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

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

#41

Post by jansan »

marcosdumay wrote: post #3

Hum... The Great (Web) Frontend Revamping seems to have passed. Nowadays people are still discussing if React or Vue is better, with a clear intonation of "whatever works for you, I prefer X". Looks like the field is maturing. Either that or we are on a fake calm before we see a lot of articles about people migrating into wasm in "whatever language has support for it right now" (AFAIK, currently wasm goes with rust).

If you started with Vue two years ago, you had to learn Vue 3 shortly after that. With a new Vuex. Which has been dropped since in favor of Pinia. Oh, Vite has been developed since, so you may want to add this to your stack, because it makes compiling during development so much faster. Also, be aware of all the breaking changes that Webpack 5 has introduced.

I hope front end development will be more stable in future, but the last two years where full of pretty major changes.

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

#42

Post by danenania »

A lot of it is that UI programming is just difficult and inherently complex.

Expectations of users are very high and always shifting. Browsers/consumer OSes are constantly moving targets. Mistakes and bugs, even small ones, stand out in a glaring way, so there’s low forgiveness. There are more code paths and they’re harder to test.

All that means that unless you want to miss your deadline by a year or leave a bad impression on users, you will need a lot of libraries!

Backend/systems specialists always underestimate how hard UI programming is. Then they try their hand at frontend and quickly run into a wall. They find they either need to build something clunky that users aren’t impressed by or else spend a lot of time learning new tools and paradigms (and yes, installing lots of dependencies /shiver). This is a blow to the ego, so it’s better to criticize the language, the culture, the “churn”... anything to avoid admitting the pixel pushers are solving seriously tough problems too :)

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

#43

Post by azemetre »

sjtindell wrote: post #36
Atheros wrote: post #5

UI/UX is a fundamentally flawed field for a number of intersecting reasons, most of which boil down to not really distinguishing between when it's doing engineering, when it's doing psychology, and when it's doing fashion. And these days, on web apps and mobile apps, it mostly does fashion. Fashion must change for the sake of change. To more easily support these frequent changes, more libraries get invented to make d…

I’m not sure fashion feels like the right term. People just assume newer equals better. So they want to use the latest and “greatest”.

This sounds exactly like fashion to me. One just has to look at how often design has changed over the last decade with the many fads and worst UX.

I feel like when you have an org of designers they will justify in wanting to redesign everything because why else do you need them? The same can be said for some POs and devs as well IMO.

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

#44

Post by [deleted] »

holoduke wrote: post #33
moonchrome wrote: post #15

Saying React support libraries are at fault here is not fair - React basically reimagined itself over the years and went from OO and class based components to hooks and functions. The fact that you can still do OO isn't really helping it since it adds to the complexity of things you need to learn to grasp the ecosystem. But that's honestly missing the forest for the trees - JavaScript itself went from asynchronous ca…

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.

[deleted]

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

#45

Post by moonchrome »

holoduke wrote: post #33
moonchrome wrote: post #15

Saying React support libraries are at fault here is not fair - React basically reimagined itself over the years and went from OO and class based components to hooks and functions. The fact that you can still do OO isn't really helping it since it adds to the complexity of things you need to learn to grasp the ecosystem. But that's honestly missing the forest for the trees - JavaScript itself went from asynchronous ca…

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.

Pretty much anything after C/C++ era comes with a usable build system, modules and a package manager. JS is really stuck dealing with insanely low level issues in shit ways for various historic reasons.

As shitty as Android support matrix can be - it doesn't compare to IE6 web days (at least in terms of UI development, stuff like OS services is entirely next level - but you can't even start doing that in JS so it's not really a fair comparison) - and we're still paying for the technical decisions made in that era (how many people are polyfiling all the way back to stone age and including hundreds of KB of useless shit ?).

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

#46

Post by lopatin »

croes wrote: post #40
lopatin wrote: post #32

The article starts off with an outdated take on the space: "We all know the meme: by the time you’ve learned one front-end technology, another three have just been released. Also, that one you just learned? It’s deprecated." Maybe it's because the article is 4 years old. I just don't think it's true anymore. Ok there's React and Vue and others, but that's fine. It's basically the same tech, but they have DX/cosmetic…

I thought VDom is old school since Svelte and such? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19950253

I was waiting for someone to mention Svelte :)

I think it's is very possible that it's the next evolution of innovation in the space. It might actually be a Backbone -> React style quantum leap in terms of tech and adoption. The thing is, that won't happen for another 10 years, if it does at all. It could very well turn out to be a niche technology for most people, with minimal real-life benefits compared to the drawbacks of moving off the mainstream.

Every space has new innovative technologies that risk upsetting the status quo. I'm not saying things are completely boring now. Just that, unlike in the mid 2010s, they are actually stable enough.

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

#47

Post by Matumio »

lopatin wrote: post #32

The article starts off with an outdated take on the space: "We all know the meme: by the time you’ve learned one front-end technology, another three have just been released. Also, that one you just learned? It’s deprecated." Maybe it's because the article is 4 years old. I just don't think it's true anymore. Ok there's React and Vue and others, but that's fine. It's basically the same tech, but they have DX/cosmetic…

Ah, the irony. An article arguing about how fast web-dev is moving is itself considered outdated just four years later.

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

#48

Post by jhgb »

moonchrome wrote: post #45
holoduke wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Pretty much anything after C/C++ era comes with a usable build system, modules and a package manager. JS is really stuck dealing with insanely low level issues in shit ways for various historic reasons. As shitty as Android support matrix can be - it doesn't compare to IE6 web days (at least in terms of UI development, stuff like OS services is entirely next level - but you can't even start doing that in JS so it's n…

> Pretty much anything after C/C++ era comes with a usable build system, modules and a package manager. JS is really stuck dealing with insanely low level issues in shit ways for various historic reasons.

But of course JS needs neither a build system (runs from source files) nor a package manager (runs from URLs) and recently even plugged the "no modules" hole.

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

#49

Post by suction »

jansan wrote: post #41
marcosdumay wrote: post #3

Hum... The Great (Web) Frontend Revamping seems to have passed. Nowadays people are still discussing if React or Vue is better, with a clear intonation of "whatever works for you, I prefer X". Looks like the field is maturing. Either that or we are on a fake calm before we see a lot of articles about people migrating into wasm in "whatever language has support for it right now" (AFAIK, currently wasm goes with rust).

If you started with Vue two years ago, you had to learn Vue 3 shortly after that. With a new Vuex. Which has been dropped since in favor of Pinia. Oh, Vite has been developed since, so you may want to add this to your stack, because it makes compiling during development so much faster. Also, be aware of all the breaking changes that Webpack 5 has introduced. I hope front end development will be more stable in future,…

The Vue 3 disaster (in my opinion) shook my trust in the framework forever. I immediately knew this is not a framework I will spend any more time in. What if I "upgrade" my apps to 3 and then Vue 4 comes along with yet another fundamentally different concept? This is not acceptable for apps with any kind of long time support requirement. Yes I know, Vue 2 paradigms are still usable in 3 but they feel very deprecated.

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

#50

Post by fny »

azemetre wrote: post #43
sjtindell wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure fashion feels like the right term. People just assume newer equals better. So they want to use the latest and “greatest”.

This sounds exactly like fashion to me. One just has to look at how often design has changed over the last decade with the many fads and worst UX. I feel like when you have an org of designers they will justify in wanting to redesign everything because why else do you need them? The same can be said for some POs and devs as well IMO.

Yup. The most brutal environments I've ever worked in canned design folk very quickly once a cost crunch arrived. Some startups would even can designers first to save cash.
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