2 years ago is decades in the front-end world. If we make decisions today based on the state of things years ago, we'd be screwed.

And yet nothing much changed in the needs of webapps or in the Javascript language in the past two years.

And if we CAN'T "make decisions today based on the state of things years ago", then we're really screwed.

> And yet nothing much changed in the needs of webapps or in the Javascript language in the past two years.

But Ember has likely come a long way in that time - I think this is mcardleliam's point.

For me the creation of ember cli was like admiting their framework didn't work as good as they intended.

I'm sorry, Ember has come a huge way in 2 years. We've got 2.0, which was a big leap forward, a whole bunch of concepts were refined/removed or changed.

Also you're flat out wrong: Ember-cli isn't really anything to do with the framework. You don't need it to write Ember apps, it's just the communities command line tool for managing Ember projects. That's all.

This is only theoretically right.

Practically, there are Ember modules/extensions/features that require Ember-CLI to work or are a huge pain to work with, if you don't use the CLI...

for example animation libraries or glimmer.

They are views directly related to that persons job responsibilities. So Github endorses the views by hiring the person and putting the person in a leadership role. It would be different if the views were not directly related to the persons job responsibilities and policies of the company.

Every time I wake up it seems like there is a new version of iojs.

And is that a good thing?

You are not forced to update (in another environment, I have customers with Rails apps in production of version 2.3, 3.0, 3.2, 4.0, 4.2) but you have the option to develop with the latest technology. In those Rails examples: I'll start new projects with Rails 4.2 and Ruby 2.2.2 and not with what I had two years ago. In the JS world, I'd start with ES6 and the latest v8, not the old one from node.

That's like saying a 486 CPU is more stable than a modern i7 CPU just because it's slower.

From my experience/observation, I believe this is what EmberJS is trying to do, combine best practices of the past with new learnings today. SmallTalk for example, heavily influences the framework, as does a number of historically successful frameworks. I am not arguing that Ember is perfect, but I believe what you state is part of their objective.

How does he show initiative? A couple of reasons people work on side projects are to gain experience and show initiative. While I'd agree that 1, 2, and 3 are good things....I would also say that side projects are a way to achieve #2.

Totally agree.