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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)

#171

Post by nawgz »

ricardobeat wrote: post #170
nawgz wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol, where did you get that I maintain one stable app from? I additionally don’t see how your working conditions relate to churn in JS given that you could use the same stack for each of those projects, as I said, as far back as 5 years ago

You said 'It's a React/MobX collaborative model editing internal tool' so I assumed you're commenting based on that particular project. It's not a value judgement either way. The kind of development you do (product / projects / marketing) makes a huge difference in your experience, how often you get to start from scratch (= latest versions of everything) vs maintaining existing codebases. I don't think that's controv…

Yes, this whole time you’re assuming I’m doing the bare minimum, and that no one could be using the same tools.

Yet, here I am, new apps in hooks based react, old ones not, and the same stack delivering great performance in either case - DX is only suitable in some tho

I’ve used Context only, SolidJS, Angular, whatever you like these days, I still would only build real apps with MobX. Typescript is the only real change since 2017 you need, otherwise what’s newer is not what’s better since then. That’s the point. Take care and try to not get lost in the noise, it’s very different than what came before it

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

#172

Post by mbrodersen »

It isn’t and never has been. Nobody stops you from using the same tools for years, only upgrading when it is truly worth it. The “instability” of front-end development is a “problem” created by front-end developers themselves. Like most problems in software development I might add.

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

#173

Post by AishwaryaVenkat »

apatheticonion wrote: post #133

I would say the Web is unstable because it's a disruptive platform. Traditionally we build native clients, be it mobile or desktop, that work offline and connect to back end services. The modern web allows for that but in a simple, cost effective and cross platform way. Naturally this attracts developers from all backgrounds to target this platform for their projects. These various influences puts pressure on the pla…

Atatus Real User Monitoring can definitely help you to identify frontend errors and fix them when it is so unstable

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

#174

Post by spiralx »

mgkimsal wrote: post #166
escape_goat wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what it's like these days but I recall especially the pernicious 'evangelism'. People on a literal salary promoting frameworks like they were from marketing. As a bargain basement, self-taught, late web 1.0 dev more comfortable on the server side I remember rake-stepping the undiscussed limitations of Backbone JS, and then studying the ridiculous complexities of Angular 1 while reading post after post of…

> and then learning that the great leap forward for Angular 2 was "yeah we're going to throw all that bullshit out we were wrong." By the time I was done I genuinely had no interest left in me for another new framework, package manager, or library.... I've seen this more than a few times over the years, and it makes me a lot more skeptical of praise for anything new. Almost always the praise is about technical aspect…

> Marks of maturity of a project - acknowledging upgrade requirements, publishing upgrade guides, supporting previous versions for a publicly stated time range, etc.

All of which did happen for AngularJS. And you could still be using your AngularJS components within an Angular application today - or vice versa - thanks to the tools provided to migrate piecewise. End of life for AngularJS was only five months ago after a four year LTS period that started in 2018, given that Angular 2 was released in 2016 that's a five and a half year period where both frameworks were supported.

Libraries deciding to break everything without warning is definitely an issue that's caused me grief in the past. Moving from AngularJS was something we decided on and planned out well in advance.

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

#175

Post by spiralx »

api wrote: post #39
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.

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 go…

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

This gives me flashbacks to writing a Java applet (supporting the MS JVM!) in which my boss has decided AWT (no Swing lol) was verboten and implemented his own widgets. Which was great up until I had to implement dropdowns, because then you need a concept of z-ordering, which meant refactoring almost everything in order to include. And this pattern repeated several times for "simple" new features I was asked to add.

Writing a primitive windowing system with nested menus in GFA Basic and getting lost in a rabbit-hole browsing the Turbo Pascal object hierarchy as a teenager was a good way to teach me to not try and write my own UI library if I wanted to get anything else done :)

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

#176

Post by suction »

runarberg wrote: post #167
suction wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

3-4 months seems doable. We are usually asked to do it in a week or two.

That seems like a bad idea from an engineer perspective. The migration path is designed to be gradual, that migrated and legacy code can live side by side in production. I honestly don’t know why anyone would enact a policy of migrating all at once when there is an alternative.

The reason is superiors without an engineering background (but rather a "tech consultancy" background). Don't get me started.

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

#177

Post by dang »

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…

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#178

Post by dang »

lopatin wrote: post #62
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…

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.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#179

Post by xwolfi »

abraxas wrote: post #122
xwolfi wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends HOW you coded. I started JS at 11 yo in 2001, and became fulltime around 2012 - 2 more years of JS than you, I'm your grandaddy in this ever changing mess... I do not know Broccoli either. Googling it: "A fast, reliable asset pipeline, supporting constant-time rebuilds and compact build definitions" I raise my eyes to the ceiling and whine "why the hell isn't there an Oracle or IBM for JS to finally standardi…

Very, very few places will let you not use a framework nowadays. There is a ton of cargo culting around JS frameworks and coding vanilla is pretty much heresy land these days. Personal projects? Go for it. Commercial apps built for your employer? Good luck with that. Not only will you be raked over the coals for "reinventing the wheel" you'll also be blamed for any stumble along the way, whether it's related to using…

I was "born" after Struts was "obsolete" (so I had my honeymoon phase with Spring/Hibernate until I fixed so many mistakes in companies I decided using smaller surface tools and closer to the metal queries would actually save time) and never touched JSF :D CGI for me is prehistory loool.

However, employers dont need to be involved in choosing a framework or not. You ll notice that usually its the little bees building their resumes that bemoan non stop about migrating from react to vue or vue to react :D

I never heard a sales guy tell me: WHAT, it works fine, is cheap to maintain and has no stupid 10k levels dependency graph in npm ? I ll stop making money on this until you completely "standardize" it into a moving sand on npm. And dont forget a pipeline of 3 transpilers, you wouldnt want to write in a browser-native language, caveman.

I do use requireJS to split in nice files and import easily though I admit.

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

#180

Post by lopatin »

dang wrote: post #178
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.

Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Sorry dang.
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