Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

There is no logical/mathematical theory around program design. We have no idea if we're improving in optimization, staying the same or even going backwards.

For the shortest distance between two points, we have a theory that defines the best distance: A line. That's an easy target to hit. For the best way to design and organize our programs... there is no theory. It's all made up and opinionated. Without a theory we can never truly know.

Thus we are doomed to forever move in a flat circle creating framework after framework and endlessly having progress move horizontally while wasting effort creating isomorphic patterns without ever knowing if the new pattern is better or worse.

Until the day we have a mathematical theory around program organization that can say Design A is 2.3 times more optimal then Design B. Then on that day... this madness will stop.

But until that day we're all stuck in an endless limbo mouse wheel mind fuck. I look at front end and I suspect that out of all software technologies, front end is one of the few fields that is actually moving backwards. I'd estimate 0.01x less optimal every year then I predict at a delta of 0.5x less optimal from an inflection point it starts to oscillate back towards the natural equilibrium again. Then when it hits equilibrium it will oscillate in the opposite direction again. Endless.

Python is likely one of the most stable technologies imo. It's definitely not remotely close to the MOST optimal state but it's nested too comfortably in a local optima and it will likely be stuck there forever.

Frontend development is mostly done by people who are into visual things and less into logic.

Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit and less by visual appearance.

This leads to the adaptation of large number of garbage frameworks in frontend primarily because their landing pages look visually appealing.

After some time frontend developers will find some new framework with a better landing page and move on to that.

And the cycle repeats.

Like 30% of pages just give me something along the lines of "enable js to make this site work"

2006-2009 server side frameworks were in vogue but most were slow and sometimes memory intensive. In the pursuit of creating highly interactive experiences that also scale many of us were optimizing website architectures around cached components of varying vintage and write frequency.

By 2009 we were solving for performance + scale + interactivity challenges using client side rendering for highly interactive components. During that period I can remember doing isomorphic rendering of mustache templates in server side Ruby and client side Javascript.

2010-ish Node was starting to gain traction and lots of attention went to Javascript. I think post-2010 many were pushing web app architectures to more client side business logic as web browsers became more and more capable. Backbone.js, SproutCore (now Ember.js), Knockout.js and others were on the scene by then and I think most other frameworks are inspired or derivative approaches meant to solve for their shortcomings.

2014-ish I think everyone was pushing responsive web. Apps got fatter and needed CDNs now more than ever. Websockets start to gain maturity. Cloud-services really start to gain traction beyond EC2 type deployments.

2015-2016 is the inflection point where client side frameworks start to get stupid complex, i.e. I can no longer read the source code of a web page easily, simple read only sites have a loading screen and/or need to download 1MB+ for reading a basic page.