Love a pro-Web Platform post
Really every single point made is well taken, even the if-you-gotta-use-a-JS-framework one(s)
The Frontend Treadmill
131–140 of 722 posts
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#132As an embedded developer I've long felt the web folks were crazy changing their frameworks all the time. They are not doing anything on the web we haven't done before. Most of the concepts are right out of the mainframe era, and we switched to dumb terminals and PCs for a reason (not always good reasons - there are pros and cons to both approaches)
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many dependencies does your package.json file declare? Which versions of node/npm does your team use? If you're on recent-enough versions and are using any popular libraries, you will have seen the deprecation notices pile up during npm install for downstream dependencies.
None? I use it from ClojureScript. I've been maintaining a React-based app with Semantic UI for 10 years now.
Then you aren't doing what the author is talking about.
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
How many dependencies does your package.json file declare? Which versions of node/npm does your team use? If you're on recent-enough versions and are using any popular libraries, you will have seen the deprecation notices pile up during npm install for downstream dependencies.
None? I use it from ClojureScript. I've been maintaining a React-based app with Semantic UI for 10 years now.
Do you mean your package.json literally has no dependencies declared (or you don't even have package.json)? If so, you're not using frontend tooling like 98% of development teams.
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#135I have recently been doing some upgrades to the build system for our FE code to swap out yarn for pnpm. I’m normally a backend engineer, but I’ve spent plenty of time in the JS mines. The most frustrating thing about dipping in to the FE is that it seems like literally everything is deprecated . Oh, you used the apollo CLI in 2022? Bam, deprecated, go learn how to use graphql-client or whatever, which has a totally d…
decides to swap out a working package manager for another for no apparent reason
"Why do JS people keep doing something new for no apparent reason?"
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm... React, Backbone, jQuery. SwiftUI, AppKit, Cocoa, Carbon, Toolbox. WinUI 3, UWP, WinRT XAML, WPF, WinForms, Win32 GDI. --- Of course this is misleading, because React has had so much internal churn. But desktop toolkits also have churn.
You left out other 150 major web frameworks.
I also left out Qt, Swing, etc. on the desktop. I'm comparing a direct lineage of replacements, not showing diversity of choice.
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#137If you're in the java world, I feel that Vaadin the "java-only" frontend framework is heavily underused. Yes, http sessions, but no it's not a big deal unless you're scaling beyond 10k+ users and even then so. It's been around for 20+ years, with paying commercial features if needed and they seem to have survived from JSF all the way through the latest version of sveractular.
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#138As an embedded developer I've long felt the web folks were crazy changing their frameworks all the time. They are not doing anything on the web we haven't done before. Most of the concepts are right out of the mainframe era, and we switched to dumb terminals and PCs for a reason (not always good reasons - there are pros and cons to both approaches)
Which web folks have been changing their frameworks all the time?
If anything, I think a valid criticism of modern/current web development is that it's entirely a React monoculture. I'm happy writing react, and have been at countless companies for the past 10 years.
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
Class components and HOCs aren’t deprecated though.
They're very much not "best practices", and will be deprecated soon (if they're not already).
But they're not deprecated. Where's the forced churn?
Every place that I've been at has made the gradual shift to migrate stuff away from class components as new stuff gets built or refactored. Seems like a pretty common development habit.
Re: The Frontend Treadmill
#140I have recently been doing some upgrades to the build system for our FE code to swap out yarn for pnpm. I’m normally a backend engineer, but I’ve spent plenty of time in the JS mines. The most frustrating thing about dipping in to the FE is that it seems like literally everything is deprecated . Oh, you used the apollo CLI in 2022? Bam, deprecated, go learn how to use graphql-client or whatever, which has a totally d…
And the craziest part is that it is built on top of JS/HTML which is an extremely stable technology at heart. 15 years ago I wrote a small (5KLOC) vanilla JS webapp that is still in daily use by around 10 people without a single line changed. It held up better then my Win32 applications! Almost all of the front end churn is simply a political/organizational failure.
I build simple applications for personal use like issue tracker, day planner, etc,. By default if you ask Claude it will generate React for frontend but I ask it to use HTML/CSS/JS instead. Because as a backend developer that makes sense to me. I find it hard to read the react code and want to avoid having dependency on npm.
It's surprising how well the core technology works without fancy front end frameworks. Claude does most of the grunt work related to CSS/JS allowing me to focus on more interesting things. I only have to do few minor changes here and there which I am happy to do.