Fresh – Next-gen web framework

Believe me, I hate the toolchain/buildchain as much as anyone. Especially TypeScript (see below). Luckily, Next.js also takes care of all that too! Out of the box it preconfigures all of it with sane defaults. `npm start` and you have a working server with transpilers all seamlessly configured, and when you change a line of code it just hot refreshes in the browser. On a `git push` to Vercel or a similar capably platform, the server transparently does all that and gives you a sandboxed preview environment for that specific build. It is magical.

But really, what I meant about "writing code not like the old days" isn't so much about the shitty toolchain (which Next helps with, but I agree it's shitty). Rather, it's the ability to write code like:

{widgets ? widgets.map(widget => {widget}}

Basically, the ability to compose pages & apps out of components (which different developers can work on), and the ability to manage state in a central controller via Redux or useContext to avoid race conditions and the such. That sort of stuff is REALLY hard to do with plain HTML and JS, especially where there are multiple developers involved. React isn't a magical cure-all, it just makes it easy to componentize large apps into smaller areas of concern.

The shitty buildchain isn't a feature, it's an unfortunate side effect of browsers being limited to JS. Essentially it's a "compile" step that became necessary as the vanilla-JS developer experience wasn't able to keep pace with the complexity of desired business apps (and as devs of various skill levels flooded the market). So the developer tools kept growing, but they still had to be compiled/built into JS for the browsers. Next.js makes it relatively painless, compared to how it was just 3-4 years ago. But I agree, I hate that this is a step at all.

Ugh, as for TypeScript... I get that it's a necessary evil, but I spend more time fighting it than actual bugs... coming from PHP, it was already common practice to manually typecheck and coerce everything when needed, anyway. TypeScript often felt redundant and overly sensitive, especially when it came to async nullables, causing false alarms that React could just've silently handled with {isLoaded ? : }

But TypeScript is optional anyway. It's a superset/addon on top of JS, so you never have to use it if you don't want to. If it's scaffolded for you in someone else's project, usually it's just a matter of a either using a .JS extension instead of .TS, or adding a ts-nocheck or similar to that file. Other devs may hate you for that though, when your object or props ends up breaking theirs... so it's definitely a conversation worth having first :)

If it weren't websites it would have been native apps.

Microsoft alone has made more proprietary native app frameworks for Windows in the last 15 than hipster Javascript developers had to learn new frameworks for work.

What makes you believe the community left him behind? And he's only wrong from your perspective, especially as you say you aren't working in this domain.

> It is using silly naming conventions in filenames as an alternative to specifying routes. eg /users/[name].tsx for /users/:name

Its a convention also used by Next.js, so it is just sticking to existing conventions.

> There is no documentation about the islands or how they are implemented.

Documentation is still only partial & incomplete.

> It says there is no build step but there has to be one because v8 runs JavaScript not TypeScript

This is a module for Deno, which does that under the hood, it isnt something a deno user would have to be concerned with.

I recently wrote a small web app.

I started with https://alpinejs.dev/ linked via CDN, and OpenJSCAD, also linked via CDN - I wrote basic html, marked it up with alpine `x-model` and `x-data` tags, and sprinkled a little vanilla js on top. Everything worked well and I got 80% of the way through the project.

In the final 20% I ended up adding a bundler (parcel), so I could bring in an scss framework and override its variables. While it added a fair bit of complexity to the project (dev dependencies, parcel config files) I gained lighter files via parcel's tree-shaking and minification, auto-recompilation/reload during development, and re-usable html partials via `posthtml-include`. I'm also set up to swap to typescript quickly, if the project gets more complex and I start to get annoyed with the lack of compile-time type checking.

So, it's 2022, and you can write a web app without any of the things you mentioned (transpilers, package managers, typescript). Yes, adding even one of them nets you a 100+ dependency node_modules directory - but the reason we keep adding them to our projects is the things it gives us are NICE, and the cost (complexity) is mostly worth it.