Have the polyfills got any better recently? Last I looked, they had a list of performance issues or only partially supported the spec. Made it really hard to consider them for a serious production app.
The polyfills have been used in many large production sites for a while now. The Web Components v1 specs instigated a rewrite of some of them that may have improved perf, and definitely reduced size.
The unhealthy fascination with burn down charts and Scrum in general continually amazes me. I have witnessed the same debates about what Scrum points system to use so many times and witnessed teams of intelligent people waste days of developer time earnestly discussing relative point values.
Interesting comment below the article regarding a government-run programme in Brazil trying something similar:
"However, there is a trend of the part of these persons become dependent of this benefit and do not strive to change this situation..."
That was my immediate reaction after reading this. What about after the twelve years, when the donors ride off into the sunset? There are some encouraging stories there of participants using the money wisely, but not all will do so. You could argue that nobody is forcing them to participate, but it does seem at least a little ethically questionable. Particularly given the targeted demographic of a rural Kenyan community with (presumably - I could be wrong) low education levels.
If this solves their basic needs, housing, food, medical, education, ..., then why would they need to 'strive for change"? Seems to me the world would be a far better place if people could get more content with just living. We have no shortage of produce already, and that is before the automation revolutions coming in the next decades. Just living without exponential 'wealth' accumulation plans that invariably seem to include some form of over-exploiting natural resources while externalizing the effects, or rent-seeking schemes that create lopsided distributions, seems to be a far more 'civil' future.
I've been using React for a side project for a while. Generally it's been pretty easy to understand the concepts behind it and get productive. A couple of things that have confused/irked me a little:
- Having to figure out babel, browserify and/or webpack before you can write hello world isn't a great first experience. I'm glad to see much of this has been moved to a separate page outside of the getting started guide now.
- The main React page emphasises that JSX is optional. Even looking at the trivial examples, nesting createElement statements looks horrific. Does anyone use this approach in a large-scale project? If your components are fine-grained enough, perhaps it's passable, but it looks far from ideal. Having used other frameworks, even building up a template in JSX in a return statement feels dirty. I see there are some suggestions around on splitting out JSX, but it would be great if this was the default.
- I wasn't really sure what to do with CSS. There's a brief comment on inline-styles at https://facebook.github.io/react/tips/inline-styles.html. For a library for building user interfaces, it seems like this deserves more attention. I would've expected the CSS (styling), javascript (logic and state management) and JSX (layout) to be a little less interwoven.
There are like 3 or 4 different ways of doing it, each with their own pretty big drawbacks.
Personally we ended up using CSS Modules with SASS in our "main" react project, but it feels clunky.
The biggest issue we have is determining which element "owns" the styling. Should a widget style itself, or should it let it's container style it, or should it provide some simple defaults and let the container overwrite them (which gets ugly because with CSS Modules overwriting means using !important or doubling classes (like `.button.button` to overwrite `.button`).
All that being said, it's actually working out really well for us despite feeling wrong. And it might not ever become an issue because our largest stylesheet is like 100 lines long since everything is so compartmentalized.
I remain pretty dubious about generalisations about the populations of countries as a whole. In my experience, these sorts of differences are more local. People in city centres are less friendly, because it's an intimidating environment. Walk your dog out in the 'burbs or a park somewhere and people are far more likely to be relaxed and say hi.
Only if you use some of the old-school widgets (e.g. Horizontal Panel). I think standard practice these days is to use HTML as far as possible in views.
