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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#401

Post by jongjong »

mplanchard wrote: post #2

I 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…

Part of the problem is that React monopolized the entire space and most other frameworks became legacy; not able to maintain even a tiny community.

The sad thing is that React's success, much like its parent company (Meta) is due primarily to network effects and not to merit.

This is why frontend development is so bad these days.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#402

Post by lenkite »

cyberax wrote: post #296
wolvesechoes wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI." "People who have never touched any UI tech until HTML/JS have no clue how good they have it" Tech like: - Delphi/Free Pascal, where usually code from 20 years ago compiles today with minor adjustments? - Qt, developed and maintained for over 30 years, currently at 6th major re…

On the other hand, I can write a very complicated graphics-related app in React+tons_of_libs within _days_. It took me months to do that in Win32 API in 2005. The developer velocity enabled by React is insane.

Your win32 app would have been much faster with much less memory hogging though. I would prefer to run that compared to your React app.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#404

Post by squidsoup »

mplanchard wrote: post #2

I 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…

You could make exactly the same complaint about python packaging. We've gone from setuptools, to pip, to poetry and now uv.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#405

Post by jongjong »

pjmlp wrote: post #213
Aurornis wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s just nuts to me the degree to which FE development as a whole seems to embrace the breaking change, the deprecation, etc. I’m amazed at how much of this is driven by the FE influencers. The FE world has embraced social media, YouTube, and even Twitch to a degree that I haven’t seen in other domains. Influencers in these areas need to have a constant stream of fresh material to stay relevant, so they’re always…

Yeah, back in my day being an "influencer" required being able to crack copy protection mechanisms and add an intro into the loading screen, or animations deemed impossible in the given hardware, while remaining anonymous behind a group handle. With fame being slowly propagated via tapes and floppies sent by mail, or some BBS archives. Now you comment on what others do, or commit single function packages.

True, the barrier to becoming a tech influencer are very low now and yet it's harder than ever. This suggests that dumb luck plays an increasing role.

Current tech influencers are generally smart and qualified but they aren't experts in anything specific and they aren't innovative in any way. They are chosen by algorithms out of a large pool of possible candidates.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#406

Post by yawnxyz »

poncho_romero wrote: post #282
yawnxyz wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Newbies should read MDN and ignore everything else. I think people forget how inaccessible it is for a newbie to start writing pure javascript directly from the API reference. People need tutorials and walkthroughs, and need to build a an internal understanding of how these all work. Frameworks help them abstract all that

MDN has exactly those kinds of tutorials and walk throughs! It’s not all API documentation

I've been using MDN for a decade, and this is a TIL!

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#407

Post by thaumasiotes »

acdha wrote: post #384
0x000xca0xfe wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 did that a few years ago and it was fascinating: not only did it remove near-weekly React dependency churn, it produced significant performance improvements (multiple orders of magnitude better update speed - and yes, I did the usual incantations), and the total lines of code in our repo actually went down and it was easier code because it just did what was necessary without having to deal with layers of abstractio…

> but a lot of younger developers only ever really learned React and are stuck the IE6 era it was designed around

Last release of IE6: 2008

Concerted campaign to make everybody stop using IE6: 2009

Microsoft joins that campaign: 2011

First release of React: 2013

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#408

Post by nullpoint420 »

uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #336
nullpoint420 wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it _doesn't_ use web standards. It has it's own mental model and gotchas just like any other framework.

It does. It bridges a purely server-rendered architecture with a SPA really nicely, and does it mostly with web standards. You don't need to run any client-side JS with a Remix app. It's not perfect, but there are a lot of benefits to its approach. I won't try to argue there's no front-end treadmill: there absolutely is, and I had to laugh reading the current top comment because I just had to migrate off Apollo CLI a…

> mostly with web standards

IMO, the pain from "mostly" starts to show when integrating React Router v6 with legacy frameworks and applications. I'm sure if you go all in on React Router v6 it's great.

At my $DAYJOB we are migrating to Remix w/ GraphQL Federation. It's been a pain.

Especially because we haven't finished any of these migrations:

* ExtJS -> JQuery

* JQuery -> React class components

* React class components -> MobX-observed components

* Observable MobX components -> functional React components with context

* Functional React Components with context -> React Router v6

* React Router v6 -> Remix w/ GraphQL federation

I understand my situation is unique - I'm just bitter from needing to know ~6 different frontend technologies at once. Let alone all the Not-Invented-Here-Syndrome abominations in our codebase.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#409

Post by viraptor »

ninininino wrote: post #208
Aurornis wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s just nuts to me the degree to which FE development as a whole seems to embrace the breaking change, the deprecation, etc. I’m amazed at how much of this is driven by the FE influencers. The FE world has embraced social media, YouTube, and even Twitch to a degree that I haven’t seen in other domains. Influencers in these areas need to have a constant stream of fresh material to stay relevant, so they’re always…

I'm only recently getting into some of the dev influencer stuff (and enjoying watching some!), I've discovered Primeagen and Theo but that's about it. Are you willing to name some names? I am trying to still form my mental model about these people and what I should pay attention to and what I should ignore.

Prime is almost an anti-influencer. He promotes not adding dependencies more often than not. He's the guy making fun of the Ai craze, while also genuinely reviewing the recent releases and saying people should just learn to code instead. I really wouldn't put him in this general category of fe influencers discussed here.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#410

Post by edwinjm »

divan wrote: post #195
mplanchard wrote: post #2

I 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…

The worst thing is that it's a cultural aspect. This deprecation and breaking stuff hell is a result of millions of micro-choices. "Why not rename MultiselectDropdown into MultiSelectButtonDropdown! And maybe replace the API of that component to a completely new one! Sounds like a cool idea!". Thousands of person-hours are spent daily for fixing results of such 'extremely important'™ breaking changes. There is simply…

What are you talking about? Websites from ten or twenty years ago are still working. If there's one technology with good backwards compatibility, then it's JavaScript.
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