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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#511

Post by Izkata »

acdha wrote: post #418
thaumasiotes wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

It may be hard to remember now that we’ve had frequently-updated browsers for so long but not everyone updated promptly. That lead to a lot of now-vestigial frontend culture where developers would build around the oldest browser they couldn’t afford not to support. That colored a lot of low-level decisions about how events were implemented, false claims about virtual DOMs being fast or efficient, and especially the c…

The major turn for the average user was actually 2009/2010. IE6 usage seems to have dropped below 1% by 2012, still before React's public release: https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...

That said, I was on a team that was still supporting IE6 around 2014. We had clients, mostly in China from what I heard, that were required to use it because internal tooling had developed around it and their IT teams wouldn't let them upgrade.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#512

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#513

Post by johnfn »

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…

As a primarily frontend engineer who has "spent plenty of time in the Python mines", I feel exactly the same way. Oh my god, Python is a horrific mishmash of deprecated and impossible-to-upgrade libraries and dependencies. Honestly, I think it's significantly worse than the frontend - at least with the frontend, the scope of the damage is limited by TypeScript and the language limiting you to doing relatively sane things. In Python, you can do LITERALLY EVERYTHING, which leads to library authors doing LITERALLY EVERYTHING. Want to change how modules are imported? Go for it! Want to make a metaclass and break all assumptions about how a class operates? Have fun! Think your static typing will help you? Good luck - you can't even do trivial things like `Partial` or statically assert that two objects have the same type.

All this kvetching about libraries changing makes me laugh. The Python 2 -> 3 transition was so horrific that the last place that I worked at had a 100M Python monolith with no plans of EVER upgrading to 3. SqlAlchemy 1 -> 2 is an 8 step migration that requires a TOTAL rewrite, and if you break anything, YOUR SITE GOES DOWN. And then people complain because React optionally added hooks or something!

The weird thing is that the internet is full of posts about "The Frontend Treadmill", but no one ever seems to gripe about the converse.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#514

Post by andrewchilds »

bdlowery wrote: post #333
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…

Svelte will never overtake react. It won’t even overtake Vue.

Especially true with the runes update. imo, it traded away the thing that made it unique and truly great in the market: the feeling that you’re just writing vanilla HTML, JS, and CSS.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#515

Post by viraptor »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #448
viraptor wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Meanwhile Primagen: " I Am Using Cursor - CURSOR FOUNDER TEACHES ME CURSOR!!!!!!! #ad "

Go on, link a video where he actually recommends Cursor.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#516

Post by WuxiFingerHold »

ewzimm wrote: post #171
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…

That's fascinating, and I had no idea web dev influencers were so big. I checked, and there really are people with millions of followers doing development. Personally, the idea of learning anything related to coding through a video is extremely frustrating. It's a text medium. I want to look at things, take time, think it over, compare code, follow references, look up functions. That people like video formats isn't r…

It's not about learning (anymore). It's about consuming content. People spending (wasting) their time on X and YT are not there to learn something but to get their social media (dopamine) fix.

I hate YT, X, Insta. Don't even have an account. Some years ago there was really great content on YT, now it's mostly clickbait.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#517

Post by nophunphil »

tshaddox wrote: post #259
bloomingkales wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one: https://remix.run/ These grifters sell entire courses on the product, that's their game. So when you find an unmaintained Remix app at your company, well, the grifters got the ears of your junior devs :( And they just promote it and promote it: https://kentcdodds.com/blog/a-review-of-my-time-at-remix https://kentcdodds.com/blog/why-i-love-remix https://kentcdodds.com/courses Pure grift. But since most peo…

I think you're mistaken. I can't comment on the quality of Kent C. Dodds' educational content, but his formal affiliation with Remix was short-lived. The courses that he sells have no apparent affiliation with Remix (the open source project or the company). Incidentally, Remix is an open source project started by the React Router devs to create more framework features around React Router. React Router is probably one…

> React Router is probably one of the most widely deployed JavaScript libraries ever and is the furthest thing imaginable from a project created by grifters to sell online courses.

This is a funny example (to me) because in 2017, one of the two co-creators of React Router (Michael) came to my job and gave a two or three-day in-person training course on React. I think he also covered Redux and React Router. We had a great time getting to know him.

It turns out that Ryan and Michael spent a substantial amount of time and effort on a side business called React Training. It is fair to say that their speaking engagements were a solid revenue stream, but agreed - definitely not grifters.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#518

Post by WuxiFingerHold »

bob1029 wrote: post #80
antirez wrote: post #9

To jump off the treadmill is not using a fronted framework: at all, and not using a random one and not rewriting the code later. Server side rendering, JavaScript only when needed, no separation between backend and frontend folks in the company.

> no separation between backend and frontend folks in the company. This is the biggest gain available anywhere. When you have one engineer who is empowered to write SQL specifically crafted to pull the exact columns required to SSR a web view (which they are also responsible for), you don't need to spend a single second thinking about APIs or ORMs or whatever. You just need to know SQL and modern vanilla HTML/CSS/JS.…

> I think the end game is doing SSR of web content inside the RDBMS (e.g., Oracle APEX)

At my workplace our IT department uses APEX a lot for all kind of internal LOB apps. It works great as long as it supports what you need.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#519

Post by graphememes »

homebrewer wrote: post #249
numinoid wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure it's fair to characterize a repo with 6k + commits and the last being 10 hours ago as "pure grift".

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.

You know you can just read rfc's right? there is a reason they update the thing, because people use it. https://github.com/remix-run/react-router/discussions/catego...

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#520

Post by cyberax »

lenkite wrote: post #402
cyberax wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The choice really is between React and nothing. React (and Electron) enabled a lot of apps to be written that would not have existed otherwise.
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