Things engineers believe about Web development

Everything running in a browser is interpreted. There is no reason for webdev to require a build step, and it largely does so because JS standards haven't delivered anything around static typing. Even a "this syntax is valid but ignored" would enable IDEs to provide checks via LSPs, but for no-build running.

Build steps and development iteration overhead is something to be avoided at all costs. For it to have been introduced, with multi-second latency, to web dev. is a sign of developer experience dropping off a cliff.

Time-to-iterate, tool quality, release speed, etc. are essential to being able to build mental models of code (etc.)

In practice, you can make both as complicated as you want, but SPA seems like a simpler starting point.

> https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... (28 results)

So at least some are saying something along those lines. I'm sure if you search Xitter you'll find even more hits.

I think the argument is usually not made in isolation like that though, and usually with exceptions. "Websites without heavy user interaction should work without JS", "Websites should work without JavaScript, unless based on live data" and so on, which makes a lot more sense.

I had some nostalgic notion that MVC was going to be a smooth ride. That all this JS cruft was slowing me down. Then I needed a search bar, then validation, then I kept running into weird surprises with Razor templates. After a month I ruefully concluded I'd have gotten it done a heck of a lot faster just using my usual stack.

I now regret all those times I complained about how much bloat there is in the JS ecosystem. Yes, is it possible to make crud apps with Razor, sure, people do it everyday. But for me, with a project with increasingly complex display logic and validation, I definitely should have tried a little harder to talk them into using Next and TS.

As an aside, I was surprised that getting HMR with C# is kind of a pain. I never figured out how to get it while debugging. So every time I wanted to debug some new issue with the template not sending data right to the controller (which felt like every few seconds of work) I'd have to restart the server and wait 10+ seconds for it to restart and then renavigate to where I was, reenter my form fields, and then try again. After I was done and wanted HMR, I'd have to restart the server again. That extra hassle really started to grind on my patience.