State of JS 2023 Reactions

I had a, out I had a ordeal getting getting home from Italy, man. I I always like I had to sleep on the floor in an airport for was in an airport for I was in JFK for, like, 24 hours with my kids.

With kids.

They're 57, so they're Scott, like, little little, but, like, they're little. And they slept on the floor in the airport with me just because Delta didn't wanna cancel the flight because they didn't wanna give people, like, hotel reimbursement. So they were just like, oh, we'll tell you in 20 minutes. We'll tell you in 20 minutes. And it's, like, 2 AM, whatever.

And they're like, alright. It's postponed until tomorrow. Tomorrow tomorrow at 8:15 AM, we get to the gate. Oh, the the flight doesn't have a crew or a pilot. It's postponed again. You're just like, oh, there there was an actual literal fight.

The police had to be called.

It was yeah. For you? There was there was 2 airplanes that were, like, leaving at the same time, us and another 1, and we both got on the planes.

No. No. No. And we both had to deplane after being on the plane waiting for, like, an hour. So so we had to deplane, and then the other the other flight was a bunch of people that were going to go on a cruise, and so they were gonna miss their cruise. And so the the people across the way from us that that they they were just, like, basically losing their minds, and it got heated. I don't I don't necessarily know what happened, but it was a kerfuffle.

Next thing you know, there's police protecting the, the Delta employees who were awful, by the way.

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What's interesting here is that almost all of them have gone up. So Angular went down, and has gone down year over year. Since 2018, it was at 56, and now it's at 45%.

And lit is kind of, like, staying stagnant, but the rest of them have all gone up, which is all pretty interesting to me. I don't know if it's just more people trying different things, and then that's it because there's a lot of options. People are actually trying things Node, but, like, it's cool. And and HTMX showing up here at a 5%.

Man, it JS really interesting to see how much some of the like, viewing up, like, 4%, Svelte went up 4%, Quicken up 3%.

So interesting that they most of them seem to go up.

And I wonder if positivity is maybe a potential precursor for usage in the future. Because if you do this on. Positivity for React, it has gone down from 2020, 81% to 71%. So positivity for React has gone down by a whole 10%.

Meanwhile, positivity for Vue JS basically kinda stayed the same the past couple of years, but gone down overall. Positivity for Svelte has gone up. Yeah. I was gonna say that. What's the only 1 that has gone up every single year? Yeah. Svelte. Svelte. It's pretty wild. And h t max.

And lit. Lit has gone up too, although usage. Solid's gone up. You know, it seems like Solid is becoming 1 of those ones that's getting more and more awareness, in general. I think people react folks who come to Solid are are gonna find that it's a nice experience compared to maybe what they're dealing with React. But I always find the positivity 1 to be 1 of the most interesting aspects of this just to gauge general sentiment around around these things. Because if you look at positivity around Angular, usage goes down. But positivity JS is kind of remained flat for quite a while and even has, like, a small uptick. So I I wonder, like, how this eventually translates to usage.

Let's talk front end framework pain points because these are the things that I think people have issues with their front end frameworks. And it it's funny because, you know, how many of these are specifically to React or any of these things? And it what I like about this is that they've broken them down. Let's say you have very React specific issues.

React specific issues account for 17 percent of the respondents.

So those would be excessive dominance. That's a wild pain point to say.

React is too dominant. And, I mean, I agree. I I don't love working React myself, and it's everywhere. So you can't avoid it. Right? So you fall into this trap of, well, I gotta use it even if I don't like it. Slow progress, community concerns, those are all a lack of signals, which is an interesting 1. You can just use signals. I mean, you don't have to use, you know, reacts baked in signals to use signals there.

Excessive complexity, choice overload, these are all things that we've been hearing all the time.

that are are saying this type of thing. Yep. Yeah. It is a common sentiment, and I think you get that from that 10% decrease in people liking using React. But, also, like, we talk all the time about choice overload. To me, that the numb that being the number 2 problem is kind of a React problem in itself because the React Sanity, more so than Vue, more so than Svelte or Angular, makes less choices for you. And therefore, that right there increases the choice overload. It also increases the excessive complexity because now you're wiring all these things together that might not be connected, where with Vue, you have a very clear options of what you should be using for state management for for basically everything. Right? And same with with Svelte or or Angular. They take care of a little bit more for you. And because of that, I would say that you have less choice overload and less excessive complexity there. And maybe that that choice overload and excessive complexity are are symptoms of the React ecosystem itself, but, you know, who knows? JavaScript Vercel has got, like, a 1000000000 different framework options.

Wes state. And

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting stuff. And it does I mean, all of these track with things that we've been hearing for so long, in terms of, you know, people's fatigue about JavaScript frameworks and how they feel about them. So, you know, it's obvious that this stuff is a real problem, but it's interesting to see it being laid out like this.

Let's talk about meta frameworks unless you wanna unless you have more there. That's exactly what I was gonna go to. So Let's do it. Major jump in Next. Js

Let's see what Wes let's see what the interest. Yeah? Or the positivity for Next. Js goes from 75% to 64%, an 11% drop in positivity while they jump in in increase in usage and a decrease

Yeah. It feels like people are being, you know, led to use it and then maybe not having a great time. You know? Maybe that's it. Yeah. What what's got the most positivity,

Man, SvelteKit is killing it. SvelteKit is killing it. Astro also, though. Astro goes from, oh, since 2021, it goes from 20% to 54%. And I gotta say that tracks with my experience with Astro. I I tend to really like it. I pick up SvelteKit just because it's like it's the Svelte framework, and that's what I use. But Yep. If I'm if I'm writing a React application today or Vue app and maybe not a Vue. Maybe Vue. I don't know. If I'm writing React application today, I'm picking Astra as my my framework for sure.

The jam Jamstack. Yeah.

You know what? What's funny about how that these these comments about Jamstack relate is that, like, I've been doing more what you could call Jamstack now than I did even back when Gatsby was at its peak. I'm I'm like it could be the hipster in me, but I've moved fully into, like, alright.

SSR my my about pages and the SEO stuff, but CSR, everything else, keep my data clients like, I'm going so hard in that direction. It's it's very funny now.

It's just like whatever everybody's talking about, I can't be doing it for some reason.

Yeah. Adonis, 12. You know? Like Meteor's higher than Adonis. Yeah.

Yeah. It it is funny how these things it it it is like it's weird because, like, yeah, people are saying there's there's too many choices that need to be made.

There's, too much fatigue in that direction. But then the options that reduce that fatigue are, like, not present in the usage category. It's like, hey. These things are here.

Yeah. If you were to give them a look and give them a try, especially with things like Redwood or Adonis or some of these other ones. Even even Meteor does a lot for you. And and I haven't kept up with Meteor that much, but it's it's still chugging along for sure. Yeah. Do you think that's because people just want to be told what to use? Like, the reason why Next. Js

Yeah. I know. It's so funny because that that conversation has been happening so frequently lately where JavaScript developers are trying Laravel, and they're like, wow. This is actually great. And I think the reason why it's actually great is is not be I mean, Laravel's great, but not because Laravel is anything special. It just makes all the choices for you for you. Right? Like, it does so much for you that you you, you know, don't have to do all the all the pain pnpm stuff that was listed in the pain points. And if we go to the the meta frameworks pain points, the most respondents, number 1, is is Next. Js issues is number 1, for pain points here, including the app router being a big thing, the caching Next JS 13. I I have heard a ton of things about the app router being a pain. I don't know much about the App Router myself. I haven't I don't know what's different about it. But Yeah. It's

Yeah. And so excessive complexity, number 2. Number 3 is deployment. This to me, honestly, feels like a Next. Js issue as well because I don't find many of these frameworks to be difficult to deploy.

And not that Next. Js is difficult to deploy, but if you want, like, the the features, you're gonna use it on Vercel. Right? And if you try to deploy it elsewhere, yeah, then it's difficult to deploy. But, that's interesting. So many so many respondents said deployment given that anything that adopts the adapter pattern is super easy to deploy because you just install a given adapter and and let it rip. But, again,

together, and it Deployment of Next.

Js. Many of Next features are locked behind vendor. Yeah.

And lock in is number 13 on the pain point.

Vercel is 9 on the pain point. And what's funny is that, like, Vercel makes everything really easy. The problem with that is that it makes everything really easy in a way that could potentially cost you a lot of money later on, or you're locked in now to using it and and being on that as part of your platform. Right? You're you're you're locked in to that being part of your platform.

And not that that's a bad thing if everything is good, but it it is something to be aware of. Mhmm. You you don't have that flexibility and freedom that you get with just deploying a node app anywhere because we that that used to be a really nice thing about Next. Js. You could just deploy node app anywhere, and that was just the way to do it or do it on Vercel. It's just a straight up node app. I'm sure you can still do it as a straight up node app. But yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

So we wanna I'll tell you where I've been hosting everything now is basically just Cloudflare. I've been hosting everything on Cloudflare. I I find it to be dead simple. So good. Works every time.

Yeah. I just got a bit into Cloudflare workers, and it's so funny. We'll we'll talk about this in another episode because I built a little font serving service to host our licensed fonts in a way that we didn't have to put them in the repo.

And I did a, like, a a bit of a testing here. It's like, where do we host these things? Do we throw them in a bucket? Do I throw it in a a function a pages function? Do I throw them in a worker? Like, what what's the fastest way to do all these things? So we'll talk all about that. But hosting, man, it it's a wild world right now, and and I I tend to just either throw it on Coolify or throw it in Cloudflare and and call it a day.

to Vite at this point. But It's it's Next. Js is really what it is. And if you go to the positivity, Webpack had a 89% positivity in 27, which is wild to me in the 1st place. But now it's, like, down in the 40%. So it's nearly dropped 40 percentage points in in terms of positivity. I have not touched Webpack almost my entire career.

It is like a such AAA Node thing for me. I'll I'll just say it. Yes.

to 80%. Yeah. Yeah. It's great. I have a a prediction, Wes. Yeah. My prediction is in the 2024 respondents, we will see a roll down on this list, because I think people are gonna actually start to get to use it in some regard at some point this year. Because I even saw Evan Evan just, Evan, you posted today that he had his 1st view app using roll down actually working.

Roll down. So here's here's the gist on roll down. Basically, Vite, the thing everybody knows and loves, Vite uses 2 different build tools behind the scenes. It uses roll up for production builds because roll up is very good at all sorts of things in production builds, and it uses ES build for all kinds of things as well. It's very fast. Right? So it uses a combination of these 2.

And they said, like, alright. Well, what would a next generation version of roll up look like that had the speed of ES build, but it was built from scratch in Rust.

So roll down is an attempt to, essentially, have a next generation version of roll up built in Rust, that's super fast and will eventually become the main build compiler for Vite. It will replace ES build and and roll up within Vite. Interesting.

The road map's super interesting if you wanna give the road map a, a check because the it's it's moving quite along. And, I I think it's 1 of those projects that we're we're gonna hear a lot about over the next, I don't know, next year or so. That's my big big bold prediction.

pain points here. Configuration, obviously, being the the biggest 1 of Yeah. With Webpack. All of them. Config's always gonna be a a thing.

Yeah. Performance, yeah, also, Webpack Mini because let me tell you. There is no performance issues with Vite. Excessive complex complexity, no issues with Vite in there for me.

Webpack issues number 4. Yeah. If you're looking at this list for me, I'm I'm trying not to be too much of a hater here, but, like, the top 4 are all Webpack issues if you're asking me. Wes and and CJS, definitely a big pain point for a lot of people, and definitely something that I I don't know how it gets any better, to be honest. So, you know, I I I've moved fully over to ESM a long time ago, but you still have a 1 off situation here and there. And it it still can be a pain ESLint, definitely.

browser JavaScript. Weird. I don't know if that's that that doesn't feel like Why would that good information. Yeah. I know. That's that's crazy. But Maybe people just aren't thinking about, oh, you're doing it. Yeah. Like, the browser is a runtime. Yeah. 22%

has to show for that. Yeah. Service workers always I like about BUN, but I ultimately can't find myself really committing to the things that make BUN. Like, the things that make BUN unique are all excellent, but I find myself having a really hard time saying, like, going all in on that, and I'm, you know Yeah.

Foregoing anything of the you know, being able to move back to Node or or even to Deno.

I would assume a lot of people who might even answer this might not even have, like, a firm understanding of their runtimes and and what their Yeah. Oh, we're using the same same dang cup. We got our big cups here. Man, we are just, like, just got it all right now. We showed up to this recording wearing the same T shirt, and I had to change. So

Great.

Yeah. I you know, DigitalOcean is a platform I think about for VPS. They're, like, whole app platform thing I have not really dove into at all. Yeah. I I tried it once when I was trying to deploy

Yep. Let's talk about back end frameworks, which is interesting because Express is still king. 73% of the response, which is wild to me. I get there's a lot of people who have built on Express. It's it's I'm still on Express, and I'll tell you what. Wow.

the express version, you know, and and that's a bit of a pain. Yeah. It's it's interesting to see Nest at number 2 here. I always figured Nest was a little bit more niche, but it it does a little bit more for you. It it's definitely 1 of those ones that the Angular folks are all definitely on, so that tracks because Angular has a lot of usage.

Fastify at number 3, nice to see. I've always loved working in Fastify.

Strapi, Koa, Happy, these are none of the ones I've I've I feel like these gotta be, like, a little bit legacy because you don't hear that much about them these days, but they have been existing for a long time. Meteor.

Yeah. ESLint interesting to to still see things like we talked about, maybe perhaps like Redwood or or sales or some of these being so much lower or even, you know, the much hyped up Eliza JS is super low on this, which it goes to show you that, like,

The top 5, do I have to guess them in order?

non JavaScript languages.

So, alright. Python, a lot of AI.

Number 1, 44%.

Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of stuff written in Python. Yeah.

You know, you'd probably have to say PHP, obviously. Yeah. Number 2, 31%.

Feel like Ruby has to be here still?

Yeah. What? You know? K. There's no chance. That's not that's not usage. That's just usage in the JavaScript world. Yeah. That's Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay. So I got 3 of them or I got 2 of them.

I have no idea. C warp. We just talked about C sharp. C warp, number 4. Actually, I had

Yeah. Yeah. CJ was schooling me a bit. Alright.

Let let's, I feel like I should know these last ones. But yeah. Yeah. Number 3,

Java. Java.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Number 5, bash?

Yeah. Go Node and Rust are still a little niche, but III am surprised to see that at least Go isn't higher than Bash. Although, I I do write a fair amount of Bash. I guess if if you think of it JS, like, these are languages of people who write JavaScript

Yeah. Interesting.

Okay.

I've never hosted anything on GitHub pages, so I don't understand this 1. But yeah. I do. But it has to be unless you're using their, like, weird Ruby

Man, it just goes to show you, if you could get enough market share, you you'll be you'll be cruising forever, because I can't imagine deploying on Heroku today. I see. That's why all these

Yeah. For real. Hey. You know, it is it's wild to see that Heroku's ahead of Cloudflare and DigitalOcean.

Yeah. You Node, it's not it's it's not surprising to see it ahead of, like, some of the smaller smaller guys like, you know, Fly dot io or or Render or or Railway or 1 of those. But Hetzner is is starting to get up here. Node Hetzner the big challenge with Hetzner is even getting an account on there. I I Wes like, they their security is so intense. I had to, like, send a DM and, give them the blood of my firstborn child to get an account on there. But I I do have a server on Hetzner now, and it's it's really nice. So I'm a big fan of Hetzner because I have an Yarn an ARM based server on there, and it it's super slick for really cheap. Yeah. That's great. What else is on here? Azure Google Cloud 1918. I think

Which is it's wild to think. You know? I mean, given that when we started this show, it wasn't a thing. And then, like, a few years into the show, we were like, which one's gonna Wes else is it gonna be Flow TypeScript or Reason? And at that point, it wasn't even clear. And now it's like TypeScript is so ubiquitous. I I don't even I don't start a project without TypeScript these days. Yeah. And I haven't for a while. And and, honestly, I I don't necessarily get the grumbling about it. To me, it's like TypeScript is a fancy linter that helps me out when I need it.

That's pretty nice.

And I am very excited about that. Yeah. III met 1 of the Tory guys at, JS Nation. We should have him on the show. Oh, awesome. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. We're talking quite a bit about the challenges and some of the cool stuff they're doing over there with with desktop apps. So, you know, III like building desktop apps using JavaScript because you can lock in the specific features. You know? If you're you're shipping on a web view, you know exactly which features are there. Browser compatibility goes out the the window. You don't have to worry about it as much.

Did you look at the missing features in in JavaScript?

50 7% of respondents said types. Number 2, standard library.

3, better date management. Hey. That's coming. That one's gonna be solved, folks.

100% of you. You can use the polyfill today. It's great. I feel like the standard lib and the date management

Yeah. Yeah. I don't need them is really what it comes down to. What what's wild to to me about this is that for all the hype around signals, it's only 26 people responded saying signals.

Only 26 individuals responded saying signals when when there is, like, serious talk about adding it to the to the language. So that's crazy to me. I want I want signals. Pattern matching is really high up in here too. Pattern matching is great. We've seen pattern matching being really nice and rust. A lot of people have noticed that. So I I think pattern matching would be cool. Observables, pipe operators are in here.

Immutable data structures,

the pipe operator. I I wonder where that's at. Bro, I'm just looking at this, and the proposal pipeline operator feels like pretty stagnant.

You know, you you I don't have no idea what the conversations around this Yarn, but, like, the official changes thread Wes last updated, August 2022.

Yeah. What's up with this? I think we should get somebody who knows exactly what's going on. You can you can often go through the t c 39

most of the comments or anything on there are, like, from 2021, 2022.

You Node, I know a lot of this stuff happens offline. So or off of these GitHub issues. So it'd be really interesting to see what is actually going on. If if you're someone out there and you know the status of of what's going on, leave a leave a comment or hit us up on on Twitter or whatever. I'm I'm very interested to know what the status of this

Okay. But insurance is big. Remember? We met, Christy from yeah.

The the,

Big world, insurance. A big world. I know. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Cool. Well, that's really interesting. I love this survey every single year. Again, it gives us a good, indicator. You Node, we can all get ourselves into little bubbles, and it's easy to to, like, be in your your Twitter bubble Wes everybody JS suggesting that, this thing is the 2nd coming or something, and it's incredible and whatever. Yeah. You look on here, and it has 10 respondents saying they use it. So it's important definitely to to to get your your mind in a recalibrated way with these kind of surveys. And, also, be cognizant of the fact that, hey. The survey is a result of the people who responded to the survey, not a result of every single person in our industry overall.

Veet.

Just riding riding Vite on this thing.

It's doing me good. 2 for 2. But runners up. So 98%

That's a tough 1 for me.

This is a tough 1, because, you know, so many of these little things, they deal in small numbers even if it is. And it's, like, often small little, like, feature.

You're gonna say bun. I'm gonna say, solid.

Oh, V test.

Really?

It's gonna You know? It's gonna be beat. The most write in answers, oof. Oof. Oof.

I don't know. III couldn't tell you Deno.

number 1 on the podcast once again, guys.

Syntax.

Woo hoo. Yeah. So shout out to everybody who wrote ESLint in here or at this.

Yeah. Thank you so much for that. That's it's it's incredible every single year to see us be at the top here. So it's shocking. So thank you so much.

Sick pick. Hey. I I feel like I have a lot of sick picks because there's some of them that I wanted to share or wait until you were back because I thought I felt like you would specifically appreciate them. 1 of the cool things that I got was a digital and I don't know Node digital JS the right word. A a rechargeable lighter.

So, you know, you have those, like, gas lighters you click and you light a fireplace or something like that. I got 1 that is a USB C chargeable lighter, and it just has a little electricity burst between like, a little taser between 2 posts.

And they're, like, $15 or something. They're super cheap, charges with the USB c.

You can light your fire pit or your, fireplace. If you got 1, you can light birthday candles, anything.

And you never have to worry about it running out of gas or collecting those around or any of that stuff. So there's a ton of them on Amazon or whatever. I'll link to the 1 that I got. But, man, I've been using this thing all the time. It's 1 of those, like, little cheap cheapo gadgets you can get that you could just have around the house and never have to worry about having an actual, like, flame based lighter around there again.

and it's a little, like it's long, so you don't have to be near it when you're lighting it. And Oh, okay.

Oh, I see that. It kinda rules. Yeah. So you maybe maybe a nice little candle lighter for you, and then you have to deal with flames when you're starting your flame.

Yeah. That it's it's not surprising that you would like that. And in fact, somebody left a comment on 1 of our videos when I was with CJ here in the past couple episodes, and they're like, since the move to video, it's become increasingly obvious that Scott has ADHD.

So it's like

You got a tooth. I I chipped mine on a, PETA chip.

Which which 1? Like a front 1? Yeah. Well, the the front 2 ones. I chipped out another Stacy's giant pita chip that was apparently like a piece of concrete.

I know. It sucks. It's wild.

Sick.