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The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

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Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#41

Post by nl »

bayraktar wrote: post #29
nl wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you are missing the point. React/Vue/Angular/Whatever are different flavours of the "framework oriented front end development" thing. Yes there differences in both technices and degree you are forced to use only that framework but the principles are essentially the same.

So what other kind of thing do you suggest (and which currently has some traction)?

I don't agree with the Twitter thread but the implied alternative is serverside HTML and unclear what is the solution for rapid UX on the client.

Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#42

Post by christophilus »

Beltalowda wrote: post #34
christophilus wrote: post #3

Ah, yes. Everyone’s favorite whipping boy: the front end developers. I don’t think the last decade was a mistake. React (and Preact and similar) are my favorite ways to build out UIs. I prefer it to every other thing I’ve tried— and I’ve tried just about every other thing, including building native UIs for a decade. It’s not perfect. I think we’ll find a better approach eventually, which is why I’m fine with the chur…

> It’s not perfect. I think we’ll find a better approach eventually, which is why I’m fine with the churn. The churn is part of the search for something better. People have been building UIs for quite a while now; from before a large percentage of people reading this were born. It's not exactly a new thing. I have generally found building UIs a bit painful in any language, so sure, let's go find a better solution, I'…

No argument from me, there.

I’m not going to defend the instability of the rest of the JS ecosystem. It’s totally insane. I try to minimize my deps as much as possible, but even so, they’re in the double digits.

My side project at the moment is a zero-dependency stack.

That said, React itself is pretty stable. My guess is that an upgrade from a 3 year old version would be painless. And I still think React / Preact are the best approach that I’ve found for building UIs. It’s quite painful to go back to templating (ERB or Go templates) by comparison.

Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#43

Post by expanseoftrees »

cehrlich wrote: post #14
christophilus wrote: post #3

Ah, yes. Everyone’s favorite whipping boy: the front end developers. I don’t think the last decade was a mistake. React (and Preact and similar) are my favorite ways to build out UIs. I prefer it to every other thing I’ve tried— and I’ve tried just about every other thing, including building native UIs for a decade. It’s not perfect. I think we’ll find a better approach eventually, which is why I’m fine with the chur…

Yeah, I think people who pretend that modern FE is possible without React or another similar framework haven't built a modern frontend and dealt with all the demands for interactivity that users have nowadays and the complexity this brings regarding rendering logic, state, etc. There's still a time and place for sending HTML and maybe a few tiny JS files down the wire, but for anything "application-like" it's just no…

I cannot wait for the next.js rfc. React server components are going to be awesome. You could say they’ve been a decade in the making.

Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#44

Post by mattgperry »

drcongo wrote: post #24
christophilus wrote: post #3

Ah, yes. Everyone’s favorite whipping boy: the front end developers. I don’t think the last decade was a mistake. React (and Preact and similar) are my favorite ways to build out UIs. I prefer it to every other thing I’ve tried— and I’ve tried just about every other thing, including building native UIs for a decade. It’s not perfect. I think we’ll find a better approach eventually, which is why I’m fine with the chur…

> React (and Preact and similar) are my favorite ways to build out UIs Sadly, they're not what your users want.

No post body was provided.

Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#45

Post by Beltalowda »

cehrlich wrote: post #14
christophilus wrote: post #3

Ah, yes. Everyone’s favorite whipping boy: the front end developers. I don’t think the last decade was a mistake. React (and Preact and similar) are my favorite ways to build out UIs. I prefer it to every other thing I’ve tried— and I’ve tried just about every other thing, including building native UIs for a decade. It’s not perfect. I think we’ll find a better approach eventually, which is why I’m fine with the chur…

Yeah, I think people who pretend that modern FE is possible without React or another similar framework haven't built a modern frontend and dealt with all the demands for interactivity that users have nowadays and the complexity this brings regarding rendering logic, state, etc. There's still a time and place for sending HTML and maybe a few tiny JS files down the wire, but for anything "application-like" it's just no…

I've built quite a few highly interactive webapps over the years both with and without "modern FE" (although more without), and I found the more "classic" approaches tend to be quite a bit faster than SPAs, and never really had serious problems with complexity.

I never understood this whole "it is literally impossible to do it without React" (or React alternatives) thing. I've seen it a few times now and it reminds me of 2005 when people were saying it's literally impossible to build any serious program without OOP. I don't really want to have a fight about which approach is "better"; I don't really care, maybe SPAs are better. And if you want to build SPAs then by all means do. If my boss wants me to build an SPA I'll go do it without complaining; maybe not my favourite approach but that's okay. But clearly they're not the only approach that can work well. The insistence that it is, is something I find rather off-putting.

I absolutely think you can do SPAs well; my favourite example is FastMail's web UI, it's pretty good and quite a bit of attention has gone in to various details such as the way the scrollbar/pagination works for large mailboxes. It's just hard to build a good SPA.

I borrowed quite a bit from FastMail's design when we built our own email solution a few years back with a more "classic" server-side templated approach, and I felt the UX was on par, and it was a very manageable project technically.

Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#46

Post by wellanyway »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #40

I'm at a startup that builds an e-comm platform. Currently on Next.js; evaluating Astro. We're slowly coming to the realization that none of these platforms are either simpler or faster than what we could do with modern vanilla. Some very basic things like show/hide images and blocks of text based on user selection require an obscene amount of code/complexity in React that in vanilla is just element.style.display = c…

It's been while since I've heard frontend devs even speak about actual frontend. Layouts, fonts, accessibility, that sort of thing.

Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#47

Post by bayraktar »

berkes wrote: post #39
bayraktar wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what other kind of thing do you suggest (and which currently has some traction)?

What about the tried and trusted "have some backend generate HTML and push that to the client"? It still works for me, has many benefits, and many downsides. But so do the "react-alike" frontend frameworks. There's no silver bullet. It cracks me up (and makes me sad) to see all the effort going into "hydrating, SSR and whatnots" in JS frameworks, where we move our ball of react-js-spagetti onto some deno-based-edge-f…

Okay, I'm with you - but I meant for, like, people who have some idea of what they're doing (and don't just impulsively reach for a massive framework to deal with routine content dispatch).

What do you suggest for manageable SPA-like development -- for those of us who have actually thought the matter through and have decided that's what we need (at least in certain corners of this otherwise lean and mean, mostly static / old-school website we're building)?

Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#48

Post by scrapcode »

rubyfan wrote: post #18
cynicalreason wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat, I was expecting some punchline .. it's just moaning without anything concrete

I couldn’t even get through it. I sort of hate Twitter threads. Lost are the days of making your point in 140 characters or less.

At first I found it surprising to start finding all of these Twitter threads making it to the front of HN and thought "well, it must be a really compelling message..." Now I just ignore them altogether. It is a very distracting medium for the longer posts, and that distraction shows through from the writers side as well.

Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#49

Post by christophilus »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #40

I'm at a startup that builds an e-comm platform. Currently on Next.js; evaluating Astro. We're slowly coming to the realization that none of these platforms are either simpler or faster than what we could do with modern vanilla. Some very basic things like show/hide images and blocks of text based on user selection require an obscene amount of code/complexity in React that in vanilla is just element.style.display = c…

> Some very basic things like show/hide images and blocks of text based on user selection require an obscene amount of code/complexity in React

That’s just a ternary conditional in React. How is it complex?

Re: The front end community wants to wash its hands of the decade we lost

#50

Post by CharlieDigital »

wellanyway wrote: post #46
CharlieDigital wrote: post #40

I'm at a startup that builds an e-comm platform. Currently on Next.js; evaluating Astro. We're slowly coming to the realization that none of these platforms are either simpler or faster than what we could do with modern vanilla. Some very basic things like show/hide images and blocks of text based on user selection require an obscene amount of code/complexity in React that in vanilla is just element.style.display = c…

It's been while since I've heard frontend devs even speak about actual frontend. Layouts, fonts, accessibility, that sort of thing.

When I interview front-end devs, I still focus on core fundamentals and I want to see if they can build simple interactions and layouts in HTML, CSS, and simple JS via jsfiddle. My assumption is that if they can do vanilla well enough, having them do React is easy enough. The reverse is often not the case.
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