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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

#51

Post by christophilus »

z9znz wrote: post #35
cynicalreason wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

maybe people enjoy working with it .. I love it, I went from a systems admin/customer support to being a senior react dev, I learned angular, than some javascript, than some programming and then some more and some more.

Perhaps your love of JS/TS/whatever is based more on the path you took and your starting point than the tech you use. Having been through half a dozen programming languages and most phases of the evolution of web development, I have a very different perspective. The complexity and fragility of modern JS-centric web development would have been unimaginable to us 15 years ago. What started (as far as most people experi…

I’ve written quite a few old-school web apps in Rails and ASP.Net. Unless you stuck to really basic stuff, they were much harder for me to reason about than the React codebases I’ve been on. jQuery consists of trying to reason about accidentally over aggressive global event handlers and effects, etc.

I prefer the modern mess.

It’s still a mess, though.

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

#52

Post by CharlieDigital »

christophilus wrote: post #49
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?

I'd encourage you to write it once in vanilla and once in React in jsfiddle and compare the implementations.

Then consider the render model and how it would affect page time to interactive for a large content oriented page.

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

#53

Post by thunky »

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…

> all the demands for interactivity that users have nowadays and the complexity this brings regarding rendering logic, state, etc.

Are you sure users are really the ones demanding this?

It's more likely that "modern FE" is imposing this additional complexity on itself for other reasons, because most sites are still boring old crud apps that don't need anything "modern". The canonical example is the Todo app, which is...crud.

I don't think it's the users fault.

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

#54

Post by Beltalowda »

cynicalreason wrote: post #20
Beltalowda wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, that's the part that really kills me about JavaScript. I can deal with the language, npm, some curious conventions in the community, every "npm install" telling me I have 100+ security vulnerabilities. It's the whole "THIS IS THE MOST AWESOME THING OF AWESOMENESS SINCE THE INVENTION OF AWESOMENESS!!!!" that kills me, which is really just my snarky way of saying that I found there's generally some serious lack o…

maybe people enjoy working with it .. I love it, I went from a systems admin/customer support to being a senior react dev, I learned angular, than some javascript, than some programming and then some more and some more.

That's fine, but lots of people also enjoy working with Python. I happen to not particularly like Python all that much, and that's never really caused that much friction (responses tend to be "yeah, that part isn't very good" and/or "right, I see where you're coming from"). Frontend on the other hand...

I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush. Some of my best friends are frontend developers! But a community can have a certain "atmosphere" or "vibe" to it. I do a lot of Go programming these days, and I find the "vibe" in Go is one of self-righteous arrogant twattery. Does that mean every Go developer is like that? Of course not. But I found that's the overall "vibe" in the community nonetheless (it's a bit better than it used to be though).

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

#55

Post by berkes »

bayraktar wrote: post #47
berkes wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stat…

I'm not familiar enough with the current space.

But my preference would be something like: plain old server side rendered HTML with JS that enhances the site, adds some dynamicity etc. But in which a link or button-click usually is just fetching a new page over the wire.

This JS can (also) fetch data over the wire, websockets or such. And I wouldn't even expect it to be some fancy "progressive enhancement" - fine if the web-app doens't work without JS for me.

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

#56

Post by kethinov »

I thought it was a good thread.

For those unaware of the missing context, what he's talking about is how in the 2010s, progressive enhancement — long seen as a webdev best practice — was largely replaced by a JS-first approach by JS frameworks in practice.

It does seem like the JS-first bubble is deflating a bit, but I'm not sure it's on its way to fully popping like the Flash bubble did. I do agree it was a lost decade though. More than a decade. I miss when everyone agreed progressive enhancement was the way to go.

It's entirely possible to build a SPA without abandoning progressive enhancement, but the frameworks do not encourage those best practices. As such, it's rare to see a web app built with a framework that doesn't create a hard dependency on JavaScript or isn't an accessibility disaster.

When I reflect on the last decade of frontend development, the lesson I draw from it is everyone is susceptible to ill-conceived fads, including people who think of themselves as evidence-driven. We're good at convincing ourselves we're objective, especially at times when we're not.

What's really depressing is this tendency applies to all the applied sciences. Tons of people who think of themselves as motivated solely by evidence fall for terrible fads in their field all the time, including, terrifyingly, in areas like medical practices.

I think we'd all do better to spend less time emotionally attaching to our tools and more time looking at evidence and metrics in a dispassionate way. As Paul Graham once said, keep your identities small.

A great book that's vital to grokking this stuff is The Scout Mindset by Julia Galef. She argues we should always just go where the evidence leads. But our monkey brains are bad at this, so it takes a lot of conscious effort or we'll do it poorly. I think JS framework mania is yet more evidence of her thesis.

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

#57

Post by christophilus »

CharlieDigital wrote: post #52
christophilus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

I'd encourage you to write it once in vanilla and once in React in jsfiddle and compare the implementations. Then consider the render model and how it would affect page time to interactive for a large content oriented page.

I’ve written this sort of thing in both. Personally, I find the “make your view a function of your state” approach to be much easier to reason about and more maintainable. Obviously, not if the only thing your site does is this one feature. But as soon as your site becomes non-trivial, I prefer the functional / React approach.

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

#58

Post by drcongo »

mattgperry wrote: post #44
drcongo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Quoted post unavailable.

No post body was provided.

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

#59

Post by alcover »

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.

> hate Twitter threads

Me too. They are absurd, hard to read and a waste of resource (load time, requests, steaming pile of JS).

They sould be penalized/barred.

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