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Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

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Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#121

Post by spankalee »

Asking this question without looking at the underlying platform is ignoring a huge source of insight into the problem and its solutions.

Growing up from a document viewer to an app platform in the particular way it did left the web as the most important and ubiquitous GUI app deployment and runtime platform, but without a dev-accessible native GUI component system. No other major modern UI platform was _ever_ in this state.

This left all the work of creating the most basic widget system to userland, while at the same time the platform's features available to that userland were relatively paltry to begin with. As those features of JavaScript and DOM grew, frameworks were released frequently because newer ones were designed to take advantage of newer features. This lead to a huge amount of fragmentation.

Which brings us to now. Outside of threading, the runtime features are much more suitable to an app platform now, and finally the web has a native UI component system in Web Components. I think there's one or two more big shifts ahead of us toward Web Components and better utilizing Workers, and then things will settle down because we'll finally all be using the same platform features. Even if we still have opinionated and helpful layers on top, the foundation will be more stable and standardized.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#122

Post by rhapsodic »

davidjnelson wrote: post #110
rhapsodic wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bad jQuery apps follow the pattern: When “.x” is clicked, show “.x .y”, add className “xyz” to “.z”, and fire off an XHR to “/api”. This defines what the developer wants to happen, Yes, it does. All in one place, in about 10 easy to understand, easy to debug lines of code. >but is brittle and hard to test. I don't see how it's brittle, or hard to test. You click the button, and verify that it does what it's suppose…

You can test conditional logic, state mutation, and any function without side effects. It takes very little time and definitely improves the codebase. Testing is very dependent on the culture of your team and company though.

>You can test conditional logic, state mutation, and any function without side effects. It takes very little time and definitely improves the codebase. Testing is very dependent on the culture of your team and company though.

For sure. We have a team of people dedicated to testing. Compared to developers, they're easier and cheaper to hire. Our developers, who are very brilliant and very expensive, mainly write code for production, and leave testing to the testers. They write code designed to run efficiently and be maintainable, not to be more amenable to unit-testing.

This has proven to work extremely well for us. If you need unit testing to ship robust code in a short timeframe, it would be foolish for you to not write the unit tests. But our team culture is such that we don't do things that we don't need to do to be productive and successful, and unit testing is one of those things.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#123

Post by k__ »

evilduck wrote: post #59
EvanYou wrote: post #41

FWIW, the GitHub age isn't entirely accurate because both React and Vue had major rewrites and the current default branch doesn't hold the entire development history. Vue's first public release was Feb of 2014 and React is just celebrating its 5th birthday.

Likewise, Ember holds the record on that list at 6.5 years, it was forked from SproutCore which goes back even further.

Wasn't it just renamed from SproutCore?

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#124

Post by k__ »

softwarefounder wrote: post #28

It's only unstable if you drink the JavaScript cool-aid, and change frameworks frequently. I've been using Knockout 3.* for the past five years, no issue here. Edit: Looks like some Angular and React devs have started downvoting :)

Whining about downvotes is generally frowned upon.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#125

Post by sixQuarks »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #30
freedomben wrote: post #8

This 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 ‘cele…

I'm finding the growing celebrity culture of programming to be troubling. I find that programming is becoming less and less about code or architecture and more about evangelism and marketing, but I'm not sure what changed in the incentive structure for this to happen, and I would like to find out. Aside: This has made me reconsider being a career programmer.

Once the market is large enough, you're going to have some people at the top who excel at marketing. Look at almost any large market, it's not the "best" products that win, it's the best marketers.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#126

Post by hvs »

perlgeek wrote: post #20
aaron-lebo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

> Pick a library, stick with it, stop jumping to the next framework and the churn stops. I wish it were that easy. At work, we've picked angular 1, and now there's angular 5, which is a totally different framework (and the migration path only works well if you did everything juuuust right), and no clear policy on how long angular 1 will be maintained. So either we churn, or we have no idea how long there will be any…

They made a fair number of mistakes with Angular.js (1), so the rewrite was a sensible, if painful change for early adopters. Since version 2, the model has remained relatively stable with changes being improvements rather than completely breaking.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#127

Post by RodericDay »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #80
no1youknowz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think more developers should use jquery to prototype an app and move torward a framework when it is needed. They really shouldn't. With VueJS it's not that difficult to get setup and running with the CLI and components is such a game changer. Don't get me wrong. I love jQuery, there's nothing better than taking someone else's library and then extending it. Here's an example [0]. However, one thing that I have lea…

Mithril is similarly small and very easy to get started.

Mithril is my favorite by far.

It's not even close. It's depressing how little-known it remains.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#128

Post by paulddraper »

spankalee wrote: post #121

Asking this question without looking at the underlying platform is ignoring a huge source of insight into the problem and its solutions. Growing up from a document viewer to an app platform in the particular way it did left the web as the most important and ubiquitous GUI app deployment and runtime platform, but without a dev-accessible native GUI component system. No other major modern UI platform was _ever_ in this…

> Growing up from a document viewer to an app platform in the particular way it did left the web as the most important and ubiquitous GUI app deployment and runtime platform, but without a dev-accessible native GUI component system.

Exactly this. Web technologies cannot be understood without understanding the history of the web itself.

You could just as easily imagine, say (random example), Internet + Gopher + Lisp playing the role of Internet + HTTP/HTML + JS.

It was somewhat inevitable chain of events, plus "right time, right place"for particular choices of tech.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#130

Post by tjr225 »

collyw wrote: post #60
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm finding the growing celebrity culture of programming to be troubling. I find that programming is becoming less and less about code or architecture and more about evangelism and marketing, but I'm not sure what changed in the incentive structure for this to happen, and I would like to find out. Aside: This has made me reconsider being a career programmer.

I got asked if I had a blog in an interview. I am a software engineer not a self marketer.

Yikes! As someone who can't stand being the center of attention and also can't stand talking about themselves (yes I see the irony here), this is terrifying.
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