React is winning by default and slowing innovation

I think part of the problem is that browsers don't really serve their original purpose anymore.

Google functionally controls just enough of a monopoly via chrome that they can generally do whatever they want (and not do whatever they don't want to do). So that standards still mostly can't do anything google isn't enthusiastic about dumping dev time into.

And they're just barely not enough of a monopoly that they can't just go wild and actually turn the browser into a locked down capital-P Product. Safari and Firefox (in that order... much to my chagrin) are holding them back from that.

So browsers just kind of hang out, not doing too terribly much, when obviously there are strong technical forces that want the browser to finally finish morphing from a document viewer to an application runtime. Finally fulfill the dream of silverlight and java applets/JNLP and so on. But nobody wants to bother doing that if they don't get to control it (and firefox doesn't have the dev power to just trailblaze alone in OSS spirit).

So instead the js people just have to plow along doing their best with the app-runtime version of NAND chips since the incentives don't want to offer them anything better at the browser/platform level.

The first programming language I learned was Java as a teenager. When I started actually programming as an adult, I used C#. As my career has gone on, it's been on a very definite path down the layers of abstraction and now I write C and assembly.

I just got a new job and my first task is fixing up a vibe coded react native app. Holy hell I have never hated programming more than I do now. The absolute mess that is type/JavaScript and the very notion of running your app as an embedded website is quite possibly the worst thing I can imagine. The whole language and ecosystem appears to deliberately make debugging as hard as possible. Things that should be compile-time errors are instead runtime errors that may or may not produce a log in one of three or four locations.

I really want to go back to C. I hate this so much.

Maybe JavaScript works for you, that's great. But my brain runs on C and java just makes me want to find a cave and subsist on berries and twigs for the rest of my life.

To some degree, and to madlib your statement, alike how: C code is never going to be good as embracing the built-in features of the x86 asmcode and using minimal code to accomplish what you need.

Which is to say, that isn't really a goal or objective, imo: it's an unhealthy prediction for misoptimizations, to worship the vanilla.js performance above all past.

More-so, there were so many very very very unperformant web apps before React. So many incredibly bad ways to manipulate DOM. And the spiralling combinatorial possibilities of updating state yourself were gnarly, create enormous cognitive load on every dev in the org.

I know I've just written a pretty big anti- post.

But I feel both sides really strong. I don't want either extreme to be accepted. Inner Platform I see as good and necessary. But also I definitely hope for better someday, see us making lots of Inner Platforms, that might be much smaller / better organically interweaving Inner Platforms. Reacts flaws are significant, a full extra DOM, diffs, coarse grained updates (which I think maybe React Compiler tries to seek out?) all do so much but are a huge abstracting for an Inner Platforms, not necessary imo to what Inner Platforms would have to be. It's amazing how much React gets us, how much consistency & clarity of code & it's purpose (with its immediate mode ish rendering scheme), and the performance is overall stunningly good. But there certainly is significant overhead, lots of code to load & execution time for it. Rather than looking to return back, I want to look onwards.

The "Inner Platform" idea is an amazing & useful framing. I want WebComponents to let us escape this, to be some common system we can agree too, but I suspect even with WebComponents—if they get any broader traction—we will eventually see "inner platforms", paradigms for use and interlinkage that go beyond the very basics of HTML (although Invokers radically and excitingly open up the space of component interacting with components in standard ways!).

Maybe it's not so clear cut a decade+ later, but pieces like The Extensible Web Manifesto speak to a clear loud vocal acceptance of the web as a lower level platform, as a tool that can have higher level expressions built stop it. Theres an expectation of going further, architectures above. https://github.com/extensibleweb/manifesto

Imo it sucks that we near a decade of React Uber Alles, stealing the oxygen that would nourish the web's flourishing. And there's hope for using more of the putter platform: that React as an Inner Platform does a lot of reinvention that maybe ought not be necessary. I guess the question I want to ask is, how little can we make our Inner Platforms, while still retaining the legibility of architecture? Can we decompose that Inner Platform into smaller interoperable pieces, protocols, for how things signal and flow, rather than it being a monolithic platform? What of the Outter Platform could be better used for performance and inter-op, to de-interiorize?

It is dangerous and bad to me to demonize Inner Platforms, to attend only to notions of pure performance as the guiding factor. The karmic wheel imo needs to be going around faster harder, creating and destroying the inner platforms. We have a lot more to explore, have only a couple examples of what web architecture could be and right now the React Inner Platform is a thick boy of an Inner Platform. But it's not just getting rid of Inner Platform that's the goal.

The ecosystem culture is one that actively look for complexity. Your only hope is to be defensive from dependencies. Isolate them and have a core of serenity to handle business logic changes. Once in a while, go visit your dependencies shell to update them.

Hill I’m willing to die on (figuratively): Most websites should be readable on w3m (or lynx, or emacs’ ewww).