@andrestaltz
Open source hacker
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Hi Susan! Yes we are actively developing Cycle.js. The GitHub releases tab isn't a good indication of progress because we use this custom releases page and our Twitter account is also active. You can see from this dashboard what I'm focusing on and what Jan is focusing on. And for our long term plans, we had a core team meeting a few weeks ago and we have clear vision for the future: https://github.com/cyclejs/cyclejs/wiki/Roadmap
Smart and outside-of-the-box thinkers will suddenly hear about this company and feel like joining you. In other aspects, there isn't a "risk" in adopting this technology. You can integrate plugins from jQuery, components from React or Polymer (for Material Design), you can get things done, there is a chat with activity everyday, 3 core maintainers with time/budget to fix bugs and improve the framework. Other frameworks might be bigger, but usually people don't measure the risks accurately. There is very little risk involved in picking such technology. It's MIT licensed (no PATENTS file), and it's not as critical component as a database for your backend.
I'm sorry, I'll be honest: I always thought AngularJS was kind of weird. I never really understood why did people start liking it in the first place, so I'm not surprised people are migrating away from it. Angular.io on the other hand does a lot of things right. There is also some beauty in it, most components are specified as CSS+HTML+JS, and it reads in that order from top to bottom in one file. That's kind of cool. But I don't have hands-on experience with that framework so I don't have any qualified opinion. All that said, there is also a strong network effect when it comes to adopting technologies. People just use what most people are using, and that's because it's the easiest to justify: the most popular solution is the least surprising solution, and people can get defensive or scared of risks when it comes to new and surprising stuff, so they prefer to have a feeling of "safety" that comes from picking something familiar (I'm reading a psychology book about these effects). At the moment, that seems to be React.
I'm a proponent of getting your basics very polished, and learning concepts instead of tools. So this list won't be a list of specific libraries. It's most important to be an independent programmer, able to build your own tools instead of depending on others. And you really don't need to know much in order to build basic tools. Learn basic ES5, like functions, arrays, objects. MDN is often enough Write raw callback-based async without any tools and try to manage it yourself. Focus on gaining an intimate understanding of the problem, not the solution Functional collections, this is a great resource http://reactivex.io/learnrx/ (not necessarily just RxJS) and you'll happen to learn how to manage callback hell plus array helpers Use jQuery or document.querySelector and addEventListener to build some apps Read the source code of small frameworks like Backbone, Choo, Yo-yo. Don't be afraid of reading source code. These are small frameworks, so it really doesn't hurt to look at them After that, you'll have some experience with the fundamental building blocks in JS, and the common problems (not the solutions) we usually encounter in frontend dev.
In the few months before Cycle.js, I was using RxJava and Kotlin, so I would say RxJava was an influence, but it's quite obvious (since Cycle.js used RxJS from day one). I was mostly guided by a gut feeling about "separation of concerns" that led me to eventually explain reactive programming as A -->B not A--> B ( https://cycle.js.org/streams.html#streams-reactive-programming ). I am not sure if these influenced me, since they happened long ago, but in the University I learned Prolog, which was a fully declarative paradigm, where many concepts were backwards. In the syntax itself, you declare "this if that", not "if (this) then that". Also another important paradigm was an Event Matrix in game editors like The Games Factory, which is a programming environment without (text) code. All you have is a matrix describing actions (rows) that should happen in reaction to events (columns). Those two things defined my idea of programming very strongly and very early in my career.
I would say React, because it's a UI library, not a framework, and you have a bit more freedom to choose how to solve problems. You can include a reactive programming library like most.js or RxJS, and handle functional and reactive programming architecture however you want, and only for DOM rendering using React. With other (full) frameworks it's a bit harder to customize that. Note: I am not saying "React is FRP", I'm just saying "you can build your own custom FRP and use React in the middle".
ReasonML: I don't have any qualified opinion because I haven't tried it yet. Elm: has a great proposition but in my perspective seems a bit "stuck" at the moment. Not a lot of progress, while usually its pain points are downplayed by key people in the community. PureScript (the "other" functional language): highly under-rated language worth taking a look. It's a bit heavier on the learning investment side, but it's not gratuitous. PS has some features that surpass Haskell (it's like Haskell done right from day one), and plenty of features that benefit people in a concrete way, like type holes (compiler tells you what's missing), row types, reflection, etc. Give it a serious try.
Finland is fantastic and even when Finns complain about it, I usually don't see any serious problem. Of course nothing is perfect, but this is a 9/10 country. PS: I like the winter darkness because the computer screen doesn't get reflection from the sun. :D
10 years is a bit too far for making good predictions (for instance, 10 years ago was 2007, not even AngularJS v1 existed!). I can tell at least that in 3 years, JavaScript will gain more the status of a VM and lose the status of a language. Already today, not many people use raw JavaScript. You usually have some transpilation, at least e.g. Babel. In the future, Web Assembly will enable more innovation in that regards, and existing transpiling languages like Elm, TypeScript, PureScript will continue to improve.