I recently made a site that used JavaScript as it's primary means of loading new pages. The aim was to create a working mock up of a mobile app, so the round trip time of getting a new page was too slow, as this needed to emulate screen transitions of an app. So I needed a way of inserting new HTML, populated with data. For this I used Handlebars, which offered a simple, straightforward, well-documented way of templating with JavaScript.

This gave me a surprisingly positive experience with a JS project. I think this is because it did one job, which neatly covered what I needed it do to. Which was in stark contrast to the playing I had done with some other, more MVC-style JavaScript frameworks, which seemed so monolithic, and so bloated - though I should clarify that I have never been the whole-nine-yards with a JavaScript framework, just toy projects.

Which got me thinking about why Handlebars felt easy, but Angular just felt stressful. I think this has to be because Handlebars worked in addition to my preexisting JS knowledge, it didn't jump in and try to make the simple things complicated.

Which is similar to everyone's favourite JavaScript library: jQuery, which just gives you some useful extra things for your toolbelt, but doesn't get all up in your business.

This is basically the Unix principle. Simple, easy to understand tools, that do one job. But I found myself thinking about it a little differently, because it's more about mixing at source code level, rather than combing tools. So I thought about it like the "favour composition over inheritance" idiom, but applied at a higher level. Something like Angular felt very nested, where the depth just made it hard to wrangle. Tools like Handlebars and jQuery sit nicely next to each other, and are nicely orthogonal.

I would love for JavaScript to gain more of these simple tools, and let go off the focus on the revolving door of frameworks, of nothing else so that tools can actually stick around and not be a flash in the pan, that takes so long to learn, and teaches so little.