js toolchain

Thoughts on js toolchain infancy / difficulty

In general:
I think serious browser app development is still in its infancy and
as a result the tools move really quickly and the continued development
invalidates documentation / blog posts / SO questions etc. This is analogous
to the Rails 2.0 time period in which we had just gotten a pile of good stuff
on the internet to deal with Rails 1.8 and then everything just broke. Considering
how young the tooling is, I think it's gotten crazy powerful recently (ember-cli / lineman).
In a year we'll probably be very happy people.

Why it's still harder than it needs to be:
I think there are far too few people treating browser applications as real, first class
applications that just happen to exist as a HTML file, JS file, and a CSS file. They
want to know how to just sprinkle a front-end framework into their back-end work
and then immediately implement whatever UI the product manager is asking for.

Whenever I visit things in Boston like the Backbone or the Ember meetups, I see
people that discuss their 'practices' when developing things on the frameworks
and as far as I can tell it's just beating the shit out of the framework until
it meets their conception of how the front-end code should work / be organized.

It's true that the documentation for Ember isn't great, that it takes practice
to get the abstractions right in practice. What I see is that people who are
usually pretty bright software devs just ignore it all and glue code together
however they can instead of actually learning the framework. People seem to
look for their conceptual map of abstractions in front-end frameworks instead
of exploring their ignorance in the framework creators idea of abstractions.

How this glues back to getting started in EmberJS is that few people are trying
to build stand-alone, consistent applications (DockYard, myself, and a few others
come to mind in Boston) and most people are just trying to check off "rich browser interactions"
kind of stories off the backlog. As a result, these people tend to spread
misinformation and build toolchains that miss the point of how powerful
static apps could be.