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Second-Guessing the Modern Web

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Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#71

Post by thomascgalvin »

Dowwie wrote: post #65
luxphl wrote: post #47

I empathize with the author but client-side technologies like React have a pretty clear advantage that explains why they're popular: for the people that are tasked to make websites (i.e. us, HN readers), they're easier to work with and they save us time. It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive. It's true that they are largely more complex than O.G.…

You are contradicting yourself by opening with a claim of time savings and ease of use followed by admitting that the solution is largely more complex. More complex work does not save time in aggregate and is not easier to use.

But that's a one-time cost. Spring Boot is stupid complicated, too, but once you know it you know it, and getting your next project spun up is a lot faster.

I'd rather maintain a React app because it will be at least somewhat familiar than try to fight my way through someone's home-grown rendering framework that can't even be Googled.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#72

Post by burlesona »

luxphl wrote: post #47

I empathize with the author but client-side technologies like React have a pretty clear advantage that explains why they're popular: for the people that are tasked to make websites (i.e. us, HN readers), they're easier to work with and they save us time. It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive. It's true that they are largely more complex than O.G.…

For the most part I think the reason so many web devs put up with the “all-react” (and similar) development experience is basically cargo culting. If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. For the hipsters, the problems of SPAs are hard, and engineers like hacking on hard problems. Also the fact that the solutions don’t work very well means they’re constantly being reinvented, which means if you do the work to keep up with it all you’re rewarded by being regarded as an expert, which is nice.

Lastly, I wouldn’t underestimate how this has built up slowly over time, and therefore how many people just don’t know any better.

Last year I assigned a feature to a junior dev which was quite simple. He spent two days hunting for and testing react libraries to try and build it. When he told me this I said, “Holy crap, that is overkill.” I tried to explain how easy this would be with just plain HTML and JavaScript and he didn’t understand, so we paired for about 90 minutes and the work was done.

At the end of that session this developer said to me, “wow, I didn’t realize you could actually do anything useful with just plain JavaScript in the browser. I thought it was like... assembly or something.”

This is a good, very productive, very fast-learning developer I’m talking about. He literally had never tried to use the DOM api, and didn’t realize it was, you know, useful.

I think there’s a lot of that in front end world today.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#73

Post by Spivak »

Dowwie wrote: post #65
luxphl wrote: post #47

I empathize with the author but client-side technologies like React have a pretty clear advantage that explains why they're popular: for the people that are tasked to make websites (i.e. us, HN readers), they're easier to work with and they save us time. It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive. It's true that they are largely more complex than O.G.…

You are contradicting yourself by opening with a claim of time savings and ease of use followed by admitting that the solution is largely more complex. More complex work does not save time in aggregate and is not easier to use.

It’s all about where the complexity lives. As long as your client code needs aren’t too complicated then you lose time by using React^. But once you cross a threshold you end up inventing some subset of React^^ and hope that it’s overall less effort to maintain than using React itself.

^ maybe not if your dev team is used to using React but nonetheless.

^^ React could be any of the popular frameworks. They all solve similar problems.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#74

Post by root_axis »

Dowwie wrote: post #65
luxphl wrote: post #47

I empathize with the author but client-side technologies like React have a pretty clear advantage that explains why they're popular: for the people that are tasked to make websites (i.e. us, HN readers), they're easier to work with and they save us time. It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive. It's true that they are largely more complex than O.G.…

You are contradicting yourself by opening with a claim of time savings and ease of use followed by admitting that the solution is largely more complex. More complex work does not save time in aggregate and is not easier to use.

> You are contradicting yourself by opening with a claim of time savings and ease of use followed by admitting that the solution is largely more complex

It's not a contradiction. C# is "largely more complex" than C, that doesn't mean C is inherently more productive than C#.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#75

Post by cageface »

Use the right tool for the job. Why is this so controversial?

Yes SPA frameworks are overused but a lot of modern web "apps" are actually real applications and can't be built on a reload-the-world on a mouse click paradigm of the old web.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#76

Post by pier25 »

You guys should give Svelte a try. It's a breath of fresh air for modern JavaScript. Your codebase becomes much simpler. It's much faster and lighter than React.

It doesn't give you absolute flexibility like React + JSX does, but it solves your most common problems much more pragmatically.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#77

Post by komali2 »

I see this sentiment a lot, and sympathize with it because I value accessibility and access to content by people with less powerful devices and connections.

But full time I'm employed to build web apps that I can't conceive of building without Vue or React or some other AJAX tool at least. For example, a node management system, displaying up to twenty disparate nodes at once. Client expectations are that any edited node is immediately persisted to the server. If I refresh the page, I've got to rerender each of those elements. If I'm not using tech that has things like v-for, I'm building out 20n wonk ass custom event handlers from scratch... I'd love to find ways to build this vanilla, I do that for my personal projects, but I don't see a path.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#78

Post by simonw »

burlesona wrote: post #72
luxphl wrote: post #47

I empathize with the author but client-side technologies like React have a pretty clear advantage that explains why they're popular: for the people that are tasked to make websites (i.e. us, HN readers), they're easier to work with and they save us time. It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive. It's true that they are largely more complex than O.G.…

For the most part I think the reason so many web devs put up with the “all-react” (and similar) development experience is basically cargo culting. If you admit you don’t like it, chances are there’s at least one front-end hipster around who will mock you as outdated, and that’s enough to silence most. For the hipsters, the problems of SPAs are hard, and engineers like hacking on hard problems. Also the fact that the…

What a great anecdote. It aligns with my big worry here: we are raising a cohort of front-end developers who don't know how to use plain HTML and forms!

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#79

Post by askafriend »

coffeefirst wrote: post #37
MattGaiser wrote: post #23

The problem with not using a JS framework is that eventually, the investors/business person/design team/frontend enjoying devs wants this highly animated site with all sorts of little toggles, confirmation boxes, popup models, toasts, etc. It is far nicer doing that in React where you can just casually npm in some online component that does that rather than in vanilla JS or jQuery. React is basically a compromise bet…

Except for the user, who never asked for vanity animations and hate the popups.

Wrong. I ask for it as a consumer.

I expect it, and I demand it. We're in 2020, I don't want to click around on hyperlinks - I'm sorry. I grew up in a world of interactivity and the iPhone.

My bar is very high for consumer services. Animations and smooth transitions are table-stakes.

Re: Second-Guessing the Modern Web

#80

Post by rossdavidh »

c22 wrote: post #68
luxphl wrote: post #47

I empathize with the author but client-side technologies like React have a pretty clear advantage that explains why they're popular: for the people that are tasked to make websites (i.e. us, HN readers), they're easier to work with and they save us time. It outweighs all the end-user-facing cons by a lot, because companies need us, and our salaries are expensive. It's true that they are largely more complex than O.G.…

I always wondered if we take shortcuts because we have to re-write everything every 14 months or if we have to re-write everything every 14 months because of all the shortcuts we take.

Why not both?
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