As a mostly C++/.NET dev since over a decade, I've tried to embrace the "modern web" a bit more, but as soon as I did... Web development in 2016 feels comparatively _insane_ to a dev used to structured .NET full stack development in a big IDE made for the purpose, on a platform with slow incremental improvements over the years with a vision and coherence from a single company.
It's like assembling a castle from bricks of lego where each brick changes shape every 6 months. Jesus. I feel burnt out before I barely begin! And when I've settled on something, it's about the toolchain and distribution models. "Is it Webpack or Gulp or Browserify and what is a docker image anyway or should I just use Meteor..."
There _are_ options for people like me. Angular 2, EmberJS, big hunking frameworks like those. But then the problem instead becomes that it's hard to grow your web apps organically. The startup... You have to build a huge garden of Eden surrounding it, and only then can you ship your "Hello world". So exhausting before I've barely got started. Besides, what do these big frameworks even _do_ for me behind the curtains? I don't understand the underpinnings. I just have to trust the docs and that they don't change.
So then I tell myself "oh f all that" and build a fun Web API in Python and Flask. And hack raw HTML and CSS in a text editor. The minimalist, pretty code and lack of 100 MB's of dependencies is too alluring. I feel like I'm forced to give up. How in the world will I have enough spare time and energy after full time job days to get even just average experience in the main JS frameworks of today and keep up with "what you have to know in 2017/18/19"? I also feel like the JS world suffers a lot from not settling down, from experience hugely underestimated. It takes time to mature, and create a high quality, broad ecosystem and community. I sometimes think of the waste from the community being this fragmented, keeping to reinvent the wheel.
