As a backend guy who moved away from frontend long ago for these very reasons, I have to ask: why are people downvoting this? Is it wrong? I'm genuinely asking, because from a bystander's point of view, it certainly seems like the pattern of the Framework Du Jour hasn't really slowed down much in the frontend community.
It might be true, but it's a rant that just barely touches the actual topic, which is mostly: a company will pay somebody to work full time on an open source project that is still independent. And I think it's pretty nice. And also I think Rich Harris has given a lot to people for free and I'm happy for him that he will be paid to work on something that he loves.
So all in all it would be nice if we would for once be spared of rants how tiring, immature, half baked whatever whatever the JavaScript world is. Show us maybe how it should be really done, but maybe in a separate post please.
I didn't downvote, but I'll speak to my experience.
First off, you don't have to go learning every framework out there. Pick one and stick with it, or just go vanilla. That said, The features these frameworks provide gives a boost in productivity that far outweighs the low learning curve.
My pick was VueJS and I'm very happy with it. Using Single File Components is pretty similar to vanilla HTML/JS/CSS. Beginners that were under my guidance (with only HTML/CSS/JS experience) usually pick it up and were productive in the same day.
I disagree that React (JSX) is most similar to vanilla JS/HTML at all (I don't prefer it, but to each their own). Vue and Svelte are much further on the side of a vanilla-ish approach.
Is it false though? If it’s true, then maybe we need to look at why it’s true.
It’s not just front end developers though. I think other domains and their frameworks went through the same thing. This is just the time for front end.
Yes, it is false. Anyone in the space can tell you how stable things have been for years now.
Plus, there are a lot of people writing JS. It’s not a tiny community fracturing itself over different ways of doing things, and becoming destined for obscurity. It’s tens or hundreds of thousands of developers. In a community this big I’d say having a few choices is a sign of health.
Indeed, it’s false. React is 8 years old, and when React was first released jQuery was only 7 years old. I follow this stuff pretty closely and I can only think of maybe 10 JS UI frameworks that have attracted remotely significant use and active development at any point in the past 15 years.
I’m just picking a few frameworks and languages I’ve used in the past and are still used. Obviously there are still new frameworks and libraries that come out for these languages. But sometimes the big projects fold those in. Or they write their own or whatever. I can pick the popular names and do pretty much what I need.
JavaScript is 25. But most of that time we weren’t doing what we can now. And most frameworks are fairly young. Angular is 11. But most people (and jobs) have jumped ship to React(8) and now there is Svelte(4) which also looks good. And I think there will be more changes to come.
These JS frameworks aren’t exactly veterans that are impossible to supplant. Not yet anyway.
Why is no complaining that there more than one way to build a php app? Perhaps because like JS it's a huge ecosystem with a giant user base and millions of use cases. Front end dev has lots of room to support the dozen or so mainstream frameworks we've used over the past decade-plus
Agree, and it’s nice to see this worn-out trope getting downvoted for once. Sneering at JS / Frontend developers is one of the more distasteful tendencies of HN.
Probably because it's an entire industry that is self-sustaining, without really a reason for it to exist. Most software can be built with regular HTML / JS / CSS without some convoluted framework. Even better, let's make a desktop application (when was the last time we had those?!), and we can get all kinds of performance and security gains without having to tack everything on to the web as a platform.
> Frontend developers like to change frameworks every week it seems like
Most of the popular frontend frameworks (Vue, React, Angular, Svelte) have been around for years at this point. It is like arguing Ruby on Rails vs Spring Boot.
Anyone that's worked in a reasonably sized FE codebase can very clearly understand that changing your framework is essentially migrating a huge production DB but on steroids.
Where exactly have you seen a team of developers change their front end framework every week?
It is wrong because it has slowed down to a crawl compared to what we had from 2010-2014.
Most companies have settled on either React or Vue, which are extremely similar. Angular is used in some niches, almost always because teams already knew it.
Those three are responsible for almost 99% of the frontend positions you'll see.
Svelte is getting popular but so far it's still niche. It's more of an inspiration for others, but also a contender. And really, what's so wrong about having more options and more competition? Even if you want to stop learning new things, there'll be no shortage of job vacancies for the three frameworks above.
Also, since you're a backend dev, there are much more backend languages in use today than frontend frameworks, to give an example. And it's not hard to find companies using more than one.
Naw, the Python/Zope/ZODB/CMF/Plone/TAL/MeTAL/TALES stack can out-boilerplate the yin-yang out of Zend.
Each of those Dagwood Sandwich layers has its own special purpose object system that leaks abstracts to all of the other layers, and its own domain specific languages for writing boilerplate that sprays those abstraction leaks all over the place. ;)
Well in this case, it's more that svelte is the least of all evils when it comes to this. React and Vue have way more boilerplate and React in particular has the most framework-specific stuff of them all. Svelte is much closer to pure html/css, or so I'm told.
all of the js frameworks mentioned are view layer libraries. i.e. they create html. Hence they need a DSL for writing templated html, which will be used for generating final html
Hence, it is completely natural for them to offer a custom DSL as html does not have standard way of expressing those concepts.
Since each js framework has its own idiosyncrasies and motivations, custom DSLs reflect it.
If you were to go around and make a new js framework, you too are going to create a new DSL
I've used react for some years now and it's very very hard to do animation and event-driven operations with pure react render. You'll need extensive lifecycle events or hooks and refs to get animation or handle focus, etc well. It's due to how react render the components.
It doesn't make react bad but I guess some newer frameworks (vue, svelte, I haven't learned those yet) try to tackle this from different approach.
> I'm genuinely asking, because from a bystander's point of view, it certainly seems like the pattern of the Framework Du Jour hasn't really slowed down much in the frontend community.
Perhaps not in the "frontend community", no it hasn't slowed down. There will always be new frameworks coming and going, and people will work on them as fun open source projects or use them in their side projects or whatever. But people doing real work are almost unanimously settled upon React as an industry standard at this point. There's still a decent sized faction of contrarian Vue holdouts, but by and large the JS framework wars are over.
I never asked anyone not to use svelte... I said why should I be compelled to learn this new language, other than it being the hot new UI framework of the day.
It doesn't have a virtual DOM? It doesn't have synthetic events? Ok why not just use web components which provide their own encapsulation and vanilla JS. I don't have to learn a new language which may or may not be around/supported a few years from now... Also I'm continuing to grok web standards.
No, it's not wrong, it's absolutely correct. There's a lot of flexing around who can come up with the most elegant abstraction which ignores the important point: making sure what's necessary to understand the framework, use it long-term, and move away from it after is focusing on the core technologies of the web (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript).
The abstractions are cool, but completely unnecessary (see link to my framework above where I circumvent that problem entirely).
I assume because there's no value to it. What's the opposite side of the argument? You have an area with a lot of growth and many problems with the way we're solving these problems and something like svelte is not"completely reinventing the wheel" as the OP positions it, by nature it's try to solve specific problems using our existing tooling whenever possible. The original post is a shallow, feel-good rant
I don’t know about “wrong,” but my opinion on the overall theme of that first comment is that the requirement to learn is not at all a bad thing. I enjoy learning new things even when that is in some sense a “requirement.”
