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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)

#101

Post by randomtwiddler »

daenz wrote: post #98
randomtwiddler wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting how you can look down on front end for being new and naive while suggesting that Google is a fine reliable tech stack provider. I'm the opposite of everything about this post. A very experienced dev (>20 years professional experience) that has moved primarily to the front end recently in my career (gradually over 4 years). I won't touch flutter simply because the sole vendor and essential dependency…

If you're looking for a response, you're not really giving me much to respond to. Why do you think Google doesn't provide a "reliable tech stack" ? In any case, I wasn't suggesting that specifically (though I tend to agree with it), only that they have a coherent ergonomic vision by competent engineers.

Google doesn't have a track record of long term support for their projects. They readily cancel them when they want to.

I would hate to invest precious years into tech and apps to have the rug pulled out from under me because flutter entered the Google graveyard.

They do have competent engineers, and if they get sufficient community buy-in, I'll be much more open to it.

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

#102

Post by daenz »

randomtwiddler wrote: post #101
daenz wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're looking for a response, you're not really giving me much to respond to. Why do you think Google doesn't provide a "reliable tech stack" ? In any case, I wasn't suggesting that specifically (though I tend to agree with it), only that they have a coherent ergonomic vision by competent engineers.

Google doesn't have a track record of long term support for their projects. They readily cancel them when they want to. I would hate to invest precious years into tech and apps to have the rug pulled out from under me because flutter entered the Google graveyard. They do have competent engineers, and if they get sufficient community buy-in, I'll be much more open to it.

That's fair. I feel more confident about Google's OSS (like flutter) surviving than I do about Google's consumer products. The flutter community is very strong, and as far as offerings go, it's (imo) the strongest product that abstracts UI/UX development over web and mobile, and the demand for that abstraction is very real.

Plus having Dart (which feels a bit like Java, but less verbose) as the foundation language raises the bar in terms of library code quality (compared to Javascript at least)

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

#103

Post by mccorrinall »

ricardobeat wrote: post #91
thepasswordis wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to chime in here for anybody reading along: I work full time as a software developer doing react . I have got literally no idea what almost everything you listed is. "Broccoli"? I have heard: grunt, gulp, webpack, metro, redux, and recoil. The rest of those could be sarcasm for all I know.

These are only the mainstream ones I can remember, there have been a ton more! I guess if you've started post-2018 things have been a bit more stable, but there was quite a bit of churn to get here. And it's still happening - no two React projects are alike even in the enterprise. https://github.com/broccolijs/broccoli

That’s because react is a library, and not a framework. React doesn’t have opinions, that’s why you can find 300 state management libraries and 200 routers which do the same thing, just in different ways.

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

#104

Post by blueslurpee »

RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote: post #9

I think part of the reason is the evolution of common user networking. Initially, users had low bandwidth connections, and web pages were mostly static with links. Then came JavaScript interactivity and AJAX. As users bandwidth grew, we started having heavier frameworks and SPAs. I believe there is another revolution that is happening now because of decreased latency. Recently with protocols such as HTTP2, web socket…

Agreed, very interesting things going on in the "edge" space. I personally think this is why HN is so jazzed about things like fly.io. Super low latency opens up a whole new category of applications, it's a "step function" change in that regard.

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

#106

Post by throw_m239339 »

mccorrinall wrote: post #103
ricardobeat wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are only the mainstream ones I can remember, there have been a ton more! I guess if you've started post-2018 things have been a bit more stable, but there was quite a bit of churn to get here. And it's still happening - no two React projects are alike even in the enterprise. https://github.com/broccolijs/broccoli

That’s because react is a library, and not a framework. React doesn’t have opinions, that’s why you can find 300 state management libraries and 200 routers which do the same thing, just in different ways.

> That’s because react is a library, and not a framework.

React should be considered a framework.

React absolutely imposes a data model (unidirectional workflow) to the developer thus a certain code structure. The fact that it is light weight compared to Angular doesn't change the fact that React is a front end framework. React usage completely replaces the traditional way to interact with the DOM and manage DOM events, thus abstracting it.

> React doesn’t have opinions,

React becomes very hard to use if your data model isn't organized to suit React architecture.

It doesn't have opinions about everything (like AJAX or SPA routing) but it absolutely has an opinion about how you data objects should be structured.

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

#107

Post by rschachte »

pojzon wrote: post #72
lopatin wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! Part of the reason that I love these front-end threads is because inevitably somebody will make a fool of themselves by spouting anti-js-dev "backend master-race" nonsense, and this certainly did not let me down.

It would be true if I was working in backend development. I dont. JS is just not good enough for what we want it to do. Someone sooner or later has to make a decision to move further.

What is JS not good enough for w.r.t front-end dev in your eyes?

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

#108

Post by nawgz »

ricardobeat wrote: post #84
nawgz wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Webpack has been the de facto build system for react since 2017 Competing state libraries is to be expected but picking redux or mobx has let you use the same ones since 2017 JS itself has improved but hasn’t really ever deprecated anything, it just grows and adds terse methods to the language Npm and yarn are among the best package managers React hooks were the only major change you’ve touched on but even they didn’…

These are not really counterarguments to the fact that things change a lot here, and newcomers and veterans alike need to continuously learn, and pick the best. None of these started off as the default choice, I remember when each and every one of these was the weird / risky option.

They are very much counter arguments to the idea that there is big churn still happening.

Webpack 2 was in CRA in 2017

Redux and MobX have been the #1 and #2 state managements for that whole span, and clearly all the observable libs are successors of MobX after Proxy came out

Every language changes, many with breaking version changed that JS avoids

I don’t know how you’d point at package management as an issue in JS land

It’s just that every single popular community has massive amounts of clones or similar libraries, I don’t know how that qualifies as “churn” though. I maintain my 2017 apps including major version bumps with no issues today, using the same libraries and tools. The argument you’re making was fine in 2016 but is half a decade out of date.

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

#109

Post by taneq »

pojzon wrote: post #56

Frontend is unstable because it attracts ppl whose attention span is often lower than the one of a goldfish. Every JS frontend dev I met was speedrunning trying to prove himself by "inventing something new" which in fact was already a state of art. The amount of rehashing and reinventing the wheel with new catchy names in the field is staggering. TBH, if the field wants to improve -> its time to ditch JavaScript and…

To be slightly more charitable, front end attracts self-taught devs because the browser is the default dev environment on Windows and on phones/tablets and it’s far more accessible a new players than any other environment.

It’s more fun to write code and make stuff up than to find and evaluate libraries (especially when said libraries are written by self-taught devs), so people tend to reinvent rather than research.

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

#110

Post by taneq »

oraphalous wrote: post #95
pojzon wrote: post #56

Frontend is unstable because it attracts ppl whose attention span is often lower than the one of a goldfish. Every JS frontend dev I met was speedrunning trying to prove himself by "inventing something new" which in fact was already a state of art. The amount of rehashing and reinventing the wheel with new catchy names in the field is staggering. TBH, if the field wants to improve -> its time to ditch JavaScript and…

So your solution to the problem of the field re-inventing itself over and over is for it to... re-invent itself again.

Problem: there are N competing standards…
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