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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#561

Post by sethammons »

johnfn wrote: post #513
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 th…

I am back at a python shop and (again) pushing, successfully, Go. Python is molasses for teams for all the reasons you state and more.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#562

Post by ivan_gammel »

DidYaWipe wrote: post #509
tylerchurch wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always interpret “core” as “no libraries”. What can you do with just your browser and an HTML file? Poke through MDN and see what you find. Do you know about dialog? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/di... MutationObserver? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/MutationObs... URL? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/URL_API

Thanks! I looked at MutationObserver and wondered about the example: if (mutation.type === "childList") { console.log("A child node has been added or removed."); How can such changes occur to the DOM that aren't brought about by other code on the page? And if other code on the page brought them about, why didn't it also perform whatever the MutationObserver is doing? Anyway, not to get too mired in details... I've do…

Let‘s say you have an UI pattern that styles some element and defines possible interactions with it. You do not want business code to do that job, so it’s easier to have a decorator that detects certain elements on the page.

(This is a purely theoretical example coming from someone with lots of architectural experience, I didn’t use it before).

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#563

Post by __loam »

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…

GraphQL is such an exciting addition to the front end stack. Imagine, an entire new system you need to learn that cargo cult proponents love and also sucks ass to use.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#564

Post by dartos »

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…

I can read pretty fast, but prefer videos for introductions to any new tech.

Then if I decide I like it I read the manual.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#565

Post by apsurd »

nullpoint420 wrote: post #408
uhoh-itsmaciek wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 compon…

your last note that adds not-invented-here abominations… if chasing endless frameworks of the month is bad, and building stuff in house is bad, then what do you propose to avoid making this mess?

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#566

Post by torginus »

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…

> web dev influencers

The fact that there's influencers for everything nowadays made me realize I'm old.

It's super useful that everyone is sharing their opinions and expertise to get that sweet 5 minutes of fame - I just learned how to tile my bathroom after watching a slew of TikToks on the subject, some with millions of views.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#567

Post by rollcat »

bobthepanda wrote: post #415
cxr wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile in JS it seems like you can’t go more than six months without having to rewrite something. And by "in JS", you really mean, "in NPM land". So long as folks keep remaining seemingly (almost willfully) ignorant of the source of their pain and/or running right back into the fire the next time the opportunity presents itself, that pain is going to continue. NPM sucks. It's not the way to do JS. Everyone who h…

the problem is that as with everything else in FE it is kind of hard to tell what successor framework will "win" and not do this to you. Svelte and Vue were nice and stable until they were not, Deno as an alternative to NPM kind of never got any traction, and unfortunately no one has come up with a better sandbox that works the same everywhere other than the web.

I understand why they had to EOL Vue 2 and make Vue 3 - I'm still facing migrating a couple of projects at some point, and I will keep putting it away x)

But is upgrading Vue 3 across minor versions that much of a pain? Actually curious about people's real world experience.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#568

Post by sirsinsalot »

Aurornis wrote: post #161
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…

> 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…

It doesn't help that JS projects are often thin wrappers around thin wrappers where the project owner puts more work into their Vitepress logo than a stable API.

It all seems like it is for CV glory. Then the projects don't see a commit for years.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#569

Post by sfn42 »

johnfn wrote: post #513
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 th…

Well I've never worked much with python aside from using it for some math and ML classes in uni, but it's always been pretty close to JS near the bottom of my mental system programming language tier list.

If you want to throw together some quick thing or toy project or whatever sure, knock yourself out. But I'll honestly never respect people who write large "serious" applications using Python or JS for their backend. There are lots of great languages you can use for a backend. Java, C#, Go, lots of stuff. Js and python are the kind of languages you choose when you either don't know any other language or you don't know that they're ass.

The only good excuse to use JS is that your code needs to run in a browser. The only good excuse to use python is that you're just making a tiny little toy thing. Or you're doing data science stuff/ML, in any case you're not creating a large complex application. And you certainly don't care much about performance.

People invest so much time and money into creating more JS libraries and frameworks and stuff when what we should really be investing time and money into is creating an actually good language for the web. JS is the epitome of sunk cost fallacy.

"But TS" no. TS is just JS with a bunch of overly complicated type bullshit you have to deal with. It is a better dev experience than JS so I do use it, but it's less a cure and more a band aid over the huge, gaping and pus-dripping wound that is JS.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#570

Post by guappa »

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…

> It’s just nuts to me the degree to which FE development as a whole seems to embrace the breaking change, the deprecation, etc

My theory is that they do it because they don't have enough to do.

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