> I was completely baffled by the myriad of options out there, how complex they look (note I've been working on very high performance, distributed backend appli

> I was completely baffled by the myriad of options out there, how complex they look (note I've been working on very high performance, distributed backend applications, so complexity on itself is not an issue), and how it's very unclear when to use any one of them or what each one is good for. I tried Angular and React, and both feel like almost a different language. You have to learn their internals to work effectively with them, and it often looks like they create more complexity then the original complexity they were trying to reduce. I have no problem learning new things, in fact, I love it! It just feels like there are other things to learn that will stick around for longer - JS frameworks/libraries seem to be very hype-driven these days. What are your thoughts on this? I hear this sentiment a lot, but it always irks me. There seems to a general feeling amongst programmers new to front-end development that the current popular libraries have been over engineered and that the constant changes are driven by more by hype than actual need. From my view, the complexity in these libraries is mostly a reflection of the complexity of the underlying platform. Browsers and their JS engines are now monstrously complex and implement a horrifying number of web standards. When compared with browsers, something like the C++ compiler or the JVM suddenly looks childishly simple (and I'm not saying those things are simple). For example, it may not be apparent at first why something like React is a good idea, because it takes some knowledge of the performance characteristics of browser rendering to understand that. As for the churn, the libraries have been changing because the world has been changing. Back in the day, HTML was rendered server side and people used jQuery with little snippets of JS to modify small sections of the DOM. It only made sense to do that. But JS engines started to get really fast. Browsers finally started to use the DOM standards. People started working on solutions for all of JS's many warts, like not having any sort of module system and there being no good solution for package management. All these things came together in just a handful of years and suddenly it was possible to do actually cool stuff in browsers. Writing a browser based photoshop or itunes was no longer just the domain of tech giants like Google. When the world is literally turned upside down, that does shake things around a bit. So, if you are coming to web development from the backend, I don't think there is an easy path. The platform is complex. And just the idea of writing single page applications is only about 7 years old. That the first handful of years were somewhat chaotic is not surprising. But that aside, I would recommend to start with React and Redux.