The extreme amount of neomania in JavaScript land is what keeps me away from it altogether. The idea that all JS articles and GitHub repositories are outdated after a year means the entire ecosystem is fragile.
I'll leave the always-chasing-the-next to the programming bootcampers, and I'll work on building skills that will be useful long after the next 100 javascript frameworks are dead instead.
The thing with JavaScript is that as it evolves the opportunity to invent, and then solve, new problems presents itself.
Heck, most of the problems/solutions aren't even particularly new - they are just a JS implementation of other older concepts.
"...but it's just a client-side reimplementation of XSLT... BLOODY XSLT FFS!"
-- A developer, somewhere.
But for all the weird, wobbly wheels we reinvent, it reflects the time-honoured tradition of something getting a little better each time you rebuild it.
Each time the industry churns another fad we collectively learn something. Some of that filters back into browser development, some of that informs the development of the next set of frameworks and libraries, and some of it just forces us to ask difficult questions about our preconceptions.
But for me at least that's the appeal of a language like js - Programming is easy, solving problems is hard, so we keep trying.
I do some mentoring, and one of my mentoring calls was with a bootcamper where the instructor, mid-"cohort", decided to switch to Angular 2 - while it was still in beta. I was able to help (I had been working with it since earliest betas) but was quick to let this student know how poorly prepared they were about to be for the job market upon "graduation".
The extreme amount of neomania in JavaScript land is what keeps me away from it altogether. The idea that all JS articles and GitHub repositories are outdated after a year means the entire ecosystem is fragile.
I'll leave the always-chasing-the-next to the programming bootcampers, and I'll work on building skills that will be useful long after the next 100 javascript frameworks are dead instead.