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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#451

Post by graynk »

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…

I fully agree, _but_ it's not just frontend, it's the entire NPM ecosystem. Meaning it's not much better in NodeJS (or Deno/Bun/whathaveyou)

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#452

Post by nicoburns »

eximius wrote: post #383
jchw wrote: post #145

> Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years. I am predominantly not a frontend dev, but when I do do frontend work, (and I don't avoid it by any means,) I have been using React for the past... 10 years now? And while some sentiment has been moving towards Svelte, by the time Svelte overtakes React, it will have been in production for just as long probably. And Angular might eventually run out of steam…

React today looks very different from React from 10 years ago. Easily as different as being a different framework. So, there is some nuance, but the logic isn't dead quite yet.

Idiomatic React is different (it now uses hooks and functional components), but the old style of class based components with methods still works, and can be mixed and matched with the newer style so gradual migration is possible. There have been some deprecations over 10 years, but there are automated code migration tools for those.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#453

Post by api »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #450

I think this issue will slow down as LLMs become more prominent. I find myself being naturally dissuaded from the "shiny, new thing" because it means my LLM won't have a deep set of materials to draw from. Writing in Bevy was really hard because it was a niche language that has breaking changes every three months. Writing in Svelte has been decent/good, but LLMs constantly prefer using v4's syntax rather than v5's ru…

This sounds like it could also be a terrible thing: LLMs freezing progress in languages.

It’s kind of analogous to how the entire web became a slave to SEO.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#454

Post by SeanAnderson »

api wrote: post #453
SeanAnderson wrote: post #450

I think this issue will slow down as LLMs become more prominent. I find myself being naturally dissuaded from the "shiny, new thing" because it means my LLM won't have a deep set of materials to draw from. Writing in Bevy was really hard because it was a niche language that has breaking changes every three months. Writing in Svelte has been decent/good, but LLMs constantly prefer using v4's syntax rather than v5's ru…

This sounds like it could also be a terrible thing: LLMs freezing progress in languages. It’s kind of analogous to how the entire web became a slave to SEO.

I agree. I'm concerned with the implications, too.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#455

Post by wwweston »

mablopoule wrote: post #146
mplanchard wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree you can avoid it with care, but I do think it's a JavaScript problem, at least moreso than in other languages. The culture is one of acceptance of churn. It seems like everything from minor libraries to major frameworks is much more likely to introduce a breaking change in JS than in Rust, C++, or even python. I've never written any emacs lisp that I had to change when upgrading emacs, and the third-party lib…

I don't think it's a Javascript problem in the sense that it's due to intrinsics properties of Front-end developpement, or of NPM, but I do agree that's in a cultural problem in the Javascript ecosystem, especially around React. My theory is that there was a perfect storm around 2015 where everyone and their dog was encouraged to learn to code, especially by going through a coding bootcamp where they were mainly taug…

Probably not coincidentally, 2016 was the year that I decided I was done with front-end after about decade of focus.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#456

Post by [deleted] »

ng12 wrote: post #5

> Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years. I've been writing React professionally for over a decade at this point. I don't know what this guy's on about.

[deleted]

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#457

Post by colonelspace »

anymouse123456 wrote: post #447

I've been writing UX code professionally since the late 90's and for many years, I have led teams that build relatively complex UX software products at companies you've surely heard of. It took me about about 5 years before I began to realize no one I had met, had any idea how to do this work in a way that wasn't horrible. I held out hope, and thought maybe those other super-smarty-pants folks over there had it all f…

I agree with your sentiment.

I'm a designer but 80% of the time I implement user interfaces. I have to say that the worst user interface code comes from traditionally educated computer science people... it's almost always a huge pile of shit with layer upon layer of useless abstraction.

I think you're right... no one has it figured out, it's all a mess.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#458

Post by azemetre »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #314
homebrewer wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

E.g. react-router was ready 5990 commits ago. It is a grift, they keep rewriting it and reengineering the API over and over and over again just to be able to sell more training. Look at wouter for what is possible if your motivation isn't selling training material. It was written and left alone, it works just as well, it's stable and doesn't change for no reason.

Do you know anyone who bought courses on react-router? The documentation is right there for free.

Wasn't react-training.com owned by the react-router people? I wonder what the training consultants recommended to use for routing...

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#459

Post by Ataraxic »

PaulHoule wrote: post #66

I think of the strange case of react-router which has been through 7 versions, many of which were complete breaking rewrites. It's hard not to come to the conclusion that since they kept rewriting it, they didn't believe in any of them. Lately they made big changes because they want to support SSR but I couldn't give a flying F because we're not using SSR any more than I care about React Native support because we're…

I'm afraid you've thought more about react-router than the maintainers about the people using it.

I feel like the tradeoff has historically been between smaller, more composable libraries with more breaking changes and larger, more feature-filled libraries that move more slowly and care about their users.

react-router is the epitome of choosing the worst of both worlds with a healthy dose of disdain for their users.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#460

Post by [deleted] »

tshaddox wrote: post #435
cmgriffing wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While his formal affiliation may have been short-lived, do you think he got a cut of the sale to Shopify? If so, not disclosing that when he promotes Remix is a bit shady. Nice dude and all, but that is one thing I take issue with still.

I don't think it's weird to like a piece of software and have that lead you to work at the company that builds the software and also to develop an educational course about that software.

[deleted]
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