In university I was a TA for what they called "third stream computing," which was basically simple computer programming for non-CS people. We covered things like Hypercard, HTML and Javascript, which at the time was limited to things like showing alerts and validating and submitting forms. I think that the idea of Javascript as a very simple and not very powerful language has stuck with me through the years, even while Javascript has been maturing and advancing enormously.

A few weeks ago I decided one morning to spend an hour going through a ReactJS tutorial, because I keep hearing so much about it. After about half an hour I stopped the tutorial and starting rewriting something I was working on in React. Since then I've been doing any web-related work in React and re-writing other web stuff I've previously done in React.

Javascript frameworks like React are going to completely change web development, instead of the back-end serving HTML the back-end will now serve JSON through APIs and the front-ends will probably mostly be Javascript. And in my opinion that's a much better and more efficient way to create interactive websites. Not only is it faster to load and render data on the front-end, but it's much cleaner in terms of code and separating functionality. 

Labels: javascript , react

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