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Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

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Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#111

Post by sanderjd »

davidjnelson wrote: post #101
mseebach wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an extremely large and diverse field. There are plenty of us who aren't celebrities and don't care about celebrities (except to the extent that it is caused by deep expertise). Just like you ignore reality TV celebrities, ignore these guys. It's just noise. Turn off Twitter and read "Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests" instead.

That really is an amazing book :-)

Man, I couldn't get through it! It seemed like its own kind of hype-y proselytizing and I didn't find its examples spoke to the kind of issues I actually have. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance, but I don't know, I had been hearing for years that it's so great and I was really excited to start reading it, and it just didn't speak to me at all. Anyway, YMMV I guess!

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#112

Post by philliphaydon »

_bxg1 wrote: post #82

At some point, when modules get "micro" enough, the effort of managing them and learning their usage outweighs the effort of implementing the thing yourself. Most JavaScript projects seem to walk that line quite closely. I'm a React developer at work, but I recently gave Vue a try at home. This is one of the things that most stood out to me about it. React makes a selling point out of the fact that it's "just renderi…

I learned React at home, then learned Vue. I fell in love with Vue because i clicked on the getting started, threw a bit of code in a html file, and ran it, and it worked, then I played around and changed things, the moment i ran into something like "oh how do i do this?" the documentation is second to none for client side frameworks, I found what I was looking for quickly.

Then I started to find other stuff like vetur, the vue cli, and I felt like I was just building stuff, and it worked, and I wasn't pulling in other plugins just to get stuff done.

The barrier to entry was much lower IMO.

Just wish I could switch from Angular X to Vue at work :(

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#113

Post by z5h »

freedomben wrote: post #15
kuon wrote: post #4

I 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.

Somewhat unrelated, but a couple of questions for you: 1. How did you learn elm? 2. Was elm your first functional language? (Not wanting the "javascript is a functional language" battle here plz) 3. What is your backend written in? Do you maintain that? 4. What libraries do you make use of? 5. Any regrets?

I wrote this in Elm: https://ixberg.com. (feel free to sign up, use it, share it). I learned Elm by going to an intro course at Lambdaconf, and watching this https://frontendmasters.com/courses/elm/ and coding in it. Elm was my first PURE functional language. I've done some Scheme before. Backend is Firebase. No special libraries in particular. No regrets.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#114

Post by tenaciousDaniel »

I was exhausted by front end development, so I thought I'd try something new. I ended up first looking into AI, and then into Blockchain.

Long story short, I have run back to the relatively calm and serene world of the front end, with my tail between my legs.

The front end may be moving quickly, but in the grand scheme of larger technological change, it's far more stable than we give it credit for.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#115

Post by philliphaydon »

nunez wrote: post #97
maemilius wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No love for Rails? It's also been around since 2005.

I hate the fact that Ruby doesn’t get more love. It’s a great language on its own. It doesn’t need Rails.

I like Ruby, I hate Rails. But Sinatra is awesome.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#116

Post by 0xcolton »

Having worked as a frontend dev for a while, my observation is this - because the UI is closer to the user, and closer to the product side (for consumer-facing apps), it has faster iteration cycles, doubling or tripling the rate of technology decisions that are made.

You'd never rewrite an API twice in a year, but maybe you'd rebuild your site or interface that often, if you're responding to users.

With increased demand for tools comes more supply - more libraries and frameworks with more stars and follows.

The reason we don't see this in the mobile world is because it's a much more closed ecosystem - there's no open spec for mobile like there is for browsers.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#117

Post by chrisweekly »

meredydd wrote: post #56

Web frameworks are churn-y because they are incredibly leaky abstractions covering really awkward impedance mismatches. This means that they are never quite satisfactory - and that just to use one, you need to be capable of building a new one yourself. Think of a typical web app. Your data exists: 1. As rows in a database, accessed via SQL 2. As model objects on the server, accessed via method calls and attributes 3.…

Some good points... but I think you're too pessimistic. Some tiny subset of those fraction of users you mention manage to do something different / better. React is one example. GraphQL is another.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#118

Post by eropple »

rhapsodic wrote: post #88
DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS selectors are highly dependent on the structure of your HTML. If you refactor your HTML then you’ll be required to rewrite many of your CSS selectors. None of that is surprising at all, but jQuery makes it hard to abstract the use of CSS selectors away from the rest of your UI code. Compare with Angular2+ where the logical separation of Components and the HTML of the template is rigidly enforced making refactorin…

>If you refactor your HTML then you’ll be required to rewrite many of your CSS selectors. I haven't found that to be a major issue. And I don't think the term "refactor" is the best choice here. jQuery is library that provides DOM shorthand - it isn’t a true application framework. Of course not. I don't want a third-party application framework. I discovered years ago that they're not worth the extra effort or the tec…

Something like React isn't even an application framework, though, it's a view library of compositional functions feeding into a tree diff.

How does functional, side-effect-free code increase complexity? What makes your side-effecting code more testable and verifiable than unambiguous in/out functional transforms?

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#119

Post by k__ »

underwater wrote: post #42

Calling out Vue.js as a possible solution is hilarious. Selling a trending technology as a silver bullet is exactly the problem he complains about in the article. Comparing the development methodology of Facebook - the company behind React - and this mindset is illuminating. Facebook famously rewrote PHP and added extensions like XHP rather than start their codebase from scratch. React follows a similar philosphy. It…

Yes, I still don't get th Vue hype.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#120

Post by eropple »

philliphaydon wrote: post #115
nunez wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate the fact that Ruby doesn’t get more love. It’s a great language on its own. It doesn’t need Rails.

I like Ruby, I hate Rails. But Sinatra is awesome.

Personally I'd rather use Grape over Sinatra. I also wrote Modern[0] to provide a really nice, functionally-oriented OpenAPI server for Ruby that is very much Not Rails. (Looking at porting it to TypeScript soon to provide a similar-feeling API.)

[0]: https://github.com/modern-project/modern-ruby

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