Why is front-end development so unstable? (2018)

Asking sincerely because this take is surprising to me: which specs are you referring to?

From my perspective—started front end, gradually went full stack, spent several years fully back end, dove back in a couple years ago—quite a lot of the APIs introduced in the period I was fully back end (and since) are excellent and vastly improve both development experience and the ability to deliver a better user experience.

I’m not saying your take is wrong necessarily, I just don’t immediately relate to it and I’m curious what specifically you find objectionable.

I don't know one single UI/UX development environment which is elegant and nice. From Android to iOS to Linux to Linux and Windows to browser UI kits. They are all complex and require constant searching for answers. The libraries are very big and require a complex tooling setup. You can never be an expert in all of them. At least not me.

> Asking sincerely because this take is surprising to me: which specs are you referring to?

I'd like to see the Web Components spec revisited: it has a) no API for passing non-string attributes to other web components, b) no API for declaratively updating your DOM subtree - you either do manual surgical DOM changes, or blow away your (potentially stateful) children and recreate them.

Without these, the raw web components API isn't suitable as an alternative to React et al. You've got to build a whole framework around them (like Lit), and at that point you're just using another framework.

Fads are tempered by a community of people anchored in a deep understanding of the technology. As talented as many FE engineers are, I can count on one hand the number that I've met that have a deep understanding of things like await/async + Futures, closures, DOM trees, etc. These things are (perhaps unfortunately) required to do FE work, yet the engineers using them don't fully understand them, so they don't know how to discern if helper libraries are actually helpful.

Additionally, I'd argue FE draws more junior people in general, because of the theoretical rapid feedback loop, and the fact that you can "make something that looks cool" with relatively little effort (relative to a BE engineer). These junior people add confusion to the chaos of the community because they don't know what they don't know, so they're cocksure about their opinions. And as long as they've "made something that looks cool", even if the architecture behind it is hot garbage, it buys them cred in the community.

Somewhat related, I've been using Flutter for a recent FE project and I'm in love with it. It's more for webs/mobile applications than websites, but the ergonomics of it feel like a coherent vision. The people maintaining it (Googlers) are excellent, and the Dart library community seems to know what they're doing. Furthermore, the FE design choices are based on Material Design[0], which is backed by (some informal) research by UI and UX professionals, so you don't have to sweat usability quite as much as you would starting from scratch.

0. https://material.io/components?platform=flutter

My pet hypothesis for years has been that developers always vastly underestimate the difficulty of doing a UI framework or environment. They think it'll just be a matter of painting widgets and presenting data. As a result they under-build the foundation. The insufficient structure is then released out to the world for everyone else to build upon.

Once people realize the soul devouring chthonic difficulty of doing good modern UI, they've already built on a shit foundation and been forced to realize the full system with a heap of ugly hacks and workarounds.

Then someone thinks "wow, this is way too complex! All I need is a simple UI." Then history repeats.

You can see this with immediate mode clean simple GUI library of the week. They all stagnate after getting all the basics working, and there's a reason for this.

A good mature modern UI is at least on par with a high-end game engine like Unity in terms of feature surface area and difficulty. In some ways it's worse because while the breadth and size of the problem domain is similar the problems you encounter in a game engine are probably a lot more fun. UI is a hell of incredibly hairy state management and a really long tail of edge cases.