Everyone wants to be the person behind the "next big thing".
Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
11–20 of 46 posts
Re: Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
#12Conversely, why are there so many back-end programming languages? C#? Java? ColdFusion? PHP? Node? Rust? C++? Ruby? Python? Do we really such have different requirements that there need to be so many!?
Re: Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
#13There's only a few that are commonly used at most companies, the rest are just pet projects people made cause they wanted to learn how to make a framework.
Re: Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
#14There are lots of frameworks because there are lots of developers doing different things in different ways. You don't get to a point where there are half a dozen solid choices like React, Angular, Vue etc without experimentation.
Re: Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
#15GitHub driven curriculum.
Re: Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
#16Javascript framework makers are the new rockstars. People want to be rockstars.
Not sure why this is being downvoted, it is at least a top two explanation for this phenomenon.
Re: Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
#17Unlike many pieces of software the shortcomings of JavaScript frameworks are obvious and numerous. Frankly they aren't very good. Large numbers of people using them are going to think "I could do better myself" and some of them actually do.
A lot of people bill Haskell or OCAML as ideal languages.
But there's a hell of a lot of people, from kids to grandparents, who actually code in JS.
Re: Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
#18Javascript language was originally written in ~10 days by Brendan Eich[0]. The limited time meant that it was a bare bones primitive language that did not include an opinionated and standard GUI library.
Compare that to how Java and C# gestated internally for years at Sun and Microsoft before the v1.0 of the respective languages were released. With more development time, they included a bigger standard library. Java has AWT (and then Swing), and C# had WinForms (and then WPF).
Yes, one could argue that Java and C# also have "UI frameworks" on top of their base GUI technology but it's nowhere near the same chaotic degree as Javascript's landscape.
Javascript is so barebones that people made frameworks for:
- manipulating DOM elements (e.g. JQuery, etc)
- simulating classes & objects
- calculating dates (e.g. Momentjs)
- UI and state flow (Vue, React, Angular, etc)
In Java/C#, you can subtract 2 dates in using their standard library of datetime functions. Javascript can't do that easily[1] and programmers end up rummaging through github repos and/or npm for libraries that multiple people reinvent. Another famous example of Javascript's small standard library is not having a builtin leftpad().
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=javascript+Brendan+Eich+10+d...
[1] picture those variations in Stackoverflow answers leading to different not-invented-here Javascript datetime libraries: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3224834/get-difference-b...
Re: Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
#19A Framework Author's Case Against Frameworks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7n2xnOiWI8
Re: Why are there so many JavaScript frameworks?
#20In part because "other programmers are dorks. I know better"