[hardwaresofton]

While I love Ember, one of it's biggest downfalls is definitely has a longer ramp up period, and more complexity than other frameworks. Ember's documentation is very good now, but still, there is a lot you have to read (and eventually experience to truly understand) about how ember works under the covers.

One of ember's greatest benefits is that it adapts to change and doesn't miss out on features for very long at all (you can look at fastboot as a reaction to isomorphic react apps, or something that the ember team would have just pursued anyway). However, that benefit can also be a pitfall for newcomers to ember as it's hard to find consistent discussion, help, and resources for a framework that changes so fast.

BTW, while Ember CLI makes things much easier, it does not improve the complexity situation, it just becomes one more thing you have to learn when learning Ember (even as a newbie). What if a newbie isn't familiar with node? what if they're not sure why you're precompiling? what if they're not familiar with task runners like grunt and gulp?

Contrasted with frameworks like Angular 1, Backbone+Marionette, Ember definitely has the most rampup and complexity, not the least.

[sotojuan]

I think the CLI helps tremendously, even if you have to learn it (and for simple stuff you don't aside from `ember new` and `ember start`, maybe a few file generators). The biggest problem with beginners is setting up a JS environment—I've seen people waste hours doing it. Ember's CLI tool takes care of all of that.

[hardwaresofton]

I agree it helps -- but there is a hidden cost of people not understanding all the towers of abstraction that have been built up for them, despite sitting on top of it.

Ember CLI does file generation and a whole lot more. I'm not saying it shouldn't -- but that shouldn't be the easiest most approachable way to start with Ember.

Why should someone have to learn all the following things:

- transpiling

- nodejs

- npm & packaging

- bower

- broccoli/task runners

- livereload

... just to START with a web framework?

Maybe don't market Ember to beginners? Again, I like Ember, I think it's the most viable large framework out there right now -- but this is certainly an issue

[qaq]

For the 3 major frameworks it's about the same list (minus bower but Ember is phasing it out too.

[hardwaresofton]

How so? angular1 does not require you to download anything node-related, for example?

Angular doesn't recommend any tooling, pretty much (just include the framework code and you're off to the races, write some html write some js)...

[qaq]

Angular 2 does :) about the same list as was outlined for Ember

[ef4]

Indeed, and AFAIK angular is even basing their build tooling code on ember-cli.

[awalGarg]

Most frameworks I have used (yes React included) don't require any of those. Their documentation is lacking/confusing, and the community build "documentation" is not designed to bring a newbie from the newbie level to the guru level gradually - it is designed for jumping straightway up. Several hundreds of "starter" templates are one good place where the dependency bloat starts because the template maker wanted to cover every single usecase ever, but not help the user start (see the irony?).

You can very well use React/Angular(1, atleast)/etc. just by including a script file in your markup and continuing to write your application code. There was a tutorial series for React posted on HN sometime before that made you learn React just this way.

[sotojuan]

Good points, though I'll say I've rarely seen Ember be recommended to beginners.

And to be fair, the same thing has been said about React, though both Ember and React allow you to use a CDN link like in the good old days.

[orf]

> I've rarely seen Ember be recommended to beginners.

I started a new job and went from 0 JS (other than some JQuery and knowing the syntax) to 100 with Ember. Ember is really really good for beginners, grandparent talks of having to know transpiling, broccoli/task runners and livereload but doesn't understand that you need to know none of that to get working with Ember.

Write your app by editing the files ember-cli produces. No transpiling, or add transpiling with a single 'ember install' command. Who cares about broccoli, I just edit my ember-cli-build.js file with some paths and it all works. Livereload is hardly difficult to understand, with Ember you just run "ember serve" and it also all just works.

[hardwaresofton]

I stand corrected -- clearly what I thought was what beginners would feel is not what they did.

My point though, was that after you build on all this complexity that you don't understand (and don't have to deal with), when something goes wrong, you're in for a world of hurt. But maybe that's not an issue

[iamstef]

Abstractions aim to hide complexity until one requires them.

As a developer, one becomes productive when one realize when to put the blinders on, and when to take them off. As such I for one, love that I don't need knowledge of x86 assembler, chip design, or signal processing until the problem at hand actually requires them.

Ember-cli aspires to keep developers focused on features, not orthogonal tech. That is unless they need to peel back that layer of the onion, and dive in. Even then, the goal is for only a few community members to dive in, explore the problem space, and ultimately contribute the solution. Next release, all community members benefit, without also having to invest (until the point where they have a specific itch to scratch).

Abstractions hurt when they leak, as such we must aspire to provide the best abstractions we can (at each layer), and this is only possible in collaboration with an eager and enthusiastic community.

An symptom of a curated solution, is all aspects of the stack evolve to work together. Mitigate abstraction leaks at the various boundaries.

[hardwaresofton]

Yeah, Ember maybe shouldn't be recommended to beginners... I think it has some of the best documentation however (especially true in recent versions, if your codebase is pre-1.10, you're donezo though).

Also react's documentation is terribad. I'm in the middle of teaching someone who is completely new to JS how to use React, and the documentation has been horrendous (for newbies), reasons:

- JSX is super hard to properly understand if you only know HTML and JS and don't know they normally don't mix, and aren't actually mixing

- Requiring precompilation (no more JSXTransformer, no more babel-browser)

- The entire concept of components-all-the-way-down

- Documentation (Reference) section that does not differentiate between code blocks you can use and function signatures

- Hints on how to deal with routing

- No explanation of where to store data/state

I, as an experienced developer, can very easily understand React (I've used it on 2 projects now I think, and I like it), but there is so much for beginners to stumble on.

[vmware513]

Following this Ember.js tutorial, it is really easy to learn Ember for beginners: http://yoember.com