Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

So someone people don't learn the stuff in use (or find it difficult to achieve the current trend in preexisting technology) in use and find easier tricks/concepts then base their whole framework on that.

Now newbies, who want to quickly achieve something gravitate towards the new shiny things which makes the current Trend easy but makes rest of the things difficult.

You can optimize technology along any axis, but if you optimize it along one axis it will be deoptimized along some other axis.

For example, think of interactivity. When people wanted to build interactive website, they brought stuff like websockets/single page application but now websockets can't be cached like a http API and SPA throws monkey wrench into SEO.

Now, you made current trending thing (interactivity) easier for newbies but made other things like initial page load time, SEO difficult.

These are my noob level observations, as you gain more experience you'll find many examples of this happening in wild.

Similarly, to achieve scalability people brought in JWT instead of Session cookies and lost ability to revoke the token without maintaing a blacklist or using short lived tokens which you've to refresh every few minutes increasing RPS load for the server.

So the moral of the story is that you need to understand what a particular technology makes easy and what it makes difficult then you select the appropriate technology without chasing the hype.

1- back-end frameworks tend to follow either the Rails or Sinatra models. We may get new frameworks in new languages but their structures are fairly similar. Datastores have been changing but usually get abstracted into a supporting library. GraphQL a bigger change than we've seen in a while.

2- front-end requirements are changing faster with a greater number of developers solving more varied problems.

3- front-end is at the top of the stack so is less constrained. Making changes in the back-end can have consequences to all developers of a product. Front-end changes only affect the front-end devs who likely do both the app along with new frameworks being built.

What are the two hacks the whole field is based on?

1. Javascript has a massive and diverse community. Developers that would otherwise avoid the language must learn to use it. So, where other languages would rally around one framework (because of the self-selection), Javascript rallies into sub-communities around methodologies and architectures.

2. Javascript is gaining new developers at a very high rate. All these new minds bring new ideas, new combinations of ideas, and lots of re-invented ideas too. All of it, even revisiting old ideas, pushes the collective industry in new directions.

3. Frontend developers have had to layer on top of a set of tools barely adequate for what we're trying to accomplish. For example, jQuery should never have been necessary, but was revolutionary when it came out. Today there's still not great solutions around storage, security, performance, etc. Solving these problems improve the abstraction and allow higher-level frameworks to appear.

4. Based on what I've seen there appear to be very few UI toolkits that aren't kind of garbage. Human interaction and rendering pretty bits is hard. Generally I think the industry (even outside webdev) is still looking for the "right answer" to the problem.

What are the minimum technologies needed to get a solid front-end stack, with a nice balance between modern features without framework/library/build tool/transpiling hell?

For example, I don’t want to learn TypeScript when vanilla JavaScript will suffice. I’m wary of picking up the “hot” new frameworks because they haven’t stood the test of time and may get deprecated/irrelevant.

Basically, I want to have a flexible and minimalist stack, but also with a good balance of features (i.e. not just a static HTML site).

Any ideas?