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Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

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Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#511
post #394

Rich Harris has done a lot of great work. Until esbuild came along, Rollup was the only sane JS bundler for those of us who can’t stand Webpack. Svelte has some interesting concepts, albeit I am planning to stay with React. His code is always interesting to read. Then there’s Vercel. I was a big advocate for them years ago, back when they were Zeit. I used them in production at multiple companies and I contributed to…

Hey, Lee from Vercel. I'm sorry you had a bad experience here. If you want to email lee @ vercel, I'd love to hear what we could have done better.

Hi Lee. I appreciate the offer but the simple answer is that Vercel abruptly pivoted away from backend oriented services. That broke everything I built on the Now v1 platform and there wasn't anything to do but switch to other providers. It was stated that migration to Now v2 would be simple but that never materialized in time for the Now v1 shut down. On top of that, I encountered a lot of bugs with the deployment system when the new infrastructure started coming online, where it would auto deploy to data centers that couldn't run Now v1 apps and then the CLI would crash. I tried to be understanding, given you were a startup in a competitive space. It was unfortunate but I decided to at least continue using your domains and DNS features. But then the format of the zeit.world nameservers changed a couple of times and again with relatively short notice. Other frustrations... the domain search & buy page used to be public, now it requires a login for seemingly no reason (trying to keep bots out?). The marketing of early Zeit was all about embracing open standards and now Vercel is basically the exact opposite, with proprietary solutions for running frontend projects being at the heart of the product. I can only guess as to why it unfolded that way, but the transition was extremely rough for people who bought into the original vision. I just logged in now to transfer out some domains I still have in there and discovered that years later you still don't have a way for customers to change their domain's nameservers other than contacting support. That's just user hostile. A lot of people would say that is a dark pattern. I've literally never encountered another registrar that didn't have a simple button to change my domain's nameservers. Having to contact support to do this was excusable when your company was only a year old, but at this point it looks negligent, if not deliberate.

If you want more details, my contact info is here: https://seth-holladay.com/contact

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sounds like an easier process for you, but at the cost of your users. This proliferation of web tooling when it clearly doesn't suit the environment (desktop) is part of the reason why our software is getting slower, even as our hardware is improving.

Not always at the cost of the users? If dceddia is able to add features and fixes more quickly, that's good for users too. And if Svelte on the desktop becomes popular, people will likely come up with more efficient options. For example, a more efficient Electron or something like "Svelte Native", which could be a good thing. I'd love if all software were more efficient, but getting up to speed on a new platform has…

Not clear from your wording, but Svelte Native incidentally does exist:

https://github.com/halfnelson/svelte-native

It's a Svelte renderer for NativeScript (a framework targeting iOS and Android), rather than being a port of React Native to Svelte.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#513
Why has this discussion become a Svelte vs React war? React is not going anywhere, Svelte is pretty cool and very young and it's exciting and it will be fun to see what cool new patterns emerge from larger use, as much as React patterns changed with time. I started with Emberjs (which i love and had some faults), then move to React (which i love and had some faults), then Vue (which i love and had some faults) and now I am trying Svelte, which i love and has some faults. That's what maintainers do, make their frameworks better.

people saying that they don't understand the new toy as well as the old toy they are used to...i mean...yeah! and people saying that devs write bad code because of the framework, remember how much logic and bad code was in the view layer of mvc frameworks, how much logic and bad code was in class initializers and lifecycle methods in react components etc.

Give svelte some time and contribute to make it better if you care!

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#514

I have recently joined a team that had invested in Svelte. I had previous experience in Angular and React. I was happy with React, but I decided to drink the koolaid and go all-in and do my best with Svelte. 6 months later, we're moving to React. It is partly because our Svelte code was messy enough to warrant a rewrite, and partly because we wanted to leverage the React ecosystem in that rewrite. It was also partly…

This is unfortunate for your team, but most of your conclusions are not adequate. 1. Actually, Svelte has much less "magic" involved than React. Sveltes abstractions are not leaky. The reactivity might be more difficult to understand. But the rules are well defined. They are strange - no doubt - but not leaky. When looking at the generated code it's actually much more obvious what is going on than what React is doing…

> Two way data binding is not a constant source of bugs

Every team using AngularJS _did_ have those problems (not to say it didn’t have some niceties also). It was one of the big architectural changes in Angular (2+) as a direct result. React does not have this feature; passing down a setter function is not the same as automatic 2-way binding.

As to your first point, different things feel like magic to different people, so it’s really hard to debate this with other people with different perspectives unless maybe your talking about single specific instances. It’s like trying to tell someone they don’t feel cold because you don’t feel cold or vice versa.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#515

I have recently joined a team that had invested in Svelte. I had previous experience in Angular and React. I was happy with React, but I decided to drink the koolaid and go all-in and do my best with Svelte. 6 months later, we're moving to React. It is partly because our Svelte code was messy enough to warrant a rewrite, and partly because we wanted to leverage the React ecosystem in that rewrite. It was also partly…

React has special syntax for reactivity. What is useEffect? Is it a native JS function? I don't understand why JSX is still being used. Why should I a HTML developer change how I write HTML for a framework? And why doesn't it allow style tags? Svelte lets me use HTML, style tags even a script tag. The only framework that is close to HTML is Svelte. The second version even had .html extension which is now .svelte. ===…

> And why doesn't it allow style tags?

You can 100% use style tags in React, they just aren’t automatically wrapped in module/component scope. Just like normal HTML style tags, actually.

As for JSX, I personally have always hated HTML template languages (“now which slightly-different version of the for iterator does this template get use?”) but I also recognize that there are other people who have opposite preferences. JSX-in-JS and template-directives-in-HTML are both valid approaches and it’s great that there are solutions to cater to various preferences. Trying to argue one down because you don’t like it is like arguing that your favorite color is factually superior.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#517
post #88

I've been pretty skeptical about SPAs but having tried out Svelte for a few side projects, I have to admin I was probably directing my skepticism to the wrong thing, probably React was the cause of my dislike for SPAs. Svelte looks really awesome and the simplicity it brings back is invaluable. I really wish it takes off, for real. Looks very promising.

FWIW I would give Inertia a look. I’ve been using it as the glue between an SPA and my backend, and for me it’s been a best of both worlds experience. Nearly stateless front-end, atomic deploys, easy to understand, no client side routing. Yet you still get the very snappy SPA experience and the nice DX from componentization of your UI. I highly recommend it.

Yeah, I really like the middle ground approach, but having tried almost everything in the category, my favourite by a long margin is Unpoly.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree 100%. The migration from componentDidMount, componentDidUpdate, etc to useEffect was a major regression in terms of readability. The return function in useEffect vs. componentWillUnmount is just terrible. This is always a bizarre topic for juniors.

I actually think that useEffect is an amazing abstraction. It lets you group related functionality like subscribing and unsubscribing into one place and makes it very difficult to leak stuff or use stale values. I didn’t write many class components beforehand though, so my mental model didn’t have to change all that much.

Same experience, I've started working with React when Hooks were introduced in a greenfield project. My last experience with JavaScript was jQuery and Angular 1. I was blown away by the functional-declarative approach of React Hooks, I can't believe that people haven't used it before.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#519
post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You often copy html snippets into your code, for example from tailwind or bootstrap samples. This is easier in JSX syntax; you'd just need to copy and fix up some attribute names. I literally never do this, but I suppose there are people who use React/JSX as a glorified templating library. Even then I probably wouldn't do this and rather use a proper templating library where HTML is valid.

It's very common if you're working with Tailwind (since the markup is self-contained). No need to be condescending.

Sorry, I did not mean to be condescending. I do use Tailwind, but even then I don't really copy-paste HTML examples.

Re: Rich Harris joins Vercel to work on Svelte full time

#520
post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But what does ‘#await someFetch’ actually do ? The thing I like most about react is that it’s just executing plain Javascript most of the time.

> The thing I like most about react is that it’s just executing plain Javascript most of the time. Then explain what hooks do ;) Hooks are decidedly not Javascript (even if they look like Javascript), and are a much more weird construct than {#await promise}

No, they are JavaScript, it is array based programming wrapped in a reactive functional-declarative approach. Simply array of objects cascading with state. {#await promise} is more cryptic than any useHook function implementation.
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