Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
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Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
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Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
#2"Unstable", "Issue", "Problem". The opposite of the front-end world is not something to desire. Change means people are fixing problems and giving away their solutions for free. To desire less change means wishing fewer people gave away their work.
Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
#3>Why is Front-End Development So Unstable?
Because on average, the skill level in the whole webdev community is low. Below that of "a dev with average schooling, and average industry experience"
Webdev has close to no barriers for entry, and is under the strongest influence from the fact that the evaluation of deliverables is not done by another tech professional out of all software development jobs
The combo above makes things that are unheard of in other software development niches possible, like meeting borderline or de-facto frauds running webdev businesses selling "ultrasophisticated" corporate websites on Wordpress to F500 types for few $k USD per hour of dev time, or well entrenched in-house "developers" in tech giants who made it to six digits on technobabling to non-tech managers and copy and paste.
All of this is evidently projecting onto to the tech solutions used in the trade, and the popular image of the webdev development process. And over the time, popular stereotypes are becoming self fulfilling prophesies: Angular - was an okish framework at near 1.0, but marketing messaging made it look like an "enterprise stuff," and their devs eventually turned it into it - purposelessly overengineered monster filled with SOAisms; jQuery - got bad fame for unusable, animation rich websites made by least talented part of the dev community, and this infamity has both sealed its further development, and was responsible for attracting even more unskilled devs into making websites with crawling slow animation;
And like this for few pages, as well as for the notion of webdev world being "unstable." Many people here who are not novices to webdev can probably call few sites that had a "single piece of JS code continuously maintained over 10 years" or more. I myself knew people who were making yandex.ru homepage in nineties, they say that a very sophisticated ajax autocomplete code there was developed and maintained continuously since 2004
Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
#4I work with elm now for frontend. It has often been criticized for being too conservative and slow paced in its development. But the result is that code is easier to maintain, libraries have a great quality and most of the time there is only one, obvious, way of doing something.
Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
#5It's because of all the icky data-sync for the client/service round trips. An async, slow, failure-prone concern wired throughout the entire codebase. I/O hurts everyone in subtly different ways and it's hard to solve so you see a lot of churn.
service/database has this problem too (the ORM flamewars of the 00s) but to a much less degree because it is in a happier place on the latency chart: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832
Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
#6> 2.5 years for the youngest isn’t that old in the scheme of things - it’s less than half the support lifespan of your typical desktop OS, for example - but it’s still a ways off our caricature.
Let's compare it with some server-side technologies:
Python/Django: 2005
Python/Flask: 2010
Nginx: 2004
Perl/Catalyst: 2006
Maybe I'm biased towards older software, but the difference to the popular frontend stuff is striking.
The only thing in the frontend with a comparable history (that I can think of) is jQuery -- and I still use it today, but it seems many developers frown upon it these days. And it's a library, not a framework.
Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
#7> 2.5 years for the youngest isn’t that old in the scheme of things - it’s less than half the support lifespan of your typical desktop OS, for example - but it’s still a ways off our caricature. Let's compare it with some server-side technologies: Python/Django: 2005 Python/Flask: 2010 Nginx: 2004 Perl/Catalyst: 2006 Maybe I'm biased towards older software, but the difference to the popular frontend stuff is striking…
Node probably belongs on this list (2009, it's older than I thought).
Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
#8This is a really well-written and well-thought out piece. The author touches on a number of points but never gets polemical. This piece resonated with me particularly well:
> Be wary of self-promotion
> Over the last few years I’ve seen much more aggressive self-marketing in the JavaScript world, possibly due to the rise of paid online training materials and the employment/consulting advantage of being a Github ‘celebrity’. I’ve no problem with people being incentivised for good content, but increasingly I feel I see dishonest tactics: self-citation; invented, proprietary terminology (so searching takes you back to the author’s materials), and name-squatting (e.g. ‘Standard.js’)
This is becoming a big problem in JS world, particularly over the last 3 to 4 years. Like the author, I have no problem with people taking credit and being respected, but we as a community are becoming much too centered around people/personality than technology. I've been guilty of this in the past too (love you Pete Hunt ;-) but it's not healthy IMHO.
Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
#9> 2.5 years for the youngest isn’t that old in the scheme of things - it’s less than half the support lifespan of your typical desktop OS, for example - but it’s still a ways off our caricature. Let's compare it with some server-side technologies: Python/Django: 2005 Python/Flask: 2010 Nginx: 2004 Perl/Catalyst: 2006 Maybe I'm biased towards older software, but the difference to the popular frontend stuff is striking…
I think more developers should use jquery to prototype an app and move torward a framework when it is needed. The same should be said when adopting redux when using react . Also webpack for building and moving beyond SQLite for data .
Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?
#10> 2.5 years for the youngest isn’t that old in the scheme of things - it’s less than half the support lifespan of your typical desktop OS, for example - but it’s still a ways off our caricature. Let's compare it with some server-side technologies: Python/Django: 2005 Python/Flask: 2010 Nginx: 2004 Perl/Catalyst: 2006 Maybe I'm biased towards older software, but the difference to the popular frontend stuff is striking…
The difference is that the backend model has been around for 20 years if not more. You're locating lots of old-ish and stable libraries because that's when that stuff was made.
Maybe you don't remember the days of Zope, Subway, Turbogears, Paste, Pylons, Werkzeug etc just within Python, but that happened. React is a relatively young model for the web. Wait 10 years and it'll look the same.
I personally don't feel it's that unstable. Pick a library, stick with it, stop jumping to the next framework and the churn stops. It's part of being a mature dev. Things always look worse to outsiders than they are.