The "full-stack framework" fallacy

We can't solve this problem until we at least agree what "full-stack" even means.

Right now you have many frontend-focused engineers who justifyably argue that something like React Server Components is a backend concern because it runs on the server. I think they're wrong but they have a point.

You also have many backend-focused engineers who justifyably argue that something like Rails is a frontend concern because it's designed to run webpages. You probably wouldn't want to use Rails to build an ETL pipeline or an airline scheduling system, for example. I think they're kinda right but also a little bit wrong.

And ultimately the whole debate is so deep in the It Depends territory that I honestly think 90% of the people arguing come from such vastly different backgrounds and situations that they're just talking past each other. They're never going to agree because the problems they're solving are too different to ever have the same solution.

edit: I say this as someone with professional experience in almost all the usual suspects (Django, Rails, Flask, various JavaScript frankenstacks, even PHP).

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The full stack web is a fallacy because it exposes how much the developers involved cannot program, at least in this context.

As a former JavaScript developer most of the people doing that work cannot program. That is why frameworks are so essential. What percentage of these people could realistically do any fraction of their jobs without third party abstractions line React or jQuery? It’s striking.

Look, what’s the primary mission here:

1. Put text on screen

2. Handle user events

Why is that so hard? Because nobody knows what they are doing, the blind leading the blind. The compile target on the front end is the DOM and that absolutely scares the shit out of people. Secondly, communicating outside the browser requires network traffic handling which also scared the shit out of people. Finally any kind of event handling requires an understanding of the event loop and listeners and that also scares the shit out of people.

Finally, most people cannot write in JavaScript. Instead they write Java (or whatever) and modify the syntax just enough to avoid critical run time failures. The blessings of a lexical first functional environment are often absent because the language is a mystery. Fucking horrible mess.

None of this is challenging. It’s stupid easy to learn, but there is almost nobody willing to teach it. The insecurity in that line of work is so universal I refuse to go back to that line of work for less than $500,000 salary.

"Really cool" is not compelling enough for me to decide to build a product against something like this. Here is, at a minimum, I would require to even consider:

- Comparisons against other types of stacks, like laravel livewire or phoenix liveview

- Performance metrics/stats/benchmarks whatever. You need to be faster and more robust than the other things out there, or provide some other benefit

- First Class self-hosted on premise install version without dependency on any cloud provider. Kubernetes helm charts or docker compose stacks or whatever

- I do actually like that you have a time-windowed source available license. That is something that alleviates the concern if you go under

- Jepsen or similar analysis, need to make sure whatever consistency guarantees you are advertising hold up

Remix is really cool too! On the paper