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Unnecessarily Complicating Front-End Development To Feel Like A Smarter Person

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Re: Unnecessarily Complicating Front-End Development To Feel Like A Smarter Person

#2

Post by vikingcaffiene »

Sorry but the tone of this article rubs me a bit wrong.

Clearly the author didn't spend enough time in the bad old days maintaining massive piles of CSS and JQuery vomit to appreciate why modern approaches are the way they are. If an app approaches any degree of non trivial complexity on the front end, a framework like react or angular can really pay off. On the other hand, if we are just talking about a little vanity site or something that isn't going to need to be maintianed long term, by all means go old school. Just don't tell me that it's better in all cases because I've got the scars.

Re: Unnecessarily Complicating Front-End Development To Feel Like A Smarter Person

#4

Post by mattnewton »

Yup. Whole industry is wrong. No need for better tooling. Web development is easy /s

Making things more complicated by cargo cutting patterns isn't unique to the front end (looking at you, AbstractFactoryBuilderInjector dot Java). It is however different from using those patterns to reduce complexity or otherwise aide in the development of big systems.

Re: Unnecessarily Complicating Front-End Development To Feel Like A Smarter Person

#5

Post by cityofdelusion »

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #2

Sorry but the tone of this article rubs me a bit wrong. Clearly the author didn't spend enough time in the bad old days maintaining massive piles of CSS and JQuery vomit to appreciate why modern approaches are the way they are. If an app approaches any degree of non trivial complexity on the front end, a framework like react or angular can really pay off. On the other hand, if we are just talking about a little vanit…

My experience and my scars are very similar. I remember the old days of maintaining piles of random JS and CSS -- it is not fun and it doesn't scale beyond blog-size without very good planning. I work for a huge national bank and I despise having to work on our older code. Sure, React/Angular/Redux have a learning curve -- but my company is able to deliver features at large scale significantly faster (and with full test coverage!). I cannot overstate how much better developer quality of life has gotten.

I'd challenge people opposed to more complex frameworks to consider the challenge of delivering code at scale in the old-school style (say, Java EE with JSPs with shared components across multiple million-line applications, with 50% legacy code > 20 years old).

These newer frameworks were created for a reason. I had some doubts at first, but I've seen huge productivity gains.

I also don't care to hear complaints about "HTML in my JS". You only need to code a large application one time with a nest of document.createElement calls to see the rationale.

Re: Unnecessarily Complicating Front-End Development To Feel Like A Smarter Person

#6

Post by GoToRO »

I agree. With a little discipline, namespacing and a good project organization you can be very productive using only jQuery. No framework to learn, no need to update your app to the latest incompatible version (angular), you do not need to wait 6 months until you can hire a new developer.

The only thing that I would use is a CSS framework.

Re: Unnecessarily Complicating Front-End Development To Feel Like A Smarter Person

#8

Post by fvdessen »

GoToRO wrote: post #6

I agree. With a little discipline, namespacing and a good project organization you can be very productive using only jQuery. No framework to learn, no need to update your app to the latest incompatible version (angular), you do not need to wait 6 months until you can hire a new developer. The only thing that I would use is a CSS framework.

I am sorry, but modern frameworks such as Vue or React make you an order of magnitude more productive. And instead of waiting 6 months for a dev, I would consider training new ones.

Re: Unnecessarily Complicating Front-End Development To Feel Like A Smarter Person

#9

Post by GoToRO »

fvdessen wrote: post #8
GoToRO wrote: post #6

I agree. With a little discipline, namespacing and a good project organization you can be very productive using only jQuery. No framework to learn, no need to update your app to the latest incompatible version (angular), you do not need to wait 6 months until you can hire a new developer. The only thing that I would use is a CSS framework.

I am sorry, but modern frameworks such as Vue or React make you an order of magnitude more productive. And instead of waiting 6 months for a dev, I would consider training new ones.

Yes, you are more productive writing the easy stuff and then you loose time with esoteric bugs, configuration, training. Overall I would say less productive, but maybe this is only my experience.
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