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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

#61

Post by distopico »

stemuk wrote: post #2

After reading the entire thread I am still in the dark about what exactly the author wants to see changed. The narrative that frameworks = bad and vanilla js = good falls apart quickly IMHO in medium to large sized projects since the complexity has to be abstracted in some way in order to reach a realistic timeframe for completion.

I think is because JS is one of the few languages that has practically always been used with a layer on top, before with Jquery or other libraries and now with frameworks, that is not so common in other languages, JS has an external layer for everything

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

#62

Post by distopico »

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…

I worked with React.js for more than 5 years in a big projects and I finally burnout of it, I agree with all you said, React added a extremely complexity for simple thing, added a lot of side affects that sometimes are hard to debug and fix, fix re-render will be your daily work more that create features and in the end you get a slow application in mobile devices due the size/re-render etc.

In the end I decided to re-evaluate was I was doing, I want make the web better but with React.js I was doing worst the web

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

#63

Post by azangru »

stemuk wrote: post #2

After reading the entire thread I am still in the dark about what exactly the author wants to see changed. The narrative that frameworks = bad and vanilla js = good falls apart quickly IMHO in medium to large sized projects since the complexity has to be abstracted in some way in order to reach a realistic timeframe for completion.

> The narrative that frameworks = bad and vanilla js = good falls apart quickly IMHO in medium to large sized projects since the complexity has to be abstracted in some way in order to reach a realistic timeframe for completion.

Consider that Chrome Dev Tools are built with vanilla js (plus web components). I would call it a medium-to-large-sized project, wouldn't you?

Although Chrome Dev Tools isn't the kind of use case that Alex has in mind when he rants on Twitter. His concern is the mobile web; his reference is a weak Android device (used to be a Moto G4) on a 4g mobile network. Which kinda ignores that there are valid use cases for sites that are built as apps primarily for stationary desktop users.

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

#64

Post by caspii »

To add my subjective opinion:

I came back to frontend development after a break of 10 years. Back then there was jQuery, CSS and HTML.

I found that the complexity of the tooling had increased 20-fold. All these build and task runners that were cool for a year and then a new one came along.

Those were the costs, but what was the upside? It seems that you can do maybe 10%-20% "more" than back then. It seems to me that this is a very very steep price to pay.

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

#65

Post by slightlyoff »

talkingtab wrote: post #33
stemuk wrote: post #2

After reading the entire thread I am still in the dark about what exactly the author wants to see changed. The narrative that frameworks = bad and vanilla js = good falls apart quickly IMHO in medium to large sized projects since the complexity has to be abstracted in some way in order to reach a realistic timeframe for completion.

I agree, if you are that virulent about what is wrong, maybe you want to give a clue as to what you think is right. Or do you just think everything is wrong?

OP here; at a tactical level, prefer HTML/CSS and MPA architecture until you have firm evidence of long sessions and many interactions per session that justify JS, and when you add JS to smooth a common interaction based on data, build from progressive enhancement unless it's impossible (e.g., a text or image editor).

More pithily, maybe PHP was good, actually?

Popping up a level, this isn't about tools, it's about culture and how we decide to choose. I work every day with teams that need to claw back to sanity from years in the JS fever swamps, and nobody's having a good time when launches are blocked on terrible perf, a11y, etc. The root issues here are down to complexity and eng/management capacity to master it. What gets teams in trouble is picking stacks that have mountains of implicit complexity without attendant controls.

Some of that is captured in this post; hope it helps:

https://infrequently.org/2022/05/performance-management-matu...

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

#66

Post by drewcoo »

smt88 wrote: post #27
rubyfan wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've never seen an interesting point that could be made in 140 characters or less. That limit works for jokes, headlines, and almost nothing else. Single-tweet "wisdom" always turns out to be something so broad/unqualified that it's uninteresting or untrue. VC Twitter is basically a deluge of that kind of faux-profound nonsense.

> Single-tweet "wisdom" always turns out to be something so broad/unqualified that it's uninteresting or untrue.

True, but Twitter threads are the Burma Shave signs of the tech-gentsia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burma-Shave

https://www.legendsofamerica.com/66-burmashave/2/

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

#67

Post by bass3l »

Beltalowda wrote: post #34
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…

> It’s not perfect. I think we’ll find a better approach eventually, which is why I’m fine with the churn. The churn is part of the search for something better. People have been building UIs for quite a while now; from before a large percentage of people reading this were born. It's not exactly a new thing. I have generally found building UIs a bit painful in any language, so sure, let's go find a better solution, I'…

Well, a lot of the “modern” frontend frameworks/libs are having the same symptoms that you describe as the entire world has changed, because it’s actually IS… Good luck working on a two years old Android project where Android Studio won’t even open it.

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

#68

Post by iostream25 »

Aeolun wrote: post #6
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…

React is the worst form of front-end development. Except for all others.

No post body was provided.

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

#69

Post by hombre_fatal »

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.

Well, frameworks vs vanilla JS doesn’t cash out into whether it’s hard to write ‘element.style.display = “…”’ or not.

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

#70

Post by hombre_fatal »

Beltalowda wrote: post #34
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…

> It’s not perfect. I think we’ll find a better approach eventually, which is why I’m fine with the churn. The churn is part of the search for something better. People have been building UIs for quite a while now; from before a large percentage of people reading this were born. It's not exactly a new thing. I have generally found building UIs a bit painful in any language, so sure, let's go find a better solution, I'…

Client side development isn’t trivial on any platform. Comparing a Go project with a client application just reveals that client apps rot faster because the devices that run them and the software on them are moving targets, esp mobile devices.
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