Class teacher

ES6 introduced a whole bunch of new features to JavaScript. One of those features is the class keyword. This introduction has been accompanied by a fair amount of concern and criticism.

Here’s the issue: classes in JavaScript aren’t quite the same as classes in other programming languages. In fact, technically, JavaScript doesn’t really have classes at all. But some say that technically isn’t important. If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, shouldn’t we call it a duck even if technically it’s somewhat similar—but not quite the same—species of waterfowl?

The argument for doing this is that classes are so familiar from other programming languages, that having some way of using classes in JavaScript—even if it isn’t technically the same as in other languages—brings a lot of benefit for people moving over to JavaScript from other programming languages.

But that comes with a side-effect. Anyone learning about classes in JavaScript will basically be told “here’s how classes work …but don’t look too closely.”

Now if you believe that outcomes matter more than understanding, then this is a perfectly acceptable trade-off. After all, we use computers every day without needing to understand the inner workings of every single piece of code under the hood.

It doesn’t sit well with me, though. I think that understanding how something works is important (in most cases). That’s why I favour learning underlying technologies first—HTML, CSS, JavaScript—before reaching for abstractions like frameworks and libraries. If you understand the way things work first, then your choice of framework, library, or any other abstraction is an informed choice.

The most common way that people refer to the new class syntax in JavaScript is to describe it as syntactical sugar. In other words, it doesn’t fundamentally introduce anything new under the hood, but it gives you a shorter, cleaner, nicer way of dealing with objects. It’s an abstraction. But because it’s an abstraction taken from other programming languages that work differently to JavaScript, it’s a bit of fudge. It’s a little white lie. The class keyword in JavaScript will work just fine as long as you don’t try to understand it.

My personal opinion is that this isn’t healthy.

I’ve come across two fantastic orators who cemented this view in my mind. At Render Conf in Oxford earlier this year, I had the great pleasure of hearing Ashley Williams talk about the challenges of teaching JavaScript. Skip to the 15 minute mark to hear her introduce the issues thrown up classes in JavaScript.

More recently, the mighty Kyle Simpson was on an episode of the JavaScript Jabber podcast. Skip to the 17 minute mark to hear him talk about classes in JavaScript.

(Full disclosure: Kyle also some very kind things about some of my blog posts at the end of that episode, but you can switch it off before it gets to that bit.)

Both Ashley and Kyle bring a much-needed perspective to the discussion of language design. That perspective is the perspective of a teacher.

In his essay on W3C’s design principles, Bert Bos lists learnability among the fundamental driving forces (closely tied to readability). Learnability and teachability are two sides of the same coin, and I find it valuable to examine any language decisions through that lens. With that mind, introducing a new feature into a language that comes with such low teachability value as to warrant a teacher actively telling a student not to learn how things really work …well, that just doesn’t seem right.

Progressive Enhancement

This post was originally written in 2015, but upon re-reading it today, it still (just about) holds up, so I finally hit publish.

SCALABLE: Save form data to localStorage and auto-complete on refresh

When I was in Amsterdam I was really impressed with the code that Rose was writing and I encouraged her to share it. Here it is: drop this script into a web page with a form to have its values automatically saved into local storage (and automatically loaded into the form if something goes wrong before the form is submitted).

The quiet, pervasive devaluation of frontend - Josh Collinsworth blog

It’s like CSS exists in some bizarre quantum state; somehow both too complex to use, yet too simple to take seriously, all at once.

In many ways, CSS has greater impact than any other language on a user’s experience, which often directly influences success. Why, then, is its role so belittled?

Writing CSS seems to be regarded much like taking notes in a meeting, complete with the implicit sexism and devaluation of the note taker’s importance in the room.

Remote Synthesis | The Price Developers Pay for Loving Their Tools Too Much

• Don’t wrap too much of your identity in a tool.
• Every tool will eventually fade.
• Flexibility is a valuable skill
• Changing tools does not mean starting over.

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.

Redefining Developer Experience — Begin Blog

Perhaps most problematic of all is the effect that contemporary developer experience has on educational programs (be they traditional classes, bootcamps, workshops, or anything in between). Such a rapidly expanding and ever changing technological ecosystem necessarily means that curricula struggle to keep up, and that the fundamentals of web development (e.g. HTML, CSS, HTTP, browser APIs…) are often glossed over in favor of getting students into the technologies more likely to land them jobs (like React and its many pals). This leads to an outpouring of early career developers who may speak confidently about things like React hooks or Redux state reducers, but who also lack any concept about the nature of HTML semantics or the most basic accessibility considerations. To be clear, I’m not throwing shade at those developers — they have been failed by an industry obsessed with the new and shiny at the expense of foundational practices and end user experiences.

And so, I ask: what exactly are we buying when we are sold ‘developer experience’ today? Who is benefiting from it? And if it is indeed something many of us aren’t too excited about (to put it kindly), how can we change it for the better?

I agree with pretty much every word of this article.