HN posts follow tech hype. AI is hot right now. Another thing will come and take its place in due time.
AI generated crypto funded JS framework written in Rust
Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
41–50 of 136 posts
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
#42Anecdotally the layoff wave appears to have hit design and front end more than other areas. Additionally it feels like the dev tools market, which fuelled a lot of new frameworks, is slowing down.
For the next couple of years problems will not be technical but business and marketing. No programming framework is going to help.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
#43Been that way for a few years I feel. My entire life was cutting-edge JS for 5 years straight around the trends peak. Now it's been a long time since I've come across another developer with a strong opinion about what framework/package manager/compiler should be used.
I think that was all mostly about the, very long overdue, burst of advancements in JS engines that IE was holding back for soooo long. Everyone wanted to make THE library that had the best, most efficient, DOM abstraction possible, while taking advantage of any new speed gains the competing engines would release every week. It was a pretty cool time looking back on it but, the competition in that space has stalled and what's left is good and boring enough to easily get by with on any basic project. It's still not great, but that's just how front-end dev work is.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
#44We need another Jobs to tell us React is shit and restart the cycle again.
Will an AI Jobs do?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
#45For a while, it seemed that a new JS framework was coming out every day. There was even a "JavaScript framework of the day" blog, which unfortunately I can't find now. But things really slowed down several years back... I want to say 7 years ago or so. React really does seem to have won, as the other commenters have said. It seems to be the main software taught by coding bootcamps and the like. I suspect that the confusion caused by the Angular 1 -> Angular 2 transition helped React gain the upper hand. There were other JS frameworks floating around that had a considerable number of users (including Ember, Meteor, and Backbone, off the top of my head), but they were nowhere near as popular as React or Angular. (That's my impression, anyway.)
Irrespective of the merits of React, it is sad to see the monoculture that has formed around it. I get the same kind of vibes as I did back when Java was everywhere, and comp sci graduates used to have the impression that Java = programming.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
#46IMO a JavaScript revolution is quietly brewing. Today’s frameworks have gotten amazingly complicated and EcmaScript spec is gaining new capabilities at a rapid clip, so some of critical features for modern web dev is built in. This project is a great example of what’s coming https://www.arrow-js.com . I think the right move will become avoiding these large and complicated frameworks unless they’re truly called for.
I’m starting to feel the same way. React’s big selling point when it came out was that it was “easy to reason about”, and that was true at the time. With hooks, server components, and 10,000 different strategies for managing state and side effects, I can’t say React is easy to reason about anymore. We can do things now that were impossible back then, but now we need to do even more than that, and it feels like it’s time to take a step back and do something different. I don’t know what that is yet.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
haha, I basically feel this way about Svelte/Kit. It's not mature, but the surface is so small and learning curve so pleasant that it's our go to choice now for internal webapps. (We have no external webapps because my company, funny enough, builds a JavaScript framework!)
> not mature Svelte was first released in 2016 and has become bigger than its original creator, Rich Harris. It has quite a thriving ecosystem and a big community. The tooling around it is more mature than React's has ever been. > surface is so small I actually find the opposite to be true. React still has a relatively small API surface area. One-way data flow makes it easier to understand. However, a smaller surface…
How is Svelte intended to be used that is so hard to learn?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
#48React won. Angular is officially deprecated, and the others are distant also-rans at this point. React Native has also almost completely taken over iOS development. Thank god we can all just agree on a baseline to work from finally.
Which angular?
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
#49The hotter (as in more news worthy, not usage volume) thing in web is minimizing use of JS, using something like HTMX or Phoenix Liveview.
Re: Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?
#50React is now the de facto choice and much less painful than past de facto choices, is my take on why. It has a mature and healthy ecosystem, and its relatively small surface makes it easy to learn and predictable, while declarative GUI in general is low on footguns compared to ye ol two-way data binding. Many of the competitors springing up define themselves in terms of React, either as an improvement or a foil. But…
haha, I basically feel this way about Svelte/Kit. It's not mature, but the surface is so small and learning curve so pleasant that it's our go to choice now for internal webapps. (We have no external webapps because my company, funny enough, builds a JavaScript framework!)
I'm not a web dev anymore, I stopped right around the time hooks became a thing in React, and while Svelte was an exciting technology no big players had adopted yet. In fact the last thing I did for my old job was a little make-work exploration to test whether Svelte was was ready for them to use in prime time. My conclusion was that it was remarkably slick and empowering, but was not ready yet due to the lack of ecosystem support. It's cool that Svelte and its community has continued to grow to the point where it is a legitimate contender. I'll be honest, I never liked React very much and would love to see it dethroned, even though I have almost no stake in that anymore!