I was reading
http://stateofjs.com/2016/introduction/#sections and
could not avoid noticing that the frameworks or technologies we use
are not among the most popular or most liked among the participants of
this survey.
Examples:
* Frontend frameworks: We use jQuery and OOjs UI. The latter does not
appear at all in the list, jQuery is not in the top ten. This question
might be biased though on what people perceive as a framework.
* Testing framework: We mostly use qUnit, Cucumber, Selenium. Of these
only Cucumber appears in the top 6 and it has very low satisfaction
(people who have used do not like it).
* CSS tools: We use plain CSS and Less. Less has considerable lower
satisfaction than SASS/SCSS and is less popular.
* Build tools: We don't use these in core to my knowledge, but many
extensions seem to use Grunt for running linting tools. Again, Grunt
has very low satisfaction compared to other tools.
It is natural, that as large and complex project we do not jump to the
latest cool thing. I am not advocating to change tools that work well
for us, but I don't remember seeing a public discussion whether they
work well or not. Though, I am seeing some changes, for example
jscs+jshint being replaced with eslint.
We could possibly go faster or write better software with better tools
(of course this would need a careful evaluation). And while doing that
we could perhaps lower the barrier for new developers by using
something they already know. The topic of how to attract new
developers to our movement has been popular lately (for example [1]).
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T148911
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For me one pain point is automated testing of JavaScript code. It
seems that testing frameworks, development practices and the way code
is written could all be improved to make automated testing easier.
Would there be interest in sharing comments how you do this and does
what you do work well for you?
-Niklas