Yeah same here (it was Counter Strike for me, but still)

This is absolutely true ! I'm new to the iOS development, and while swift is really easy to get into, the API's are a complete mystery. Even building a simple app involves a ton of tutorials/articles and Googling, because one really needs to know the APIs as well as the concepts of doing things. I can write quicksort in swift, but not build a simple app.

What kind of low life do you have to be to do this kind of crap ? Is this what "hackers" do these days ?

This is a strange debate these days. For me TDD made me a much better programmer. I'm not sure how I used to work without it. It saved me on many occasions. It does lead to better quality (from my experience). Frankly I don't see a single downside. Seriously.

Is it hard ? Sure.

The most significant downside is opportunity cost; all code is eventually throwaway code, and if you are doubling your authoring burden by writing code and tests on a throwaway prototype, you are iterating half as fast as you could be.

But in my personal experience, most programmers err heavily on the side of failing to test thoroughly something that will become a long-term solution, not on the side of over-testing their throwaways.

It sounds like you write your tests based on the code you write rather than its expected behaviour.

You can write a good set of tests when you know the initial requirements, and not all requirements iterate at the same rate as the code. As you learn new requirements, you write new tests. The old ones don't go away (nor do the early requirements if they're good), even if you completely replace the implementing code.

> You can write a good set of tests when you know the initial requirements

Throwaway prototypes are part of the requirement discovery process.

As a web developer, that's very strange to me. Honestly game development seems MUCH harder (from what I've experienced). Not sure why that's the case.

Difficulty has minimal impact on pay. It's really just a supply / demand issue and plenty of people want to be a game dev at least for a while which drives down pay.

Not necessarily total compensation but defiantly pay / hour.

Is the name McAfee supposed to be a plus ? Isn't he kinda crazy these days ? That's a red flag in my book.

Well I found lately that asking anything on SO that is not trivial doesn't get an answer. My last 3 questions were up-voted, but never answered. I'm a regular SO user, I know the rules, I'm doing my research, my questions are not subjective, they are "answerable", yet they remain without answers.

This is extremely inspiring. I've been on a streak ever since I read John Resig's post and your comments about your book. I'll be writing code for my side project every day, at least 30 mins. I don't know what it is ... But I'm really freaked out of breaking the chain, it keeps me really motivated. I love it.

Man, I'm a bit frustrated with this whole JS situation in recent days. There are so many frameworks, recommendations, hype - it keeps confusing me.

I mean I don't want to spend time learning a framework that might be dead 2 years from now (remember prototype ?). I really don't see a fit for Angular in my practice. However I'm not sure if I'm just saying that because of pure ignorance. Most of my client side code is pretty much jquery (that I try to keep organized), and it works most of the time. Then I see people referring to that practice as "jquery soup" and I'm starting to think I'm doing it wrong.

A lot of the web apps I write consist of pages with ajax sprinkled here and there (where it makes sense). I think a framework like Ember, Angular or Backbone is an overkill in my case. I don't write SPAs, but then again I see people using it everywhere these days.

Honestly, for my scenario I feel that a framework such as Knockout or ReactJs is a lot more "fitting". I'm sure other devs have been where I am, I wonder what you guys think.

> I mean I don't want to spend time learning a framework that might be dead 2 years from now (remember prototype ?)

2 years ago I jumped ship from KnockoutJS to AngularJS. Backbone was also quite hyped out around the same time. All three of them are still around and frankly speaking it wouldn't have been a problem for me if the one I picked died by now. The skills I learned in Knockout helped me quickly learn Angular.

Think of it this way, learning on its own, regardless of what you're learning is valuable. My suggesstion, take a day and examine whatever frameworks you've heard of and pick one and learn it.

> Most of my client side code is pretty much jquery (that I try to keep organized), and it works most of the time. Then I see people referring to that practice as "jquery soup" and I'm starting to think I'm doing it wrong.

Possibly the biggest advantage of Angular is what it does for code organization. With JQuery, you've got to organize it yourself, and while some things are easily organized, others can easily turn into a big mess.

Angular is very big on separation of concerns, modules, dependency injection, etc. Basically, what Angular does, is provide a lot of mature code organization concepts that have been common place on the server-side for ages, to browser-side code. Javascript has long been the domain of little ad-hoc scripts. Stuff like JQuery makes it easier to work with fairly standalone libraries, whereas Angular does for the browser what frameworks like Spring and Wicket did for the server.

Is it what you need? Depends on whether Spring and Wicket are what you need.

xtrumanx said it well. What you learn while picking up any one of these newer frameworks will serve you well.

3 months ago I'd never touched any of them, at least not successfully. Then I got a project to build an app-like mobile website for my company on top of Drupal. I spent a few days trying to figure out how to fake it with jQuery and prefetching, all the while knowing that one of these frameworks was the better way to go. I spent a morning spinning up a couple of JSON feeds in Drupal and the afternoon learning enough Angular to get something to show up on the page, and I think it's fair to say that in the 2 months since that day my developmental worldview (and my productivity) has shifted considerably.

Regardless of how long Angular sticks around (though I suspect it'll be a little while), what I've learned from working with it nonstop for the last 2 months has definitely made me a better developer overall.

The framework battle is really between Backbone, Angular, and Ember. No one else I can think of off hand has the marketshare that those 3 do..

And each has their own strengths and unique opinions. My preference is Ember, but it's just that, a preference.

Even if not writing SPAs, I think frameworks can be great for building pieces of interactivity as cohesive modules. To me, this is a great use case for Backbone or React.

I was working on a project recently (in fact I still am sort of), staying late (really late) working ... and working. At first it was ok, but doing 3 weeks in a row with no weekend and very little break in between (the occasional game session here and there) really got to me. I remember one night I was sitting in the office I looked out of the window (gorgeous view - 35th floor in a sky-scaper in Abu Dhabi) and I just started crying. I had a massive breakdown. I've had panic attacks for the next 2-3 weeks almost daily. Just to clarify, I love coding, I'm coding in my free time, I enjoy it more than anything. This being HN, I'm sure a lot of people can relate.