Ask HN: Is there a sane alternative to Angular and React?

MDN is great: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript

If you're more of a "show me 30 cool things I can do with none of that baggage" person, I found javascript30.com really fun.

so from the other comments I understand that flash was better designed for the web.

I don't really know what you are trying to get at. Almost every front-end framework is going to have some type of "proprietary syntax" -- that's basically what a framework is. Even backend templating languages have custom syntax that must be learned.

Otherwise, I guess there is jQuery or web components if you are only supporting modern browsers.

React is excellent. I've been building UIs for 20 years and it is by far the best development experience I've ever had.

Watch out for contrarians and purist wonks. Set aside your preconceptions and bias against new things you don't understand.

Embrace reality with an open mind.

Fighting it and wishing for an alternate reality is not the path to happiness. I know that much.

So, one might ask, "Why do we have these frameworks, anyway?" Well, they're attempts to introduce sanity to the discordant relationship between HTML/CSS as a "Read a remotely stored document" system, and the desire to make the web browser into a fat client for every type of network-distributed application. Ever since "Web 2.0" was a thing, we've been trying to fit this round peg of delivering complex apps into the square hole of the web browser. Sometimes, we do a decent job. But, as we try to handle more total stuff, all of the moving parts overwhelm us.

With all that in mind, I think that we shouldn't blame "insanity" on the very tools that have been employed to control insanity. If anything, such a viewpoint tells us that maybe the attempts of today aren't the full answer, so there will be more tries tomorrow.

I'll leave you with these things: 1) If the only thing you're doing is creating a web page that serves as a thin visual layer over REST- or CRUD-based services, consider going back two generations to Backbone. Seriously. It does a few simple things for you, and lets you handle the rest in any way that you see fit. Those simple things may be the only thing that your app does. I suspect that this would be true for half of Silicon Valley. But, it goes against the constant pursuit of the new and shiny.

2) If your browser does more than just send a few CRUD commands from the user to a server, then maybe it's time to look into what's good about these frameworks, instead of just considering them "insane". Everyone has their own good parts and pain points to be addressed, and all these tools were built with the best of intentions, to solve specific classes of tough problems, which may happen to be yours. Look at the success and failure stories, and see who's happy with their decisions about their tools, and which problems were solved with what framework.

3) For those people telling you "just use vanilla JS", I'll leave you this: Any sufficiently complicated vanilla JS program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Angular or React.