Comment by crabasa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by crabasa | Hacker News Reader

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I think the self-reported data that you're going to get is going to be worthless. Anyone who says (for example) that they learned Angular in 3 hours probably didn't really learn Angular.

If I were you (and honestly I wish I was, I loved being a student) I'd focus much less on analyzing an arbitrary list of JS frameworks and instead turn my attention to questions like:

    Why are there so many frameworks in the first place?
    What problems are JS frameworks trying to solve?
    Why does it seems like new frameworks are constantly being produced? 
    Why can't any single framework achieve critical mass?

You might learn some very interesting things about the web as a platform and JavaScript as a language.

Hopefully they can at least self-report on what they're using professionally. I also wouldn't trust any 'number of hours to learn' responses.

I've been working in React/Flux for one project, and though I was writing code within maybe 4 hours, I'm still learning the framework after ~2 weeks. I'm also not typically a front-end guy, so that is relevant.

A couple of things:

1) You will likely see in the comments that developers will self-report that whatever FRAMEWORK X they are using right now is amazing. Super fast and super maintainable. It's just the nature of how people feel about their current tool of choice.

2) I think it's fascinating that unlike native/mobile application development, there is no clear and dominant application framework for the web. I think this is a topic worth exploring IMHO.

"Why are there so many frameworks in the first place?" seems like a question for psychology paper more than a computer science one :)

There are many frameworks because there are many, many JS programmers. The web is the farthest reaching platform you can code on, and as a result, there are more programmers targeting the web than any other platform. As a result, you get a diversity of frameworks to choose from. Frameworks like Angular and Flux/React offer different paradigms of development and there's nothing wrong with that.

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