Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

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I find the description of this confusing. I feel like there's a number of people who talk about programming in a way that I'm not familiar with. Where do people learn verbiage like this? Is it popular among some universities? Is there something beyond code complete and gof?

For example, I've never gotten a good handle on what other people see as declarative. I know the definition and I know my interpretation - but other people's interpretations seem to lead to very slightly different sets of declarative things. Is the term really not strongly defined?

I think my main grappling with this (such as "two way data binding") is that they are generally things that aren't that hard, I just didn't know there was a name behind it. Then when I see someone describe it, it takes me embarrassingly long to figure out that it's something I've done for a decade.

Do other people experience this?

edit: I noticed a downvote. I don't intend this to be off-topic or irreverent. My apologies.

Yes. People seem to form communities, isolate themselves, and rename things.

In my (not that long) career I've used .Net, Cocoa, Python + Django, Go, Ruby + Rails, Clojure, JavaScript. The same things crop up again and again, with quite a variety of different names.

Truth is, if you've understood a named concept you'll see that it's the concept as something differently named elsewhere. You just have to tell yourself that humans will be humans.

Some of these things, like Apple's Class Clusters in Core Foundation are understandable because they were probably pioneering uses / rediscoveries of particular design patterns which got named before the Gang of Four came along.

And some of them are just plain ridiculous. The Ember people refer to JavaScript objects as hashes (presumably because of their Ruby background) and that's particularly annoying.

I'm glad you brought up ember! I found it very confusing (and I have 5 years of ruby). I don't know what kind of approach I need for success there.

I met people who had only been programming under a year who were more successful with it ... and I have been doing Javascript since the 90s.

I wish I could unlearn all the things that create this mental blockage for me ... but I've been unable to overcome them. I don't know what to do - I feel like I'm missing out on a pretty lively movement.

I feel like I need to approach ember, angular et al as if "ok pretend that this isn't javascript. Pretend that it's something new." Because honestly they don't treat the language like the scheme-self hybrid I've become so familiar with.[1]

I think that approach will help, but I just don't have the discipline to be successful at it.

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1. It's like with C++ how there's basically two kinds of devs ... the C-programmer who discovered some nifty organizational techniques, and then the C++ programmer. The second C++ programmer writes code that the other one finds very odd and confusing and the first one doesn't understand why anyone would go through all that trouble to do something that ought to be so simple, in her mind.

I had a good go at Angular. I felt like it as a decent framework with interesting concepts. I built an app with it.

Next project I thought I'd try Ember. It's very much my way or the highway. Huge amounts stuff learn. Not only concepts, but all those conventions. Very narrowly scoped models to which the whole world will conform (it doesn't, not without tying yourself in knots). The same thing that really puts me off Rails.

I ditched Ember for the project and now I'm using React which I picked up in an hour and it's brilliant.

YMMV. But I can't stand arrogance, and, to my mind, Ember drips with it. That includes renaming things that already have names.

One thing that many of these techs do is take one primitive, such as a function, and then call it half a dozen different things - making it look like there's a difference.

I understand the goals of such an exercise, but I'm not convinced that it leads to quicker to deploy, easier to maintain, simpler to modify software.

I think they must have different goals in mind when they write code - a lot of people clearly love the stuff. I just don't know what these goals are.

Well... I did not use word "declarative" anywhere at jquerymy.com – but if someone think $.my manifests are declarative, I understand why.

Can you tell, why do you think this syntax is not declarative? What is your interpretation?

Many people on this thread like it and you shouldn't feel obliged to deviate from your goals for the project because of me. Thanks for working on this and I wish you the best.

I really liked your comment, but I'm still curious about what is your definition of "declarative".

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