JS is a horrible language for application development. It was designed to be a small band aid for web UI interaction, and designed as a functional language (which I assume made some sense for that specific need at that specific time, in addition it is probably easier to develop functional languages over procedural ones)

The fact is that since almost day 1 of it there where macro languages and transpilers created for it because it was hard to work with it.

Unlike other languages like PHP, its development is limited to what the major browsers can agree on and needs to go through some formal standard process. This means that whatever are its shortcomings they will be solved very slowly and you are still going to end with something that by design will be limited to whatever restrictions browsers have

Now angular or react? burn them both! as both companies showed no long term commitment for supporting the development enviroments they suggested that other developers should also use. angular 2 was not BC with angular 1, and FB just pulled the plug from HHVM. Neither company should be trusted for the long run

So the answer is, learn whatever will enable you to charge more for a "one off" type of project, and stay with vanilla JS for anything long term.

At this point in time you probably do not even need jquery for 95% of the things being done with it, but since it is enqueued in almost every theme, and on the admin side of wordpress, it is just easier in a way to keep usingg it instead of learning the relevant vanila APIs

@MarkKaplun I can't agree more with this one. Although jQuery seems to be promising in long term too.

yeh should have probably qualified it regarding jquery. many related libraries are useful, but the core idea of selecting elements based on their css can be achieved with queryselectorall developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Element/…

@MichaelEcklund you don't need to use React to use Redux

@MarkKaplun that's not true, JS language evolution isn't dependent on the browsers, else stuff like object spread operators, fat arrow functions, etc would never have been introduced

@MarkKaplun also this is misleading. Angular 2 isn't compatible with Angular 1 because they use Semver. If it was compatible, it'd be 1.x. It's also misleading because it implies Angular 1 was abandoned and deprecated the moment 2 came out, which is not what happened. Also HHVM was deprecated because PHP official caught up and it wasn't necessary anymore, and FB itself moved to Hack

also keeping in mind that tools like React and Vue allow you to build stuff much faster than virtual DOM, and aren't the only game in town. If push comes to shove you pin your NPM package to a specific version in package.json and ignore the updates

@MichaelEcklund Angular and React aren't the same. React provides a way to compose components, but it says little to nothing about how to structure non UI code. Angular is a framework

with that in mind, React doesn't provide stuff like controller classes, models, etc like Angular does, it just allows you to compose components in a tree and pass them props telling them information. When the props or state change the tree re-renders

hmmm it seems HHVM hasn't been deprecated at all, it has commits as recent as 5 hours ago github.com/facebook/hhvm