What is the best alternative to Angular?

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score 246 · Answer 1

React

Top Pro

Easy to reuse components

Since every single UI component is created independently in JavaScript, it becomes very easy to reuse them throughout your app without having to re-write them. See More

Top Con

Heavy on memory

React's virtual DOM is fast, but it requires storing elements in the virtual and real DOM increasing memory usage for the page. This can be a real problem for single-page webapps designed to be left running in the background. See More

Top Pro

Supported by Facebook and Instagram

React is built by Facebook engineers initially to be used only for their inner projects especially to solve the problem of building large complex applications with constantly changing data. See More

Top Con

Template(view) mixed into code

Top Pro

Server side rendering

React can render it's components and data server side, then it sends those components as HTML to the browser. This ensures faster initial loading time and SEO friendliness out of the box, since it's indexed as any other static website by search engines. See More

Top Con

Verbose

React gets a little verbose as applications get more complicated with more components. It's simply not as straightforward as simply writing HTML and JavaScript would be. See More

Top Pro

Virtual DOM support

Instead of relying on the DOM, React implements a virtual DOM from scratch, allowing it to calculate precisely what needs to be patched during the next screen refresh. This is orders of magnitude faster than fiddling with the DOM itself. See More

Top Con

You have to learn a new syntax

Requires learning a custom syntax, JSX, that has some gotchas and introduce complexity, a steeper learning curve, and incompatibility with other tools. Though you can opt out from JSX and use vanilla JS instead. But that is not recommended since it adds a lot of unneeded complexity which JSX tries to avoid. See More

Top Pro

One-way data flow

React's one-way data binding (or one-way data flow) means that it's easy to see where and how your UI is updated and where you need to make changes. It's also very easy to keep everything modular, fast and well-organized. See More

Top Con

Not a complete solution

React does not do everything for the developer, it's merely a tool for building the UI of a web app. It does not have support for routing or models, at least not out of the box. While some missing features can be added through libraries, to start using React and use it in production, you still would need to have experience, or at least a good grasp on what the best libraries to use would be. See More

Top Pro

Can be used with different libraries

ReactJS can be used independently as the only library for building the front-end, or it can be used alongside JavaScript libraries such as jQuery, or even Angular. See More

Top Con

Large file size

React's react.min.js is 145.5KB in size. It's much larger than some other libraries that offer roughly the same features and it's almost the same size as some MV* frameworks such as Angular or Ember that offer more features out of the box. Although, it should be mentioned that sometimes having a smaller library may force developers to reinvent the wheel and write inefficient implementations on features that React already has. Ending up with a larger application that's harder to maintain and/or that has bad performance. See More

Top Pro

Template engine independent

React provides a template engine (JSX) which is easy to use. But it's not mandatory. See More

Top Con

Renders too frequently

Top Pro

Widely used

The framework is widely used in the industry. See More

Top Con

No support for legacy browsers

React has recently dropped support for Internet Explorer 8. While the library may still work on IE8, issues that affect only IE8 will not be prioritized and/or solved. See More

Top Pro

Functional programming style leads to less buggy UIs

Top Pro

Easy to write tests

Since React's virtual DOM system is implemented completely in JavaScript, it's very easy to write UI test cases. See More

Top Pro

Good debugging tools

React has an official Chrome Extension which is used as a developing and debugging tool. It can be used to quickly and painlessly debug your application or view the whole application structure as it's rendered. See More

Top Pro

Flux architecture pattern

Flux is a platform agnostic pattern which can technically be used with any application or programming language. One of Flux' main features is that it enforces uni-directional data flow which means that views do not change the data directly. With React this is useful because this way it's easier to understand an application as it starts getting more complicated. By having two-way data binding, lead to unpredictable changes, where changing one model's data would end up updating another model. By using the Flux architecture, this can be avoided. See More

Top Pro

Extensive SVG support

Since React v0.15, SVG is fully supported. React supports all SVG attributes that are recognized by today's browsers. See More

Top Pro

Keep control over your app's logic

React is just a view library, so you still have (almost) full control over how your app behaves. See More

Top Pro

Supported by ClojureScript libraries

Reagent, Om, Rum, etc. See More

Top Pro

Tested on Facebook itself

React is used on one of the most visited websites on the planet, Facebook. With stellar results and with millions of people experiencing it every day. See More

Specs

GZipped size:45K

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246 101

score 249 · Answer 2

Inkscape

Top Pro

Free and open source

Inkscape is GPL-licensed and maintains public repositories. See More

Top Con

Very slow startup on some systems

Depending on factors like how many fonts you have installed, Inkscape can take upwards of 30 seconds to launch. See More

Top Pro

Opens lots of file types

Inkscape supports many common formats for import (including SVG, Photoshop and Illustrator) and its plugin architecture allows more to be added. See More

Top Con

Uses its own SVG-format by default

Inkscape might use SVG as its default format, however this SVG's contains some additional SodiPodi/Inkscape additions that can be troublesome if you want to import the SVG into some other application. See More

Top Pro

Export to different file types

Files can be exported and saved as a "normal" svg, png, jpg, bmp etc. file. See More

Top Con

1.0 is sluggish

Inkscape 1.0 uses GTK 3 which is sluggish and slow for low spec systems( eg. ARM, Celeron, Pentium, Core-i3, Ryzen 3 or Athlon ) compared to previous versions. See More

Top Pro

Cross-platform

Pre-built binaries are available for Windows, Mac and Linux. Inkscape can be built from source on additional platforms. See More

Top Con

Buggy

Application is often buggy so it happens from time to time that the popup / right-click menu won't close and stays open. It crashes also sometimes randomly. This makes it almost unusable for productive / business use. See More

Top Pro

Integrates well into a X11-System

Its uses the X11 icon theme and desktop theme(GTK). See More

Top Con

Crashes very often

Inkscape encountered an internal error and will close now - is one of its standard messages. See More

Top Pro

It can do anything

A very powerful software that can do pretty match anything! See More

Top Con

Since 0.91 the gradient editor is gone

It is now only possible to edit a gradient on screen. but you can't set a stop to a specific percentage anymore. See More

Top Pro

Measurement Tool

This tool is extremely handy and can not be found in any other vector graphics programs out there. See More

Top Con

Limited work with ICC CMYK color scheme

Support for ICC color profiles only in SVG files. See More

Top Pro

Live Path Effects

Extremely powerful menu that offers more than 30 powerful Live Path Effects to apply to paths vastly enhancing the application functionality. See More

Top Con

Y-axis inverted

0,0 coordinates begin in lower left corner, not upper left corner as SVG standards define in Inkscape 0.92.x. It seems this is now fixed in the 1.0 beta 2 version of the program. See More

Top Pro

Guides, Grids, and Canvas Rotation

Extremely handy features when building complex graphics using Inkscape. See More

Top Con

Uses GTK

It looks an feels like an alien. It also uses now touch-based widgets instead of professional widgets. See More

Top Pro

Dark Theme Support

The new 1.0 beta 2 version finally got support for dark theme which normally is only available for commercial software like Affinity Serif, Adobe Illustrator. See More

Top Con

A toy for facebook-ist enthusiasts, not for professionals

It's a Linux niche mumbo-jumbo, same as GIMP for raster edit . See More

Top Pro

The new version 1.1 is looks and feels fantastic

Inskape got UI update: new dockable dialogs. See More

Top Con

Based on the GTK widget toolkit

Software is based on GTK, so it might not integrate well in non-GTK environments. It also requires many dependencies on those non-GTK desktops. It also adds dependencies to GTK-environments since it is written in C++ which requires the gtkmm wrapper/interface. See More

Top Pro

Interface is available in 29 languages

Basque, British English, Brazilian, Portuguese, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Latvian, Norwegian (Bokmål), Polish, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Swedish. See More

Top Con

Mac version does not look as polished as its versions for Windows/Linux version for the 0.92.x version

It seems that Inkscape 1.0 beta 2 for Mac got some needed attention and it looks a lot better with dark theme support. native DMG installer and they got rid of X11 which is great. See More

Top Pro

It's really easy and fun

Vector graphics can be created and edited with Inkscape. See More

Top Con

Incompatible with previous versions

Sometimes backward compatibility breaks. For example, pre 0.92 SVGs are incompatible with later releases (due different default resolutions). See More

Top Con

No support for large printing machine system

No support for large printing machine environment, except exporting the resulting artwork to PDF. See More

Top Con

Under GNU GPL

It is released under GNU GPL which one of the restricted open source license. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS, Linux, Unix

License:GPL-2.0-or-later

Technology:C++

Initial Release:2003

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249 52

score 283 · Answer 3

GIMP

Top Con

Unintuitive interface

GIMP doesn't embrace OS X application design, thus Mac users might have a hard time wrapping their heads around GIMP's interface. See More

Top Pro

Free, open source and cross-platform

GIMP is completely free and open source, meaning you can use GIMP and all of its features without spending a penny. This makes it an excellent case for artists or designers who may not have the budget to spend over 700 USD on Photoshop. It is also available for free on Windows, Mac OS and Linux. It's licensed under GPL with source code available here. See More

Top Con

Less features than other programs

Being a free program, it shouldn't be surprising that it has limited features. For those needing more advanced features for something more professional, GIMP just isn't for you. See More

Top Pro

Powerful

GIMP is the most feature rich free image editing tool. It has most image manipulation and workflow tools that you would expect from an image editing software and what it lacks it makes up with plugins. See More

Top Con

Lacks adjustment layers

Adjustment layers offer a non-destructive way of combining different photo manipulations. Without adjustment layers the only way to see changes is by irreversibly editing the image. They are promised in future updates. See More

Top Pro

Content-aware tools with a plugin

There's a content-aware fill plugin available for GIMP. See More

Top Con

Poor performance

Top Pro

Modular & single-window interface options

By default GIMP splits out each window, but you can check to use the one screen mode in options if you prefer. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Compared to to other photo editing software, GIMP is very light weight. In addition it isn't very resource-intensive, meaning you can put it on a flash drive and have it with you to load up on just about any computer. See More

Top Pro

Beginner-friendly

Gimp has less features than programs like Photoshop, but for a beginner, or someone not needing complicated options, Gimp is the perfect choice. It allows you to quickly do basic photo manipulation so you can easily get the product you need without having to worry about complicated features getting in the way. See More

Top Pro

Full channel support

Specs

Platforms:Windows 10/8/7; Linux; MacOS

License:GPLv3+

Tethered capture:No

Non-Distructive Editing:No, Feature in development with GEGL

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283 60

score 114 · Answer 4

Photoshop

Top Pro

Industry standard

Photoshop is used by professionals everywhere in a wide variety of fields including photography, graphic design and digital art. It is the de facto standard for image manipulation. If you've seen a magazine ad featuring a model, you've probably seen the effects of Photoshop. You won't be alone when using Photoshop. See More

Top Con

Expensive

The standalone version of Photoshop costs $19.99/month, though it can be leased as part of the Creative Cloud Photography bundle that includes Lightroom for $9.99/month. See More

Top Pro

Trove of plugins that extend functionality are available

A wide variety of plugins that add new effects, improve existing functionality and simplify workflow are available. See More

Top Con

Latest versions of Photoshop are subscription-only

While you can still buy CS6 from 2012 without needing a subscription by contacting Adobe support or the cut-down Photoshop Elements, any full-version version of Photoshop past CS6 requires a subscription. See More

Top Pro

Lots of tutorials

There's a huge number of both free and paid tutorials available online. Websites like Lynda.com offer premium high-quality, in-depth tutorials, but there are plenty of free alternatives to be found on YouTube, blogs and specialized sites on the Internet. See More

Top Con

Learning it can take some time

While you can relatively quickly learn how to perform a few basic image editing tasks, understanding Photoshop's ins and outs can be difficult. It's partially due to the sheer amount of functionality that Photoshop packs (and understanding that some of the advanced functionality can take a while to understand on its own), and partially due to it being aimed at professionals with little hand-holding for novice users. See More

Top Pro

A cheaper, standalone version called Photoshop Elements is available

A stripped down version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Elements can be bought as a standalone application for $100. See More

Top Con

Very slow

It needs a very power CPU and GPU and many GBs of RAM and still it is so slow. See More

Top Pro

Includes powerful content-aware tools

Photoshop includes content-aware tools such as content-aware fill that can fill in a select area based on what surrounds it. See More

Top Con

Stop paying, it vaporises

With Adobes adaptation of the "subscription world" PhotoShop too is available as subscription software only. This means it will never become yours. And if you stop paying, you won't have any PhotoShop any more. Whether you are OK with that or not, it also means that PhotoShop for a large part becomes software for those "who can afford it". Or "push cost to others". Like customers of professionals. Which is also a way to become an "industry standard". See More

Top Pro

Packs a staggering amount of functionality

Photoshop is the most fully featured image editing software available today allowing you to perform highly advanced image manipulation. It has tools for RAW image adjustments, lens correction, retouching, image stitching, HDR, fixing framing. It supports most professional color modes and file formats. It includes extensive lists of filters, styles, effects, fonts as well as tools for painting, sketching and typography work. It understands both raster and vector graphics. It even includes tools for video editing, working with 3D objects and support for 3D printing. See More

Top Con

Affinity Photo is just as good at a fraciton of the price

Switching from Photoshop to Affinity Photo and it's hard to notice the difference quality of a professional's work. They say that PS is the industry standard, but so very few pros that tried Affinity Photo ever look back. See More

Top Pro

Integrates with Creative Cloud

You can save all projects directly to the Creative Cloud allowing you to access them from any device and with any relevant Adobe software. See More

Top Con

Not good enough to be so expensive

Probably the only big advantage Photoshop has over the other free software is the adjustment layers. But still too expensive for just one feature. See More

Top Pro

Creative Cloud Photography subscription includes Lightroom

Lightroom is another image editing software from Adobe that's specifically designed for photo editing and managing of large quantities of digital images. See More

Top Con

Batch editing of images is not straightforward

Photoshop is designed to work extensively on one image at a time and while batch editing support exists, it's not that intuitive to use. See More

Top Pro

Mobile companion apps available

There's a free mobile app available for iOS, Android & Windows Phone. See More

Top Con

Asset management capabilities are lacking

In Photoshop asset management is done through a separate program called Bridge. As Bridge is supposed to be a file management tool for not just Photoshop's files, but for files generated by all of Adobe's applications it covers a breadth of capabilities, but not depth. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, macOS

License:Hagu

Tethered capture:via Bridge

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114 47

score 628 · Answer 5

JavaScript

Top Pro

No installation required

If you run a web browser you already have JavaScript installed and can get started right away. Modern browsers such as Chrome also have very powerful programming consoles built into them. Aside from the browser console, you can also use online Javascript playgrounds such as JS Bin and JS Fiddle. Even from a tablet. See More

Top Con

Many errors pass silently

JavaScript looks for every possible way to treat the code you write as runnable and is very reluctant to point out likely errors. For example, you have call a function with too many arguments, the extra arguments are simply discarded. See More

Top Pro

Required for web development

If you are looking to create web projects, you will have to learn Javascript in order to develop the client side code. If you learn the foundations of programming in JavaScript you can reapply that education later in building web applications. See More

Top Con

Easy to accidentally use globals

If you forget a var or new, you can clobber the global scope. For tiny scripts (JavaScript's original use case) globals are great, but for larger applications globals are generally regarded as a Bad Thing. This is because changes to one small part of a program can randomly break things anywhere else. These kinds of bugs are notoriously hard to find. See More

Top Pro

Massive ecosystem

JavaScript has one of the largest programming ecosystems, as shown by the being the most popular language for projects on GitHub. As there are so many projects written in JavaScript there are lots of libraries available to build off of and many of them are written to be easy to use and integrate into other projects. There are also lots of resources available for learning JavaScript. Other than traditional tutorials, language learning sites such as Codecademy have JavaScript courses. The Mozilla Developer Database also serves as a great resource for learning about the standard libraries built into JavaScript. See More

Top Con

Does not teach you about data types

Since JavaScript is a weakly typed language, you don't have to learn about data types if you start using JavaScript as your first language. Data types being one of the most important concepts in programming. This will also cause trouble in the long run when you will have to (inevitably) learn and work with a strongly or statically typed language because you will be forced to learn the type system from scratch. See More

Top Pro

Easy to build an application

By using the UI capabilities in HTML and CSS you can develop substantial applications with graphical interfaces more quickly and with less effort than in other languages which would require you to learn a windowing library. Building a useful application is one of the best ways to learn a new language and because of the low learning curve for creating applications you can create more substatial programs and learn more practical programming priciple faster. See More

Top Con

Weird type coercions

'5' - 1 == 4, but '5' + 1 == 51. There are other examples that make even less sense. See More

Top Pro

Runs on both the browser and the server

With Node.js, it is now possible to run JavaScript as a web server. This would allow you to be able to create server based applications sooner than would if you had to learn a separate programming language as well for server side code. As JavaScript is the only language supported by web browsers it puts it in the unique situation of being the only programming language that's available on both the client side and server side. See More

Top Con

Complex

JavaScript has a long litany of warts and gotchas. JavaScript will bite you if you're just a wee bit careless. You have to exercise a great deal of caution and awareness. You either have to know the entire 545-page ES6 spec to avoid them all, or use a linter to help restrict you from using the bad parts (and you still have to be familiar with the language), but beginners don't know these things. (Linters are also prone to time-wasting false positives.) This is a significant cognitive burden on even the experienced programmer (as if coding wasn’t hard enough already), but try learning to program in the first place on top of all of this and you'll understand that JavaScript is a terrible choice for the beginner. See More

Top Pro

First-class functions with lexical closures

While certainly not the only language with these features, this pro alone is so powerful that it compensates for most of JavaScript's problems. You'll learn to use closures and higher-order functions well in JavaScript, because you have to. And then you can generalize this knowledge to any other language that has these, and the good ones do. See More

Top Con

Easy to fall into bad manners and bad mind structure

It wouldn't consolidate a good mind structure for moving to other languages. Too open. See More

Top Pro

High demand for JavaScript developers

If you're looking for a career as a developer, JavaScript is the place to focus your attention. There is a huge demand for good developers especially in frameworks such as React and Angular. See More

Top Con

Each browser has its own quirks when executing the same code in some cases

Beginner programmers often make the mistake of coding something, seeing it works in the browser they tested it in, and then scratching their heads when it doesn't work in another browser. Ideally you'd want a language that works consistently across all platforms in order to be able to focus more on the programming and less on the underlying environment. It just takes time away from learning and forces you to spend time figuring out why this worked in browser X but not browser Y. See More

Top Pro

Complete dev stack can be run online

With codepen.io and other prototyping tools, you can learn Javascript from a mobile device. You don't even need a computer. It can be learned from an internet cafe or public library. See More

Top Con

The constant churn of tooling and language

Trying to keep up=javascript fatigue. You won't have time to learn anything else if this is your first language, and you will probably think all programmers are crazy. Plus web assembly may open the door for better alternatives. See More

Top Pro

JSON is native to JS

JSON is arguably a "must-learn". With JS, that's one less additional syntax to learn. See More

Top Con

Very confusing to read

Top Pro

Very good debugger

Has a built in debugger with break points, watches that work on local values, and a console that you can use to edit anything at any time. Both in the browser (eg: Chrome), and server (eg: Nodejs). See More

Top Con

The "this" keyword doesn't mean what you think it means

this is bound to whatever object called the function. Unless you invoke it as a method. Unless you invoke it as a constructor. Unless it's an arrow function. See More

Top Pro

Can be very simple (teachable)

By setting a few ground-rules (effectively coding in a subset of JS), JS is one of the simplest languages to learn (requiring very few must-learn prerequisite concepts). See More

Top Con

Limited standard library

Much often needed functionality is not in the standard library. (Contrast with Python.) However, there are well established libraries such as Lodash, to fill the gap (however, due to the diverse/fractured ecosystem it may not be clear what library to use). See More

Top Pro

Great tools for development

Flow, JSHint/ESLint, Babel, npm, etc. See More

Top Con

Many tutorials, code, and resources, are structured for older ES5 code

Top Pro

Several Platforms to use the web stack and JS to create multi-platform apps

Opens the door to native application development as well as just websites. Use with React Native, Weex or Quasar (Vue), PhoneGap or Cordova, NativeScript... (etc) to build native apps. Use mostly the same code base for multi-platform and web. See More

Top Con

Asynchronous coding is not easy for beginners

JavaScript can work synchronously but its current use is mainly around asynchronous instructions, and it's surely not a good way to start learning programming. See More

Top Pro

Atwood's Law "Any application that can be written in JavaScript, will eventually be written in JavaScript."

May also be a con. See More

Top Con

The `null` and `undefined` objects aren't really objects

Therefore, attempts to call methods on them will fail. This is especially frustrating since these are often returned instead of throwing exceptions. So a failure may appear far away from the actual cause, which makes bugs very hard to find. See More

Top Pro

Modern ESNext is far better than the JS of days past

Modern JS has made great strides, and can be targerted to older (or non-standard) browsers using Babel. There are new language constructs that can make programming in JS comfortable.; e.g.: async / await ( <3 ). See More

Top Con

Array-like objects

Many cases when you should get an Array, you just get an Array-like object instead and none of the Array methods work on it. See More

Top Pro

Instant gratification

While it's easy to argue that Python will give you 'instant gratification' (while actually ruining your understanding of good programming practices), JavaScript is far better in this regard. Make a small change to a page and it's immediately visible in the browser. You can throw in a JavaScript library like jQuery with minimal fuss. See More

Top Con

Fast moving

The language and the web platform move fast these days. this makes it difficult for students as there is a lot of fragmentation and outdated information. See More

Top Pro

Speed (most implementations)

JS/ES is in the running for the fastest interpreted language given the optimizations and JIT integration of popular implementations. On the other hand, it fails utterly when compared with compiled (to native or VM code) languages. See More

Top Con

Numbers that begin with 0 are assumed octal

This is very surprising for beginners. Especially since 00 through 07 seem to work just fine. And this isn't just for hardcoded numbers. The parseInt() function has the same problem, but only on some systems. See More

Top Pro

Integrates very well with UE4

Coding an immersive 3D game can retain the attention of new programmers. ncsoft/Unreal.js. See More

Top Con

Good tools are pretty much a MUST for new programmers

You really want to be using a good editor (light IDE) and a linter, type checker (e.g.:Flow), etc. until you grok the language. And choosing / setting-up that development environment is it's own learning curve. If taught in a classroom, using a subset of JS with solid tools, there is an argument that JS could be an ideal first language... however, that is a lot of ceremony to protect the new programmer from JS gotchas. But without the tools, JS can be a very painful painful first language (trying to figure out why your code isn't doing what you intended). See More

Top Pro

Prototype based Object Oriented System

Being object oriented, it supports the predominate and powerful programming approach. Being prototype based, it provides an intuitive approach to OOP. Whereas other popular languages use classes, which focus on thinking in the abstract, Javascript's prototypes allow you to focus on thinking in the concrete. For example, in a prototypical language, you think of a rectangle, and define it. You now have a rectangle. Let's say you want a red rectangle, you copy the rectangle and give it the property red. Want a blue one? Copy rectangle again give it a blue. Big blue rectangle? Copy blue rectangle and make it big. In a class-based language, first you describe a rectangle, describe a red rectangle as a type of rectangle, describe blue and big blue rectangles, and now that you have described them, you must create instances of them, and only then do you have the rectangles. Essentially: Classes are factories for objects, prototypes are objects themselves, and the latter method was created to be more intuitive, which is particularly advantageous to beginners. See More

Top Con

The language itself is not very appealing to developers.

JS is one of the most dreaded languages as it was designed for the purpose of becoming just an scripting language for a browser. It was never intended to take over as the leading technology in web development, thus the language has been streched past its own capabilities. A beginer should learn something else first, something that is better conceived and refined. See More

Top Pro

C-like syntax

After learning Javascript, you will feel at home in other languages as C-like syntax is very common. See More

Top Con

Counter-intuitive type conversion

JavaScript is rather inconsistent when dealing with different types. For example, when working with the + operator and two numbers, they will be added, two strings will be concatenated: 3+5; // 8; "Hello "+"world"; // "Hello world" When using + with a string and a non-string operand, the non-string operand is converted to a string and the result is concatenated: "the answer is "+42; // "the answer is 42" "this is "+true; // "this is true" In any other case (except for Date) the operands are converted to numbers and the results are added: 1+true; // = 1+1 = 2; null+false; // = 0+0 = 0; See More

Top Pro

One of the most underestimated languages

deviously simple in syntax, yet highly powerful in paradigms, this language does not force you to the (actually intrinsically broken) object oriented paradigm, has a healthy dose of functional programming inside, and does not bloat the keyword space. Good javascript is all about structure. Bad javascript is all about lazy hipsters not taking the time to learn 'javascript, the good parts', a must read. See More

Top Con

Fractured ecosystem

Angular, React, Ember, Meteor, Backbone, Knockout, Express, Mithril, Aurelia. The web frameworks pass in and out of fashion too quickly to keep up with. The endless civil wars are becoming tiresome. See More

Top Pro

Extremely popular

JavaScript usually tops the lists for most popular languages in use today and rightly so. It's used almost everywhere and it's in high demand, making it very easy to find a job for anyone who knows JavaScript. This helps make it desirable for a first language, as it will often be used in the future. See More

Top Con

Has really bad parts you're better off avoiding altogether

But beginners won't know better. And even after you learn, you might have to deal with others' code that uses the bad stuff. JavaScript was originally developed in 10 days. It just wasn't designed that carefully. See More

Top Pro

The most used language in the whole Solar System in amount of scripts/applications

Because it runs in many different environments, it is the most used language in the world. See More

Specs

Engine:V8/ChakraCore

Author:Ryan Dahl/Joyent

ECMAScript Modules:Available (as a flag) (only on Node 8.x-10.x)

Version(LTS):8.x

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628 266

score 91 · Answer 6

Mithril

Top Pro

Small, easy to learn API

Most other frameworks either offer a huge API to deal with model and view synchronization, or defer to other libraries & plugins to cater for relatively simple use cases. Mithril's API is tiny but complete. The natural reaction is to assume something is missing, but as you build you realise you incredibly fast, powerful and rich applications can be built using nothing but Mithril. See More

Top Con

Small API can make it unsuitable for larger more complex projects

Mithril's small API and small number of functions while helpful for small projects and applications where speed is needed, can add another layer of complexity in larger more complex applications where a more extensive API is needed out of the box. See More

Top Pro

Fast rendering

Mithril's loading times are very fast. This is because it's templates are compiled first and then served to the browser and because it uses a virtual DOM. The virtual DOM is a virtual tree containing all the nodes of the real DOM, every time anything changes in the virtual DOM, Mithril does not re-render the entire (real) DOM, instead it just searches and applies the differences. See More

Top Pro

No need to learn another syntax to write views

Most MVC frameworks use HTML templates to render their views. They are good and useful because they are easy to read and understand. But they add more complication to an app because it's practically a new language and syntax that needs to be learned. Mithril argues that separating markup from logic is just a separation of technologies and not concerns, so you can write Mithril views in JavaScript. Writing them in JavaScript also makes it easier to debug them (HTML templates can't be debugged). See More

Top Pro

Familiar to people used to MVC

Doesn't lock you into any complicated conventions or structures, only one function is required to create either a Controller or a View. You're free to implement your architecture exactly as you want, so you can focus on the purpose of MVC, making connections between computer data and stuff in the end user's head. See More

Top Pro

Small size

Weights just 8Kb gzipped and has no dependencies. A reactive stream module can be added for one extra Kb. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

Mithril has a large and expansive documentation despite it's relatively small API. Mithril's GitHub repo has more documentation than actual source code. None of that documentation is auto-generated See More

Top Pro

Allows a smooth transition from other UI frameworks

One thing you need to start using Mithril is just a DOM node. With Mithril a developer is able to introduce the library step by step. See More

Top Pro

Allows you to choose which JavaScript libraries to integrate in your project

Mithril gives to the developer the flexibility to chose the best JavaScript library to use for a specific task. A huge framework like Angular instead forces you to use their API, which does not necessarily evolve as fast as the JavaScript ecosystem. Therefore you may end up in case when you are stuck using an API which is just not the best in terms of performance See More

Top Pro

Can be used without build systems

It's plain old JavaScript, can be used without webpack, gulp or grunt, just include it into your HTML and start writing your app. See More

Top Pro

Does not force you into a predefined structure

Mithril's API is pretty small compared to other frameworks. It forces developers to solve problems in JavaScript rather than in Mithril. Other frameworks with massive APIs force you to think in a way that suits the framework. Mithril doesn't do that. See More

Specs

GZipped size:8kb

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91 8

score 2 · Answer 7

Metayota HTML Engine

Top Pro

Fast and leightweight

The framework is only approx. 10 kilobytes in size and 2k lines of code. The custom tags can be lazy-loaded or preloaded. The rendering process is fast and selective, so only updated elements are rendered. See More

Top Pro

IDE for progamming

Metayota offers an IDE for programming or designing tags for this framework. There is no programming knowledge needed and all tags can be tested instantly. See More

Top Pro

Clean Code / Clean HTML

Readable, easy to maintain and clean code. The Metayota HTML Engine does not add any non-standard HTML elements to your code or any unintended tags or attributes. The HTML can be written, like it was intended by the designer. Only elements which are finished with rendering are added to the DOM (no flickering). See More

Specs

2 0

score 286 · Answer 8

Sass

Top Pro

Powerful advanced function features

You are able to declare custom functions with Sass (for example, converting units) which can be easily invoked, even when using shorthand properties. This results in cleaner, more reusable code. See More

Top Con

Requires Ruby or libSass

To compile Sass, it needs either Ruby or libSass installed locally. See More

Top Pro

Nested selectors

Sass allows you to nest selectors which results in code that is both faster to write and cleaner to read. For example, this: .parent color: blue .child color: yellow Will compile to this: .parent { color: blue; } .parent .child { color: yellow; } See More

Top Con

Noisy syntax

There is many unnecessary characters when using the SCSS syntax. {}:;@ However using the Sass syntax eliminates them. See More

Top Pro

Rapid development

Another big advantage for Sass is the very active community pushing the development forward at a rapid pace. Sass is constantly coming out with bug fixes, and are often the first to come out with improvements. This is an important factor to keep in mind when picking a preprocessor to invest your time into. See More

Top Pro

Extends CSS maintaining compatibility with CSS standards specification

It comes with two possible syntaxes: Sass - No parens or semicolons allowed and the nesting is dictated with whitespace. SCSS - SCSS syntax is a superset of CSS – which means SCSS can be written as CSS, but has been expanded to include the features of Sass as well. SCSS is easier to pick up for beginners and Sass has a cleaner syntax. Having both syntaxes means you can pick the one that best suits your coding style. The mandatory syntax rules for both SCSS and Sass results in a more consistent code. For a more detailed analysis between Sass and SCSS go here. To see a nice comparison of the Sass syntax against CSS and SCSS go here. See More

Top Pro

Output minified CSS

Sass simplifies minifying CSS files by offering a one-line command that will output a minified version. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

It's very comfortable and easy to write/learn Sass, even for beginners. See More

Top Pro

Compass framework provides added features

Sass can be used with a framework called Compass, which provides additional functions and mixins which can reduce the amount of code you have to write. For example, Compass will take care of vendor prefixes. This: div { background-image: -webkit-linear-gradient(#F00, #000); background-image: -moz-linear-gradient(#F00, #000); background-image: -o-linear-gradient(#F00, #000); background-image: linear-gradient(#F00, #000); } Can be written as: .gradient { @include background-image(linear-gradient(#F00, #000)); } For a full list of features, check out the Compass documentation. See More

Top Pro

Source maps support

Rather than being limited to editing the outputted CSS file in devtools, with source maps you are able to manipulate the original .scss file. See More

Top Pro

Libsass - C/C++ port of Sass

There is also a C/C++ port of the Sass CSS precompiler called Libsass that decouples Sass from Ruby. It is very fast, portable and easy to build and integrate with a variety of platforms and languages. See More

Top Pro

New sass package means you no longer need external dependencies

The latest implementation of Sass is written in Dart, and compiles to pure JS with no native code or external dependencies, means you no longer need Ruby or libSass. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use with ruby apps

Since it's written in Ruby, it's easier and faster to use with Ruby apps. See More

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286 24

score 198 · Answer 9

Aurelia

Top Pro

Out of the box Typescript support

Full support for Typescript built in See More

Top Con

No big success stories yet

There are no notable big web products build with aurelia yet See More

Top Pro

Good binding system

Clear, intuitive and HTML/SVG compliant binding syntax. Examples: Default binding => value.bind One Way binding => value.one-way Two Way binding => value.two-way One Time binding => value.one-time See More

Top Con

Needs more support from the community

It would be great to have a lot of plugins made by the community, or video tutorials from experiences when using it. Hopefully in the near term future. See More

Top Pro

Conventions over configurations

Configured to give you the most common use cases by convention, which means you only need to change the default configuration for edge cases. This means that for normal cases far less boiler plate code has to be written. See More

Top Con

Two-way data binding is often considered an anti-pattern

Two-way data-binding means that a HTML element in the view and an Angular model are binded, and when one of them is changed so is the other. One-way data-binding for example does not change the model when the HTML element is changed. This is a rather controversial subject and many developers consider two-way data binding an anti-pattern and something that is useless in complex applications because it's very easy to create complex situations by using it and being unable to debug them easily or understand what's happening by just looking at the code. See More

Top Pro

Out of the box ES6 support

Aurelia includes native support for ES6 and even comes with a Gulpfile which helps with transpiling ES6 code to ES5. See More

Top Pro

Allows developers to build their application however they want

Aurelia is extremely unopinionated and was designed to be highly modular. This gives the developer the freedom to develop their application however they want, without forcing them in paradigms or rules predefined by the framework. Likewise, any of the individual components can be swapped out if so desired. See More

Top Pro

Standards compliant

Aurelia developers always try to keep within existing and emerging Web Standards, making it easier for developers to follow best practices in web development. See More

Top Pro

Agnostic code

Most of the code you write is Aurelia-agnostic. It's one of the closest libraries that you'll find to basically write plain-old, vanilla Javascript or TypeScript code (classes) and doesn't polluate your HTML/SCSS. That way you can easily test it, switch to another implementation and make it look clean (business oriented). Even the HTML. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Learning aurelia basically means learning EcmaScript and HTML, since aurelia is designed for standards compliance. Also, aurelia embraces upcoming ES language features by convention, such as ES class decorators for dependency injection, encouraging clean architecture and future-proof code. See More

Top Pro

Variable binding helps with self-documenting the code

The syntax used to bind variables within the application class is very similar to Javascript itself. You can specify the type of the binding you are using explicitly, which practically self-documents your code and makes it easy to understand whether a value is one-way or two-way binded. See More

Top Pro

Structure

Aurelia.js consists of modules that can be used as a full framework or separately. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

One of the most crucial pieces of any new technology or framework is the documentation. At present even though Aurelia is pre-beta, the documentation is pretty complete. There are code examples missing and whatnot, but for the most part it is concise and makes the main parts of the application easy to understand. See More

Top Pro

Full commercial support

Aurelia is officially backed by Durandal Inc. and has commercial and enterprise support is available. See More

Top Pro

Data binding choices with sane defaults

Aurelia defaults to one-way data binding, alining with conventional wisdom. However, there are times when two-way data binding proves useful, such as binding an input widget with a view-model. Aurelia makes two-way data binding available to developers and uses it by convention when appropriate. See More

Top Pro

Plays well with other frameworks

Aurelia can be used alongside of React and Polymer, since it is designed for interoperability. In practice, this means Aurelia developers can use React components by including an Aurelia custom element: https://github.com/Vheissu/aurelia-react-example/blob/master/README.md It also works well with Polymer, since they are both based on the WebComponents standards: http://aurelia.io/hub.html#/doc/article/aurelia/framework/latest/integrating-with-polymer See More

Top Pro

Powerful helper CLI available

https://github.com/aurelia/cli The CLI helps rapid creation of projects with generators, building, deploying and hot reloads. Webpack should be coming soon. See More

Top Pro

Growing community

The Aurelia community is growing at a great pace. Still doesn’t rival the big players line Angular or React, but the answer to an Aurelia issue is a quick question away on their Discourse. See More

Top Pro

Provides dependency injection

With dependency injection, you can load in extra javascript and new functionality just when you need it. This is particularly helpful with testing as you can swap out services for test services. It also means in single page apps you can load dependencies only as you need them instead of loading them up all up at the start. See More

Specs

GZipped size:~67kB

Repository:https://github.com/aurelia/aurelia

Minified size:~237K

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198 29

score 77 · Answer 10

Knockout

Top Pro

Easy data binding

Knockout uses HTML5 data attributes to bind HTML elements to data objects in javascript. This allows more work to be done by the framework rather than requiring you to specify where data should be bound in the javascript. The data binding is very intuitive as the bindings are done within the HTML itself in the location it should be bound. See More

Top Con

Slower than others when amount of objects grows

Knockout has a bad performance when the dealing with large amount of objects. You can see more here. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Has a low entry barrier and an easy learning curve. It's especially easy to learn for beginners. See More

Top Con

Can become complex once the application grows large

Knockout leaves the application structure to the developer and it can become quite complex and unmanageable in the hands of a beginner once the application grows large and complex. See More

Top Pro

Built in templating

Bindings in Knockout can also be used to control the generated structure of the HTML. There are bindings provided to allow for iteration and conditionals. The structure of the html reflects the structure of the data so iterative elements are bound to arrays in the data model. Having the HTML structure maintained by bindings keeps the templating simple, easy to read, and maintain. Knockout also allows for string based templating so you can use whatever templating library you prefer. See More

Top Con

Two way binding requires a little extra work

When allowing users to edit existing data, the two-way binding of observables means you'll need to have to save original values before they're edited, to make comparisons or revert if the user cancels the action. See More

Top Pro

Legacy browser support

Supports a large number of browsers, including IE6. See More

Top Pro

Great documentation

The excellent tutorials with built-in exercises are a great learning experience, even for people without prior MVVM and data binding experience. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight and plays nicely with other libraries

Top Pro

Dynamic models help with keeping the code simple and clean

Models in Knockout can be watched to keep the page data up to date by using observable objects. The observables notify Knockout when data is changed and automatically updates the page when this happens. By having Knockout maintain this relation, it keeps the front end code cleaner and simpler, and by enforcing a consistent pattern with observables the methodology can be more robust. See More

Top Pro

Very flexible

One can do a lot of things and it keeps self references and other types of loops under control. See More

Top Pro

It's only a library

Knockout does one thing, and does it well. It doesn't try to take on more than one area. It does MVVM data binding and that is it. See More

Top Pro

Simple manageable modules

Using components is a great way of breaking up large modules into simpler ones. See More

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77 14

score 489 · Answer 11

Krita

Top Pro

Easy to use layout

All the most used and useful tools are easy to find in Krita's UI and are often just one click away. They are not hidden behind menus or dropdowns. See More

Top Con

New features are not tested thoroughly

Since releases are so often and with little time between them, usually new features are not tested a lot and this can bring a lot of bugs with them. Which fortunately are quickly patched in the next release. See More

Top Pro

Constantly updated

Krita is getting constant releases with updates and bug fixes. New features are added at a pace that far surpasses the other alternatives. See More

Top Con

Documentation is lacking

Krita's official documentation is incomplete in some areas, especially for new features that are constantly added. But this is compensated with it's great design and usability which makes it easier to understand how things work. See More

Top Pro

Free and open source

Krita is completely free and open source. They have raised a couple of successful Kickstarters in the past to get the initial financing and now they are accepting donations. See More

Top Con

Poor touch controls

They are still pretty much a WIP. But they are getting there. See More

Top Pro

Developed in part by KDE, which has a great community and therefore great support.

KDE has a long history of making solid applications. See More

Top Con

Working with text is not that pleasant

Top Pro

Amazing support for displaying brushes

Krita's preset brushes are one of the default dockers. Each brush has a preview on mouseover that shows a detailed view of the type of brush involved. All the brushes also have useful and descriptive names such as "HP Pencil" or "Textured Fuzzy". See More

Top Pro

Very customizable

Although the UI is rather busy, Krita is very customizable. The editing window can be themed and the sidebar can be customized extensively throw many dockers or panes. See More

Top Pro

Easy editing in a tiled view

Tiled view that shows your image tiled in the editor, and permits you to edit it as you are seeing it tiled. If the brush passes out of your texture, it will just automatically wrap back the painting to the other side of the original texture, while permitting you to paint and see the results on any of the tiled "clones" (the shortcut key to activate this is w by default). See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows, Linux, Mac, Android

License:Open source

Technology:C++, Qt

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489 77

score 101 · Answer 12

Polymer

Top Pro

Various basic components

It provides a base component. See More

Top Con

No server-side rendering

Polymer does not support server-side rendering. This results in higher loading times, more HTTP requests and it's not very SEO friendly, since search engines have no way of indexing a page if it's not rendered in the server. See More

Top Pro

HTML markup is not string

HTML markup as it can be a non-string. See More

Top Pro

Flex layout components

It provides Flex layout components. See More

Top Pro

CSS is easy to apply

CSS can be applied far more comfortably than React. See More

Top Pro

No need for special debugging tools

The presence od specialized debugging tools are advertised by competitors. The all features of web components are natively supported by browser embedded development tools. See More

Top Pro

Excellent routing

The router is embedded into CLI for project creation and covers as web as Progressive web app, also fused with Polymer layouts out of the box. The shop template for CLI has a complete solution including the routing. See More

Top Pro

Complete web app stack support

Full app stack from data tier to routing, progressive web app, responsive layouts makes no need to seek outside of Polymer ecosystem for application features. In addition to waste set of mature web components in Polymer Elements along with Vaadin Elements there are thousands of web components in the wild comparable to jQuery plugins set. See More

Top Pro

Excellent documentation

Polymer guides you as with tools (cli, build environment, app templates,..) as with complimentary documentation on all phases of app development from creation of app as progresive web app to production deployment instructions. As Polymer is standards based, the whole community around those standards also helping in documentation and support. See More

Top Pro

Based on web components

Web Components are a collection of specifications released by W3C as a way to reduce the complexity of web apps by creating reusable components. Browser support is currently poor for web components, however Polymer is developed to make web components compatible with modern browsers. See More

Top Pro

API is easy to understand, based on standard

The Polymer APIs are split on application layers and follow standards on all possible ways: Web Components, CSS variables, async API via Promises and so on. See More

Specs

v2.0 GZipped size (Edge):36K

v2.0 GZipped size (Chrome):10K

v1.0 GZipped size:53K

v2.0 GZipped size (Safari):13K

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101 22

score 94 · Answer 13

Font Awesome

Top Pro

3332 icons to choose from

Font Awesome 5.1 offers 1264 free and 2068 payed icons. See More

Top Con

Too expensive

The icons I need are in the pay plan. See More

Top Pro

Large variety of icons

There is a wide range of web-related icons to choose from. Categories include web-application, directional, transportation and brand icons. See the full list of icons here. See More

Top Con

You will never use all icons

This means you'll have a lot of useless data (unused icons) being load into your application. See More

Top Pro

Easy to use

Top Con

Font Awesome slows webpages

Top Pro

MIT licence for the code

Top Pro

Screen reader compatible

Other font icons have been known to have issues with this. See More

Top Pro

Font Aweseome 5 is here with over 929 icons and counting

The Pro version is very reasonable and gives you access to 2316 icons and counting. Across 3 weights! Very Nice! See More

Top Pro

Designed to be used with Bootstrap

Font Awesome can be used with any framework, however it's especially easy to use with Bootstrap. See More

Top Pro

Continuously updated

Top Pro

Can employ tree shaking to not bundle unused icons

Top Pro

IE7 support with older versions

IE7 support has been removed from Font Awesome 4.4.0. However you can still use an older version for IE7 support. See More

Top Pro

Customizable icons through stacking

Icons in Font Awesome can be restyled by stacking different borders and background to modify their meaning. For example, any icon can be turned into a bullet point by stacking it on a circle, or converted into its negative by stacking a red cancel icon on top of it. See More

Specs

Glyphs:2,018

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94 25

score 70 · Answer 14

Backbone

Top Con

Requires more coding compared to other frameworks

Because many features are not provided out of the box, you either have to write more base class code to get those features, or find a plugin that provides them in a way you like. It does not provide much structure either, things like memory management must be kept in mind by the developer, also the lack of view lifecycle management makes state changes prone to memory leaks. See More

Top Pro

Gives you the freedom to implement views however you want

A lightweight view class is provided but there is no default templating method implemented. Because views are minimal it allows for much more freedom to implement views however you would like, and because of this freedom it's possible to write views to more uniquely adapt to a problem. User interactions are done within an events object that allows these interactions to be segregated from the rest of the view code which makes the behavioral aspect of the view easier to read and manage. See More

Top Con

Can easily lead you to spaghetti code

Heavy event-binding can lead to unmanageable spaghetti mess. BB tempts users to overuse it for no reason. See More

Top Pro

Can be combined with any library you want

Backbone can be combined with any library of your choosing, giving you the ultimate flexibility in creating customized solutions for unique projects. Even the only two backbone requirements, jQuery and underscore can be replaced with equivalent libraries like zepto or lo-dash. See More

Top Con

No data binding

Backbone does not have data binding support. However, there are some libraries that can be implemented in order to have data binding in Backbone. Such as Epoxy See More

Top Pro

Large community

Backbone has existed longer than most frameworks, and has a large following of users and projects using it as a framework. See More

Top Pro

You can call underscore.js methods directly on Backbone objects

Backbone collections and models are extended by underscore.js method allowing you to call underscore methods directly on the Backbone objects. See More

Top Pro

Easy to interface with the API

Backbone provides Model and Collection classes that provide strong analogs to restful resources. These strong analogs allow you to interface more naturally with the API, and makes it easier to write custom behaviors for more complicated API interactions. Collections provide a variety of powerful manipulation methods that are integrated from the underscore library, that allow you to manipulate, sort, and filter collection data easily. See More

Top Pro

Easy to implement complex user interaction

Because all the state is managed by Models and Controllers, and they are extendable objects, you can isolate all the state logic onto those objects allowing the rest of the application to not worry about it. The app is simplified to just taking in input to modify the Models and Controllers, and updating the views to reflect them, but none of the state needs to be a concern outside of the Model and Controller classes. See More

Top Pro

Doesn’t force you into a particular coding style or paradigm

There is no “magic” happening below the surface: the source code is clear, readable and well commented. Backbone is also “lightweight” in the sense that it doesn’t require a ton of buy-in to use. It can be easily integrated into an existing page, and you can choose to only use certain components of the library (Views without Models or Collections, for example). While there are many frameworks that seem to be faster to get started with, Backbone’s lack of surprises, clear documentation, speed & flexibility make it a good fit for all types of apps. See More

Top Pro

Extendable with plugins

Because Backbone is so simple, and the different components are very well isolated, it is very easy to extend the functionality of Backbone. If you're writing your own extended code it's easy to keep it separated out, and share with the community. The community also has many plugins already available, which you can pick and choose to use to fit your programming style. See More

Top Pro

Easy to abstract interaction

All Backbone classes extend an events class that allows for listening and triggering functionality. Because all classes implement events by default it is easier to provide asynchronous communication between objects, and it allows better abstraction of interaction so the event emitting object does not need to know the structure or existence of the receiving object. See More

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70 20

score 219 · Answer 15

Pascal

Top Pro

Understanding of basics

Because of the verbosity and easy syntax, Pascal language is relatively easier to be learned and understood, even for someone who has no programming knowledge. It's said that Pascal code —if written well— is like reading pseudo code. See More

Top Con

Niche language

Most use of this language will be found in jobs supporting legacy code. It will be hard to find things to do with this language outside of that niche. See More

Top Pro

Easy

Pascal / Object pascal was used in schools during the 2000's to teach kids the basics of object oriented programming. See More

Top Con

No up-to-date version of language standards

In 1983, and update in 1990, the language was standardized with two standards: ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal. However, Object Pascal extensions to the language have no official standards but in 1993, a draft proposal for object oriented Pascal standard was re; for review purposes only. There are no standards for modern features and enhancements, thus various Pascal dialects like Delphi or HP Pascal has their own enhancements and features. See More

Top Pro

Clear syntax

Pascal's syntax is clear and concise, for example: procedure test(); begin DoSomething(); end; See More

Top Con

Effectively obsolete

While this may have been an ok choice 25 years ago, it no longer is. Consider Python, Go or Clojure. See More

Top Pro

Enforces good programming practice

Numerous strong compile time checks with optional runtime checks ensure one doesn't do stupid things and even when one does (because the compiler can't prove it at compile time), the binary will check and report it at runtime. Correct modular programming implementation with proper namespacing, no file inclusion hack. See More

Top Con

Unnecessary heavy syntax

Begin.. end. Pascal would have been great with curly braces.. but then again, that's what C is for. It's an academic language which was used in the past, but not much anymore today. See More

Top Pro

Cross platform

Pascal development tools are available almost on every available platform, especially using Free Pascal. Pascal language is available on desktop like Mac, BSD, Linux, Windows, Solaris, etc.; on mobile like iOS, Android, etc.; also on managed environments like Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and .Net/Mono framework . There are even some Pascal to JavaScript transpilers such as Smart Pascal, so you can write client side web app using Pascal as well, if you really want to. See More

Top Con

All variables, types, constants and functions must be declared at the beginning of the code

Top Pro

Tons of academic reading

Being known as the programming language for education, especially in the 90's, there many academic reading and tutorials available on the internet. See More

Top Pro

Fast compilation

The compiler is fast, really fast. Compared to C/C++, the delphi compiler is designed to compile a decent sized desktop application in seconds rather than minutes. See More

Top Pro

Flexible

Using the Free Pascal Compiler (the main Pascal distribution) you can code in a language that can be procedural and imperative now, but it can became object-oriented simply adding a directive at the start of the source See More

Top Pro

Easy GUI creation

Visual Basic may have predated Delphi but Delphi was the ground breaking visual designer which set the standards expected today by most GUI developers. Its rich component set was well designed, structured and extensible, it even has the ability to display live data from the attached database in its data controls. See More

Top Pro

Assembler Code and DLL/SO creation

You can put Assembler code in Intel or AT&T formats, to achieve great results of speed and accuracy. It is possible to create Dynamic Link Libraries or their equivalent in Unix-like systems so it's relatively easy to use and powerful. See More

Top Pro

Rich existing libraries

Both shipped with implementations and spread all over the web. Both natively written or bindings to libraries written in other languages. Typically to build non-trivial applications there's no need to surf the web as many things are implemented already. Streaming, output templating, socket & networking, web, database, image manipulation, high performance graphics, (de)compression, (de|en)cryption, regex, unit testing, json manipulation, google API, indexing, multithreading, external process management, the list just goes on and on! See More

Top Pro

Still active

From the early roots of Pascal, Delphi has been developed and is still actively supported. It is used in many desktop applications today, and even supports multi platform coding. See More

Top Pro

Suitably close to modern languages, without the pitfalls

It was developed as a teaching language and it shows. No syntax pitfalls and gently encourages good style. See More

Top Pro

Extensive third party libraries

There are large collections of third party components, many free which enable developers to add wide ranging and complex functionality to their code with ease See More

Top Pro

Component based (reusability, decoupled, rich design architecture)

Top Pro

Reliable language and code base

Most code from the Turbo Pascal days in the 80s still compiles, yet the language has since been adapted and extended with modern concepts, introducing OOP and interfaces, exception handling, native Unicode support, anonymous methods, generics, ARC and more. See More

Top Pro

Available on a ridiculous number of platforms

FreePascal is available on/for Intel x86 (including 8086), AMD64/x86-64, PowerPC, PowerPC64, SPARC, ARM, AArch64, MIPS and the JVM. Supported operating systems include Linux, FreeBSD, Haiku, Mac OS X/iOS/iPhoneSimulator/Darwin, DOS (16 and 32 bit), Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, MorphOS, Nintendo GBA, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Wii, Android, AIX and AROS. See More

Top Pro

Language depth

Object Pascal is being used to write custom kernels (Ultibo) and operating-systems for various ARM boards. So the way you work with the code scales from low-level to pure OOP high-level. Object Pascal has the same level of depth that you find in C/C++ but with added productivity. See More

Top Pro

Incredible GUI design tools

Lazarus and Delphi are both incredible GUI design tools, making rapid development a reality. Making changes to a GUI doesn't mean switching tools or waiting for things to load, it's right there as part of your core tools. See More

Top Pro

Dynamic evolution of language

Object Pascal language still evolving and being updated by Delphi (Embarcadero) and Free Pascal team (Lazarus). See More

Top Pro

Well balanced for desktop development

For desktop development, Delphi is productive, the code is easy to understand, compilation speed is blazing, and it produces well performing applications that are easy to deploy. The perfect balance between C# and C++. See More

Top Pro

Fast execution

The compiler generates fast and optimized code. No stop-the-universe garbage collection. See More

Top Pro

Automatic memory management

The new Delphi compilers are powered by Automatic Reference Counting to ease development. See More

Top Pro

Excellent database development

Specs

Standard:ISO/IEC 7185:1990 Pascal and ISO/IEC 10206:1990 Extended Pascal

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219 58

score 520 · Answer 16

Vue.js

Top Pro

Can be used with any front-end stack

Vue can easily be integrated with other front-end libraries. This makes it an extremely versatile tool and it's easy to fix its shortcomings or missing features by just plugging in another library. See More

Top Con

Poor typescript support

Very basic typescript support. See More

Top Pro

Single file component

Very useful. See More

Top Con

Very enterpris-ey in design and tooling

Top Pro

Lightweight

Vue.js weighs in at 16kb min+gzip. See More

Top Pro

Vuex store, events system

Top Pro

Reactivity system

Top Pro

CLI and Webpack integration

Top Pro

Responsive server-side rendering

Since most of the mainstream server-side rendering implementations are synchronous, they can block the server's event loop when the application is complex. Vue implements streaming server-side rendering, which allows you to render your component, get a readable stream and directly pipe that to the HTTP response. This allows you to have a responsive server and decreases the time your users have to wait before they get your rendered content. See More

Top Pro

Supports inline templating

Although you can build components in JavaScript files, you can also use inline handlebars-like templating in your HTML views where simplicity is often a more sane choice. See More

Top Pro

Can be made even lighter

Since the template-to-virtual-DOM and compiler can be separated, you can compile the templates in your machine and then deploying only the interpreter which is 12KB minified and gzipped. See More

Top Pro

Support for both templates and JSX

You can choose to use either a templating language, or if you feel it's necessary to drop on a lower virtual-dom level, you can use JSX. This is simply done by replacing the template option with a render function. Or alternatively, you can embed functions inside templates by using the <render> tag. See More

Top Pro

SEO friendly

Starting with Vue 2.0, Vue supports server-side rendering. This helps with SEO a lot, since the views are rendered directly on the server, which are indexed by search engines. See More

Top Pro

VueRouter

Specs

GZipped size:~30KB

Repository:https://github.com/vuejs/vue

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520 128

score 695 · Answer 17

Laravel 5

Top Pro

Good for building RESTful APIs

With migrations, powerful and intuitive Eloquent CRUD, resource routing, and simple JSON response out of the box, a complete REST API can be written in hours. See More

Top Con

Uses too much magic methods

It complicates debugging and autocompletion. See More

Top Pro

Comes with an excellent built-in ORM

Laravel's Eloquent ORM is a simple and fast Object-Relational Mapping which helps with organizing the application's database. It supports the most popular databases (MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, etc.) out of the box. See More

Top Con

Bloated

While the speed doesn't seem to be an issue with it (on local tests), in production it may be hindered. The framework creates a ton of files and folders, some of which your app might not even use. Not good if you don't like having a ton of folders and rigid non-standard PHP folder structure for development. See More

Top Pro

Good documentation

Laravel's documentation is thorough and very good. It covers everything and is very helpful to experienced and new users alike. See More

Top Con

Hard to use model properties

You need to check all model properties in database to know it exists, or declare all them manually. See More

Top Pro

Handles event queuing

Laravel supports event queuing and it does so in a very simple way. To create an event that should be queued just run: php artisan handler:event SendPurchaseConfirmation --event=PodcastWasPurchased --queued This creates a handler that implements the Illuminate\Contracts\Queue\ShouldBeQueued interface. Now when this handler is called it will automatically be queued by the event dispatcher. See More

Top Con

Steep learning curve

While a lot of times you can write things in plain PHP, it will hinder you down the line when you want to use core features and find that you have to rewrite code which then causes issues throughout the app. Documentation is good, but you need to know what you are looking for and practical examples are non-existent. Many features have been updated throughout the versions in such a short time that tutorials you find online are confusing to sort through outdated tutorials and guides that no longer work or have been depreciated. See More

Top Pro

Comes with its own CLI

Laravel comes out of the box with it's own CLI called Artisan. With Artisan developers can do several different tasks such as migrating databases, seeding databases, clearing the cache and much much more. See More

Top Con

Poor performance

Top Pro

Easy to write web apps with authentication

Laravel comes with Authentication capabilities and a fully-powered Auth class out of the box. For passwords it uses bcrypt. See More

Top Con

Follows bad design practices

Uses bad practices, like Singletons, Magic models, Middleware. See More

Top Pro

Easy to learn

Top Pro

Gives developers a great degree of freedom in how they set up their project structure

Laravel allows for free configuration and does not force developers to use a single project structure, instead they can change it to how they wish. See More

Top Pro

Can use Symfony components

Laravel uses many libraries built for the Symfony PHP framework. Many of these libraries are well-built and have been tested by users before. Since the point of using a web framework is to shorten development time and to avoid reinventing the wheel for problems that have already been solved, then it's logical for a framework to use libraries already built to solve problems that have already been solved. See More

Top Pro

Extremely powerful template system

Laravel has a powerful template system called Blade. It's quite similar to Twig or Moustache with lots of curly braces but the real power comes from the usage of PHP code directly in the view. Blade templates compile directly to raw PHP and are processed in the server when a request is made. See More

Top Pro

Gulp tasks in the form of Laravel Elixir

In Laravel 5.0 they added Laravel Elixir, which provides an API for using Gulp tasks for Laravel applications. Elixir supports several CSS preprocessors and even some test tools. But it's still in the early stages of development and it will be developed even further in the following releases. With more methods and more Gulp tasks supported. See More

Top Pro

Great Ecosystem

Has a great Ecosystem with SAAS like: Forge, Envoyer, Nova & from 3rd parties like oh-dear See More

Top Pro

Great Community

Specs

License:MIT License

Initial Release:June 2011

695 164

score 128 · Answer 18

Riot

Top Pro

Minimal DOM operations

Riot takes the expressions from a DOM tree and stores them in an array. Each of these expressions points to a DOM node. On each cycle these expressions are compared to the values in the DOM. So when a value has changed, Riot automatically updates the corresponding node. This way the operations are kept to a minimal amount and since the expressions can be cached, going through 1000 of them takes less than 1ms. See More

Top Pro

Lightweight

Riot is made to be used with websites of any kind, so it's built to be easy and lightweight, but still maintaining all the needed features for a UI library. It's only 2.5 KB in size when minified. So it can also be used for mobile web apps without requiring much bandwidth to download. See More

Top Pro

Components use familiar HTML tags

Riot components use custom tags which are nothing more than familiar HTML tags coupled with JavaScript. This eliminates the need to learn another templating language or syntax. For example: <todo> <h3>TODO</h3> <ul> <li each={ item, i in items }>{ item }</li> </ul> <form onsubmit={ handleSubmit }> <input> <button>Add #{ items.length + 1 }</button> </form> this.items = [] handleSubmit(e) { var input = e.target[0] this.items.push(input.value) input.value = '' } </todo> Riot tries to separate HTML and JavaScript, while still keeping them inside the component. This way, the HTML can also be neatly mixed with JavaScript expressions. See More

Top Pro

Supports server side rendering

Riot has support for server side rendering. The views and data are rendered on the server, then those views are sent as HTML to the browser when a user requests them. This helps with initial loading time and is very useful for SEO purposes because the web app is indexed by search engines same as other static websites that have their HTML on the server. See More

Top Pro

Easily pluggable with JS/HTML/CSS preprocessors

It is very easy to use your favorite preprocessors with the Riot compiler. Riot comes with CoffeeScript, ES6 (Babel), TypeScript, LiveScript and Jade support. You can also add your own parsers. See More

Top Pro

Very simple

It makes React look confusing as hell. Nothing against React - It's just that easy to implement! See More

Top Pro

Scoped CSS available in components

Riot supports scoped CSS inside components for every browser by rewriting stylesheet rules. See More

Top Pro

Lives well with any other library, framework and usage pattern

Since it's not opinionated, even the scripting can be in anything that can be transpired to JavaScript. See More

Top Pro

Separation of concerns with RiotControl

RiotControl is inspired by Facebook's Flux Architecture Pattern and it's a simple Central Event Controller/Dispatcher for Riot. It's extremely lightweight (like Riot itself) but unfortunately passes up on some features in favor of performance and simplicity. RiotControl helps with storing the stater of the application, by passing events from views to stores and vice-versa. Stores can communicate with many views and views can do the same with many stores, this enables to clearly separate concerns and inter-component communication. See More

Specs

Platforms:Android, iOS, Web, Linux, macOS, Windows, Electron

License:free open-source software

Search:yes

End-to-end encryption:yes

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128 46

score 479 · Answer 19

Elm

Top Pro

No run-time exceptions

Lack of run-time exceptions makes it easy to produce large swathes of reliable front-end code without drowning in tests. See More

Top Con

Lack of typeclasses

Elm doesn't have typeclasses which means some code needs to be duplicated. A fix in a function that needs typeclasses means all of the duplicates need to be fixed too. See More

Top Pro

Inferred static typing

ML static typing is great because it's always there, you just choose how explicit you want to be and how much you want the compiler to do. See More

Top Con

limited js interop

only one way ports are available as a crude js FFI. This means you can only call functions both directions but will not get a result. See More

Top Pro

Super easy refactoring with very helpful compiler errors

In no other language you can refactor so easy without any worries, since the compiler will guide you through. It is like TDD but than compiler-error driven. See More

Top Con

Harder to get buy-in from devs and mgmt

It's a total divergence from what most people are used to in the JS ecosystem. The change in syntax can be scary, the change in approaching problems can be scary. The fact that it's not backed by FANG can be scary. The fact that it's not v1.0 can be scary. The governance model and the deliberately slow release cadence can be scary. There are a couple harsh medium articles, hackernews/reddit posts out there made by people with an ax to grind that can be scary if you don't have a better picture of the Elm community, the tradeoffs that have been made, or the benefits to be had over other options. None of these are good reasons to write off further investigation of a great tech, but it happens. See More

Top Pro

Designed around high-level front-end development

As Elm was designed as a front-end langauge, it has out of the box support for things like DOM-element creation, letting programmers focus on their application logic, rather than implementation details specific to the web. See More

Top Con

Code Repetition

Because of the lack of genericness Elm needs a lot of code to be repeated. There are 130+ implementations of map in elms core libraries. See More

Top Pro

Great and simple way to learn Purely Functional Programming

You can try to apply some functional programming ideas in other languages that have an imperative basis, but you haven't seen the real power unless you tried it in the environment of purely functional programming. Elm is a simple language with great learning resources and easy graphical output, which makes it easy to explore the power of functional programming. Plus programming in Elm is very readable. See More

Top Con

Features get removed without warning

Often features that are deemed to be misused by the community like infix operators get removed without much of a warning. See More

Top Pro

Good tooling

All major editors have great support. With Atom for example, Elm plugins are available for linting, formatting, make/compiler support and Elmjutsu will simply overflow you with super useful functions, like navigate to referenced definition and show expression type. See More

Top Con

Community harsh if criticised

If one even dares to start a discussion about a feature on elms slack, discord, subreddit or github one will be aggressively shut down often argueing that one should use purescript instead See More

Top Pro

Batteries included

The Elm Architecture means you don't need to spend valuable time and effort choosing the right frameworks, state management libraries, or build tooling. It's all built in. See More

Top Con

Poor Windows support

Few if any of Elm's core contributors are Windows users and breaking bugs are sometimes left for weeks or months. See More

Top Pro

Static module system

Elm uses easy to use modules. Use: import List import List as L import List exposing (..) import List exposing ( map, foldl ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(..) ) import Maybe exposing ( Maybe(Just) ) Creation: module MyModule exposing (foo, bar) See More

Top Con

Good for beginners not good for experts

Development in elm is quite nice until you need some more advanced features. These however are actively discontinued and removed because elm wants to establish a "single way of doing things" philosophy See More

Top Pro

Missing syntactic sugar

Easy to learn, most functions have only one way, not 5 alternatives where you must study where to best use what. See More

Top Con

Updates break existing code often

The last few updates of elm broke existing code in major ways. See More

Top Pro

Growing community

Top Con

Adds an additional layer of abstraction

Some users claim that Elm adds an additional layer of abstraction, meaning that it is one more hurdle between the brain and the product. See More

Top Pro

Interactive Programming and Hot Swapping

Support for hot swapping and interactive programming is included. See More

Top Con

Functional programming itself has quite a steep learning curve

Functional programming can be quite difficult to get your head around. It takes time to unlearn object orientational habits. See More

Top Pro

Easy to code review

The lack of side-effects and simple, consistent language semantics make it easy to quickly review incoming changes. See More

Top Con

No Genericness in the future

Currently there is no code genericness like typeclasses possible, it has been officially stated that this will never change. See More

Top Pro

Higher confidence in code correctness and quality

Pure functions, immutable data structures, amazing compiler, clean and homologous syntax used for HTML, logic, and optionally to replace CSS, elimination of entire classes of bugs so you don't even need most unit tests. These factors lead to better code, better programs, higher confidence, and ultimately, more satisfaction. See More

Top Con

Not database-friendly

It is lots of work to make a server or database your "one source of truth", as Elm makes you write endless JSON parse boilerplate to talk to the server. See More

Top Pro

Not quite Haskell semantics

Luckily you do not have to learn Haskell to be able to do any Elm. It is meant to be a language that compiles to Javascript, so for Javascript programmers (Front end) not for CS students who want to learn as many different algorithms as possible. See More

Top Con

No Syntactic Sugar

Often you need to write longer and less readable code because there are no alternatives that are more concise. See More

Specs

Platforms:Windows Linux Mac Web

Current stable version:0.19.1

GZipped size:23.2 kB

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479 170

score 186 · Answer 20

Foundation

Top Con

Can be hard for beginners to grasp

Since Foundation is built to be customizable, it's default style may not be very appealing for most. While it's true that most production-ready websites shouldn't be using the default style of a css framework (they would all end up looking the same), this is even more true for Foundation. See More

Top Pro

Responsive design philosophy

Foundation allows designing for multiple screen sizes simultaneously easily, meaning your content will always fit. See More

Top Con

Needs more pre-built components

Example would be a scroll-spy not only for one cell, but cell to cell. See More

Top Pro

Uses REMs instead of pixels

Foundation uses REMs instead of pixels, meaning you don't have to state an explicit height, width, padding, etc, for every device. Simply put, using REMs means you can just state font-size: 80%; and have the whole component (and its nested elements) shrink by 20%. This is great for making your site mobile friendly. There is also a Sass function in Zurb that converts pixels to REMs so if you're used to thinking in pixels, you don't have to learn a different system. See More

Top Con

Not UMD pattern in core

This problem will bring attention when used with Angular, React and other JS framework. It is important to know that they create app version of this framework. See More

Top Pro

No style lock-in

Styles are purposefully undeveloped to encourage differentiation between different sites using Foundation. See More

Top Con

Documentation is a bit better than average

Documentation could be written better and clearer, with many more example than they currently have. Sometimes hard to find solutions for detailed css problems. See More

Top Pro

Block grid

Foundation has a feature called block grid. Block grid gives designers the power to divide the contents of an unordered list into a grid that is evenly spaced. Furthermore, Foundation also takes care of collapsing columns as well as removing gutters. See More

Top Pro

Easy customization

Just by looking at the name, Foundation merely provides designers with a foundation of sorts on which they can build their design. It can be customized easily through SASS, a powerful CSS pre-processor or by overriding the default CSS styles. See More

Top Pro

Easily extensible with a selection of add-ons

There's a variety of front-end templates, icon fonts, responsive table examples, SVG icons and stencils that help you quick-start or easily improve on your site. See More

Top Pro

Support for off-canvas navigation

Foundation comes with an easy way of creating off-canvas menus. See More

Top Pro

Uses Interchange to load responsive content

Foundation comes with Interchange, it makes use of media queries to load images responsively and create content that's suited to different browsers and devices. See More

Top Pro

RTL support

Allows easily changing text direction. <html class="no-js" lang="ar" dir="rtl"> See More

Top Pro

Built-in form validation

Foundation comes with Abide plugin, an HTML5 form validation library. See More

Top Pro

Good mobile support

Foundation was one of the first frameworks to adopt a mobile-first philosophy. By focusing on mobile design first, Foundation makes designers think on what kind of content is important, relevant and interesting to the users without thinking too much on the space. See More

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