Why I Hate Frameworks (2005)

Who is going to maintain the React app in 3 years? Who is going to work with the various "repairments" made to get normal browser behavior back into a SPA? History, back button, forward button, bookmarkability, context menu (if modified). The original developer will have moved on to the next gig. Are you going to rebuild, or pay even more for the next developer with more experience, to subject themselves to work with this?

This is the hidden cost associated with such decisions. If you decide to make it an SPA, you are automatically opting in for paying wages of frontend devs for the next years and not only that, you are probably opting in for them to need longer time to get browser staples back working. Things like a navigation, that could be a rather simple construct, maybe 1 or 2 days of work for rendering simple HTML templates on the server, with some nice CSS styling, can suddenly take weeks to implement and adjust. Can the most likely little need for SPA justify this extra cost?

Usually you are also not only having one frontend developer, but multiple ones to pay, since you don't want all the knowledge in one hand only.

Take a good developer salary and this can easily get into the millions over the years.

> Who is going to maintain the React app in 3 years?

Uhm, developers? Using projects documentation?

> Who is going to work with the various "repairments" made to get normal browser behavior back into a SPA? History, back button, forward button, bookmarkability, context menu (if modified).

I never had to manually “repair” any of that. Most often you just don't need them. Why would you use a back button in an image editor or an IDE?

> The original developer will have moved on to the next gig.

Developer, singular? Are we taking about small projects here again?

> Are you going to rebuild, or pay even more for the next developer with more experience, to subject themselves to work with this?

In my personal experience, React projects were one of the nicest codebases to work with. I came to projects 2-4 years old, found great documentation, good architectural decisions, and was able to compete a ticket on the first day.

Overall, I think it’s a difference in experience. I build complex web applications. IDEs. User interfaces with complex, customisable data widgets updated in real time. People I talk with about web development are building 3d visualization platforms with C++ compiled to WebAssembly. Games. Image editors.

What your are talking about seem to be simple CRUD apps. I have built those with server-rendered templates, yes (here's a takehome for some company from a couple of years back: https://github.com/golergka/url-shortener).

However, a lot of apps _seem_ to be simple CRUD apps in the beginning, until you anticipate future features and other requirements that will force you to adopt a frontend framework all too late. Do you need a form with search over content from the server? You need a system to query data and cache the results. Update data in real time with websocket connection, while also allowing your user to edit it? You need a system to consolidate state. Save user's data in local storage? Also local state, but also schemas and migrations for when your app updates. Table of 100s of thousands units of data, which user should be able to filter, sort and edit, with updates from the server too? Don't even get me started. There's a lot of other examples I'm too lazy to type. Overall — you either adopt a proper frontend framework or try and implement it in “simple JS” and then spend much more time fighting a lot of subtle bugs that simply would not happen if you used proper abstractions and tools.

Almost certainly not. It happened over 20 years ago so my memory is fuzzy, but I’d guess I still had to tell it which formula I wanted to integrate with. So to study I just had to be able to identify the correct formula. You might argue that’s the not much harder than by hand, but I was exceedingly lazy (still am, but now married with kids so it’s buried deep haha).

Why doesn't "Why I Hate Frameworks" appear in your list? From dang's post it looks like that exact title has appeared 8 times?

Possibly related: have you considered making your aggregator ignore punctuation and case in addition to the year indicators?

And the updated list, 5+ appearances:

       1   14 I'm Peter Roberts, Immigration Attorney Who Does Work for YC and Startups. AMA
       2   11 Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine
       3   10 Openssl Security Advisory
       4   10 The TTY Demystified
       5    8 Why GNU Grep is Fast
       6    7 Cool URIs Don't Change
       7    7 How to Read Mathematics
       8    7 The Architecture of Open Source Applications
       9    7 You and Your Research
      10    6 -2000 Lines of Code
      11    6 A Primer On Bézier Curves
      12    6 Advanced Programming Languages
      13    6 Bit Twiddling Hacks
      14    6 Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures
      15    6 How Not to Sort by Average Rating
      16    6 How to Be a Programmer: a Short, Comprehensive, and Personal Summary
      17    6 How to Write a Spelling Corrector
      18    6 Keep Your Identity Small
      19    6 Ten Rules for Web Startups
      20    6 The Bipolar Lisp Programmer
      21    6 The Tao of Programming
      22    6 Why I Hate Frameworks
      23    6 Why Lisp?
      24    5 A Regular Expression to Check for Prime Numbers
      25    5 A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
      26    5 Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design
      27    5 Ask HN: Idea Sunday
      28    5 Ask HN: What Are You Working On?
      29    5 Ask HN: Who's Hiring?
      30    5 Beej's Guide to Network Programming
      31    5 Data Structure Visualizations
      32    5 Dna Seen Through the Eyes of a Coder
      33    5 Game Programming Patterns
      34    5 How Software Companies Die
      35    5 How to Become a Good Theoretical Physicist
      36    5 How to Design Programs, Second Edition
      37    5 Latency Numbers Every Programmer Should Know
      38    5 Learn C and Build Your Own Lisp
      39    5 Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
      40    5 Learning Advanced Javascript
      41    5 Let's Build a Compiler
      42    5 Notation As a Tool of Thought
      43    5 Statistical Data Mining Tutorials
      44    5 Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics
      45    5 Teach Yourself Programming In Ten Years
      46    5 Terms of Service; Didn't Read
      47    5 The Book of Shaders
      48    5 The Case of the 500-Mile Email
      49    5 The Early History of Smalltalk
      50    5 The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing
      51    5 What ORMs Have Taught Me: Just Learn SQL
      52    5 Who Can Name the Bigger Number?
      53    5 Why I Left Google
      54    5 Why Lisp Macros Are Cool, a Perl Perspective
      55    5 Why Open Source Misses the Point of Free Software
      56    5 Why to Start a Startup In a Bad Economy
      57    5 You Can't Tell People Anything