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Not really - those things exist in native frontend as well but it's more stable than js. Writing GUI is not trivial, people take stuff like data binding/templat

Not really - those things exist in native frontend as well but it's more stable than js. Writing GUI is not trivial, people take stuff like data binding/templates/MVC etc. for granted nowadays, go check out early desktop UI libraries like say win32/MFC/winforms/gtk+. Took a long time to get to stuff like WPF, Qt quick, etc. With browser there were several constraints : ES5 is extremely error prone and scales very poorly to larger codebases slow JS VMs missingt for sane layout like flexbox 1. Got better with npm, we pack, es6 transpilers, typescript/flow and tooling built along the way 2./3. Got solved by finally depricating everything < IE9 (IE in general if you're lucky) and tooling I'd say angular is relatively stable now and decently productive once you get a hang of their patterns, I've been using it for different frontend projects since early betas, written ionic apps for mobile with it - have very few complaints about the framework, some of the stuff didn't always work along the way (like ahead of time compilation, i18n) but recently (5+) I've had 0 issues with the framework and I'm quite productive with it. I think the alternatives will mature as well and things will settle.

dustingetz 8y ago
Native frontend on desktop and mobile have in-memory database and sync out of band. Web browser tab is too resource constrained to run a in-memory database, and less secure as well (you don't have root on your iphone so Facebook can restrict your data access patterns, prevent scrapers, prevent mass-delete of all those old posts, etc)
- rubber_duck 8y ago
  Those things don't remove the sync issues, blocking the UI thread, they just enable a slightly better use experience. And dealing with asynchronous code is not the only issue in writing frontend code, GUI apps can be really complex beasts, managing that complexity effectively requires tools that didn't exist in js world untill recently.
  - dustingetz 8y ago
    They kind of do though, the complexity of data sync can now be dealt with entirely separately from the complexity of the app logic itself (which is not true of, say REST architecture)

dustingetz 8y ago

Native frontend on desktop and mobile have in-memory database and sync out of band. Web browser tab is too resource constrained to run a in-memory database, and less secure as well (you don't have root on your iphone so Facebook can restrict your data access patterns, prevent scrapers, prevent mass-delete of all those old posts, etc)

rubber_duck 8y ago
Those things don't remove the sync issues, blocking the UI thread, they just enable a slightly better use experience. And dealing with asynchronous code is not the only issue in writing frontend code, GUI apps can be really complex beasts, managing that complexity effectively requires tools that didn't exist in js world untill recently.
- dustingetz 8y ago
  They kind of do though, the complexity of data sync can now be dealt with entirely separately from the complexity of the app logic itself (which is not true of, say REST architecture)