Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Frontend Treadmill

polotek.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

651–660 of 722 posts

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#651

Post by Swizec »

hsuduebc2 wrote: post #558
throwaway2037 wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another big driver to move from text to video: It is easier to monetise video via YouTube compared to a blog. People with millions of subscriptions on YouTube aren't creating FE learning material out of the goodness of their hearts; it is a big business. Also, video is almost always lower information density compared to text, so it is easier for your net to capture more customers.

And you can't just search in it. It's truly trashy format for anything other that presentation or lecture. For simple information sharing it's horrible.

We millenials ruined the doorbell industry by texting “here”. (Always connected)

Gen Z just sends you a picture of your door. (Mobile broadband)

What we perceive as the best way is often just driven by the technology available when we learned how to operate in the world.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#652

Post by whstl »

MrBuddyCasino wrote: post #554
whstl wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not GP but if I were to start a project today that needs an SPA I would go Vue rather than React 100%. Or if you want to be trendy, something like Solid or Svelte are also ok. React is okay-ish when done in moderation but it becomes spaghetti too quickly when the team is not made of 10x ninja rockstars from space. It is particularly bad for startups, you either slow down with code reviews or pay the price. The main r…

> The main reason IMO is the reactivity mode. Too many footguns to watch out for. But Vue is reactive as well? Eg communication between components is not straightforward.

Vue is quite different, as it uses proxies for reactivity and automates a lot for you… no need for dependency arrays or worrying about re-renders, for example.

I like React but it does put some burden on the developer to get it right. I find that even backend devs doing frontend super casually adapt quick and barely makes mistakes in Vue, but in React even experienced mid-level frontend devs can make a mess pretty quickly.

All IMO and IME of course.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#653

Post by nine_k »

le-mark wrote: post #595
nine_k wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plain HTML and plain CSS (well, maybe with SASS) are pretty great. Plain JS loses much to plain Typescript though, to my mind.

Is there a way to use typescript without pulling in all of npm? That’s the deal breaker for me, maybe others as well.

Yes. E.g. bun [1] consumes typescript directly.

The current canonical TS compiler and language server are both written in JS/TS and run on Node (even though there's an ongoing effort for rewriting things in Go). They are relatively compact though; IIRC installing the Rust compiler or the Haskell compiler takes more space.

[1]: https://bun.sh/

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#654

Post by c0redump »

koreth1 wrote: post #463
ewzimm wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> That people like video formats isn't really surprising to me since it's everywhere, but I still don't fully understand the appeal. Me either, but I have a hunch about why. Are you a fast reader? I am, at least compared to the population at large. And one of the reasons I can't stand video as a format for learning about coding topics is that it is so frustratingly slow compared to my reading speed. To get anywhere c…

> no solid evidence

IMO you don’t need any. The correctness of your conclusion is self-evident. Proof by common sense, QED.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#655

Post by nine_k »

wiseowise wrote: post #547
nine_k wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Likely these videos did not exist when your reference / age group was acquiring these skills. Videos are sort of easier to produce (via screen capture), and are much easier to show the effect of FE things: look, we write code like this, now we can click here, and the page reacts that way. No need to muck with JSFiddle or something. I'm not a fan of videos as a reference medium, but they can be elucidating to those wh…

Blender is a gui first program, it makes sense that videos will work for it.

HTML and CSS are sort of GUI-first, too.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#656

Post by jdauriemma »

mplanchard wrote: post #335
jdauriemma wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi there - I work at Apollo and I'd be happy to help you migrate off our old CLI. That utility was sort of a hodgepodge of tools that we ended up either replatforming to our `rover` CLI or, in the case of code generation, recommending that folks use GraphQL Code Generator. It's a testament to that utility's sprawl that I can't guess your use case just by your name-drop of it. I realize the irony in my saying that sin…

I appreciate this! It is the codegen part, but because it’s in a repo that mostly is just getting bugfixes until we eventually subsume it all with something newer, it’s hard to justify the time spent to migrate to a different tool. The issue I was having with pnpm was that it wouldn’t install the apollo CLI tool due to its having set a required node version that is now quite old in its package.json. I was hoping the…

Okay thanks for your patience. I put together this gist based on an interaction we had with a user last year, I hope it's helpful: https://gist.github.com/bignimbus/457f9ac42f29d0bb6c4eb742ad...

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#657

Post by recursive »

andrewchilds wrote: post #514
bdlowery wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It was a false feeling. 1) Vue already had runes, under a different name. 2) Svelte's old behavior was only possible with their dependency-tracking compilation step. i.e. not vanilla. 3) runes use proxies, which are vanilla JS, and don't require a build step at all, although svelte may still have them.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#658

Post by pier25 »

czk wrote: post #189

I don't disagree with the point being made but it should also be noted that React and Vue are both 11 years old. Hell, even Meteor.js (anyone remember this one?) is still around and being updated.

Good luck with a Vue 2 + vuex + Vue Router project scaffolded with Vue CLI in 2016 which NPM is screaming at you is full of vulnerabilities. Or that React + React Router + Redux + Webpack 3 project from 2015.

In both cases you'd need to spend serious time moving to newer deps, rearchitecturing, probably moving to Vite, etc.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#659

Post by recursive »

c0redump wrote: post #654
koreth1 wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That people like video formats isn't really surprising to me since it's everywhere, but I still don't fully understand the appeal. Me either, but I have a hunch about why. Are you a fast reader? I am, at least compared to the population at large. And one of the reasons I can't stand video as a format for learning about coding topics is that it is so frustratingly slow compared to my reading speed. To get anywhere c…

> no solid evidence IMO you don’t need any. The correctness of your conclusion is self-evident. Proof by common sense, QED.

I happen to agree with the conclusion also. And you don't need a rigorous proof to do what you want to do. But I often find that people appeal/resort to "common sense" when they don't have a coherent argument, and just can't conceive of any other point of view.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#660

Post by czk »

pier25 wrote: post #658
czk wrote: post #189

I don't disagree with the point being made but it should also be noted that React and Vue are both 11 years old. Hell, even Meteor.js (anyone remember this one?) is still around and being updated.

Good luck with a Vue 2 + vuex + Vue Router project scaffolded with Vue CLI in 2016 which NPM is screaming at you is full of vulnerabilities. Or that React + React Router + Redux + Webpack 3 project from 2015. In both cases you'd need to spend serious time moving to newer deps, rearchitecturing, probably moving to Vite, etc.

Sounds absolutely brutal for sure. I didn't mean to sound like everything was fine in JavaScript land, they have been chasing the shiny new thing and focusing too much on the wrong abstractions for a while. Even backend frameworks aren't free from this same problem, when you look at the support and migration woes in big players like rails/laravel/django. I suppose thats less frequent though.

I'm not sure how you avoid it in any framework without rawdogging pure HATEOAS and vanilla concepts. Recently I've gravitated towards Django and HTMX and its felt quite refreshing.

Keeping your tech stack up to date inevitably brings some pain and suffering along. I do wish more frontend frameworks cared about backwards compatibility.

The web dev influencers really push the latest and greatest memes. One day they are putting out a video of how Firefox is the worst browser in the world because it doesn't support some niche variety of CSS gradient and the next they are gushing over something like Zen (a Firefox fork).

Post reply on HN