Comment by sramsay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sramsay | Hacker News Reader

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"Does Backbone help you solve your problems?"

This really bears repeating over and over again, and I think it's a corollary of "start by writing the dumbest thing that can possibly work."

If you start with dumb, simple things, the problems become more obvious. Dumb simple things tend to shake out the parts that are tedious to build, or non-conformant, or confusing to read, or hard to maintain. It may be that Backbone (or any of the dozens of other gizmos) alleviate the problems, but you really have to understand the problem first.

I really think a lot of people are seduced by the marketing of various tools and frameworks into thinking they have (or will have) problems that they don't actually have. Then they end up with over-engineered solutions that are all the things they hoped to avoid.

Don't meant to criticize backbone, or any other framework (or language, or platform). A fancy, hip tool can be just thing. The question is: do you know what "the thing" is really for, and does it fit your situation?

I hear what you're saying, and I basically agree. However, I still see some shops building new product with Jakarta Struts, hand coded javascript, and no continuous integration. They spend way too much time doing things that could be automated, which would allow them to spend more time on quality, or more features. (Say, if you want to use a java webstack, have you heard of spring & jquery, and maybe you should try hudson for your builds?) So, its also important to keep abreast of whats happening in the field, so long as you don't fetishize the newest/latest thing.

Exactly. Unfortunately this kind of discussions often leads to "black"/ "white" suggestions instead of the looking for a good balance between poles.

I wish all the energy of these polarized discussions would go into learning of the ways to find a good balance.

I don't know if this is good or bad, but when I read "... the dumbest thing that can possibly work" I immediately thought "PHP!"

I agree 1000% - very good point. The best tools (for you) are the ones that solve the problems that bug you the most and feel the most "right". It's a personal thing.

For example: In my case, I used to write a lot of plain HTML. I found it got annoying to type brackets and keep track of all the closing tags. So I tried ZenCoding, and it helped, but only on creation, not on editing. I finally settled on haml, because to me (not everyone), it solves the exact problem that I found troublesome and gave me the results that I like. No closing tags, cleaner markup. Others may disagree, but that doesn't matter - I like it for my purposes, and that's all it takes.

So to your point - learn the underlying tech, find your personal pain points, and use the tools that best solve them for you.

Haml is soo 2012. :) Try Jade (http://jade-lang.com/), it has a much cleaner syntax and integrated markdown support. You can even use it as a preprocessor for other templating languages.

Totally agree plus Haml is slow like shit.

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