS libs that are proven, battle-tested, and have stable APIs. I don't want to waste time rewriting code that was working and is now broken just because the previous API version offended the aesthetic sensibilities of some capricious maintainer.
(Sorry, I do tend to get quite grouchy about this stuff.)
These frameworks are not that different from each other. I went from Angular to Vue in an afternoon. Sure, I don't know the internals of Vue, but after working in it for a few days, I'd say I'm fairly competent and spend most of my time building the actual product.
> The way things are at the moment you've just about learned to work with the quirks of one framework and then you have to pick up another one.
Frameworks shouldn't really have quirks, they should ideally just work with a standard API. Of course, it's never that easy, but we're converging on that with custom elements. This is like switching from MySQL to Postgres. It's 90% the same, the edge cases you can figure out and migrate, and you don't really care about how it's implemented.
It's not like you're trying to learn a new keyboard layout.
Webpack is absolutely a quantum leap over Gulp which is just a task runner. Webpack is an asset processing pipeline that completely changes how one approaches js development. Also, webpack's developer tools like webpack-dev-middleware and webpack-hot-middleware are amazing tools that don't have comparable equivalents when you consider their integration into webpack in general.
There's still a lot of work out there for Angular 1.X. If you want to wait for a larger paradigm shift in front end development, I don't think you need to worry.
Also incremental improvements are a thing in lots of fields. Science and math make small amounts of progress, build to a critical mass of new theory, and then a new field or concept can be born.
Also, this endless churning is not how you develop expertise. The way things are at the moment you've just about learned to work with the quirks of one framework and then you have to pick up another one.
It's completely ridiculous, especially when in a lot of cases the benefits of one technology over another similar technology are pretty marginal.
I mean, come on: can you honestly say that Brunch is a quantum leap on from WebPack (or vice versa), or that WebPack is a quantum leap over Gulp (or, again, vice versa)? I don't think so.
By contrast, you become an expert by sticking with things and developing deep understanding. I've therefore reached the point where I'm only interested in the browser APIs and JS libs that are proven, battle-tested, and have stable APIs. I don't want to waste time rewriting code that was working and is now broken just because the previous API version offended the aesthetic sensibilities of some capricious maintainer.
(Sorry, I do tend to get quite grouchy about this stuff.)