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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#711

Post by gasull »

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…

Relevant YouTube video:

Dear Developer, the Web Isn't About You

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WYXSck7TyVM

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#712

Post by dagorenouf »

ng12 wrote: post #5

> Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years. I've been writing React professionally for over a decade at this point. I don't know what this guy's on about.

I have too and the react of today is vastly different from the react of 5 years ago. Which itself was vastly different from the original react.

It’s different paradigm, best practice, file organization, etc.

So it’s close to learning a new language.

And I won’t even go into the fact that Next is replacing React as the standard.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#713

Post by vlucas »

localghost3000 wrote: post #148

> And if you’re an engineer, you will be able to retain much higher market value over time if you dig into and understand core web technologies Been working in FE for nearly 20 years and lived through several major paradigm shifts. I think I am qualified to have an opinion here: I definitely think that you will be a more well-rounded engineer if you know all the core web tech. So strongly agree there. I am skeptical,…

Also working in FE for the past 10+ years with 20+ years total dev experience, and I agree with you.

The vast majority of companies out there - even large ones - don't really care, screen for, or hire for core fundamentals. They hire for "good at React" or "lots of experience with Next.js", etc. Fundamentals are great if you are building things from scratch, but the truth is companies very rarely do that. They just pull off the shelf things with large ecosystems and good documentation and use them. Just get good at those things and it's much easier to get hired. You can learn the fundamentals along the way.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#714

Post by joquarky »

Izkata wrote: post #511
acdha wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are in the US, it's more likely than not that your local/state court system is managed by software that runs almost entirely on VBScript within an IE7 wrapper.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#715

Post by wyclif »

ayewo wrote: post #710
josephg wrote: post #694

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel the same way. I don’t think you and I are the target audience for him. My read is that his content is actually pitched to a very junior audience - or an audience who don’t really want to read or engage with the blog post themselves. They want to feel smart and entertained without doing any actual thinking. That sounds like I’m a snob - but I really get it. I’ve been watching Inkmaster lately with my gf - which…

> But I wouldn’t call it educational. Edutainment perhaps?

Yeah, I really do think "edutainment" is the correct classification for this type of content. A lot of tech influencers have figured out the formula for success on YouTube. In order to hit the sweet spot, the content has to be a mile wide and an inch deep to get the engagement metrics necessary to make the channel profitable.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#716

Post by spopejoy »

wolvesechoes wrote: post #237
hombre_fatal wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI. Then you'd make a more sensible comparison like React versus something like SwiftUI which is constantly changing, constantly breaking, and still basically in beta mode for 10 years, yet it only runs on specific versions of Apple hardware and software. And usually it's so insuffi…

"Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI." "People who have never touched any UI tech until HTML/JS have no clue how good they have it" Tech like: - Delphi/Free Pascal, where usually code from 20 years ago compiles today with minor adjustments? - Qt, developed and maintained for over 30 years, currently at 6th major re…

> Delphi/Free Pascal, where usually code from 20 years ago compiles today with minor adjustments

Not always. I attempted to upgrade some open source 32bit Delphi frontend code to 64bit/ARM, but the specific GUI toolkit was never ported.

It's similar for Java frontends, JavaFX in particular seems to be a moving target.

QT is a bit of an outlier in terms of frontend stability, but at the cost of the UI looking pretty dated.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#717

Post by rubymamis »

spopejoy wrote: post #716
wolvesechoes wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Well, you should compare the JS UI ecosystem to other UI ecosystems like Android and iOS, not ecosystems that run on one machine with no UI." "People who have never touched any UI tech until HTML/JS have no clue how good they have it" Tech like: - Delphi/Free Pascal, where usually code from 20 years ago compiles today with minor adjustments? - Qt, developed and maintained for over 30 years, currently at 6th major re…

> Delphi/Free Pascal, where usually code from 20 years ago compiles today with minor adjustments Not always. I attempted to upgrade some open source 32bit Delphi frontend code to 64bit/ARM, but the specific GUI toolkit was never ported. It's similar for Java frontends, JavaFX in particular seems to be a moving target. QT is a bit of an outlier in terms of frontend stability, but at the cost of the UI looking pretty d…

Qt apps UI can look very good if QML is used with some effort. I wrote about it here: https://rubymamistvalove.com/block-editor

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#718

Post by whoiscroberts »

For any backend engineers that don’t build products because dealing with frontend is demoralizing… give the replit ai agent a test. I’m making better ui now than I ever could with bootstrap and jquery. Typescript + react + the right amount of prompting about code quality and maintainability and it produced workable interfaces plus some.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#720

Post by kerkeslager »

incrudible wrote: post #681
kerkeslager wrote: post #479

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just had a thought and decided to look it up. This side conversation started as an objection to the comment, "Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years." The first release of esbuild was November 2020, i.e. it didn't exist 5 years ago. And that release fixed... conditional statements in TypeScript--a pretty basic feature to be broken. Does that sound like something you want to use in production? So…

You are extrapolating from the past into the future, but a lot has consolidated in the last five years. You used to need babel to use crucial language features that are now supported across the board, at the same time the avalanche of new language features has subsided. Conditional types (not statements) are not a basic feature.

> You are extrapolating from the past into the future, but a lot has consolidated in the last five years.

I've been writing JavaScript that entire time, and the complete disregard for maintenance has gotten worse, not better.

You seem to be under the impression that because I also write other languages, I haven't been keeping track of what's happening in the JS ecosystem, but you're wrong--I still write JS, because I often don't have any other option.

The fact that I work in other languages means I get to see what I like about better-managed ecosystems. If you're writing JS on both frontend and backend and not using anything else, it's likely that you don't know how bad things are for you because the JS churn has been normalized for you.

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