3 ms·

I totally agree, but that it's "the basics" now. I remember a time when jQuery was considered so standard that every StackOverflow question about "How do I X i

by hliyan 7y ago

I totally agree, but that it's "the basics" now. I remember a time when jQuery was considered so standard that every StackOverflow question about "How do I X in JS?" had as the top voted answer "Use $X() in jQuery". All that accumulated knowledge is now essentially a graveyard. I feel React too will be supplanted by something more closer to a WHATWG standard in the future.

dclowd9901 7y ago
But jQuery was just syntactic sugar on top of a broken API. For all intents and purposes, React _fixes_ HTML and DOM. The reason we _have_ such complexity in the front end these days is because _we can_. We've eschewed all the bullshitty parts of web development (global styling, unpredictable browser APIs, hand-holding DOM through complex interactions) and opened ourselves up to actually writing applications. The problem, as I see it, is front end developers are still expected to churn out features like they used to in large scale organizations, but we've matured as developers. It's no longer throw a .js file, a .css file and an .html file at a browser and woo hoo you have a site. It requires more time and bootstrapping, but the promise is code that breaks less often and is easier to maintain. It also means we have front end developers that are now specialists in different facets of frontend, such as builds, data layer, typing, feature development and framework design. Notice these are meta jobs. In order to meet the demands put upon us by our former velocity, we often have to resign ourselves to blackbox libraries and such, which don't always contribute positively to one's stack. Just today we ditched a node module we'd been using because the owner refused to update it. We should be building more internally than we do.
- benbristow 7y ago
  Building your own frameworks and libraries is always a minefield. Too often I’ve seen it done badly. Unless you’re a big company best to use what’s already out there if you can reasonably

by hliyan 7y ago

dclowd9901 7y ago

But jQuery was just syntactic sugar on top of a broken API. For all intents and purposes, React _fixes_ HTML and DOM. The reason we _have_ such complexity in the front end these days is because _we can_. We've eschewed all the bullshitty parts of web development (global styling, unpredictable browser APIs, hand-holding DOM through complex interactions) and opened ourselves up to actually writing applications. The problem, as I see it, is front end developers are still expected to churn out features like they used to in large scale organizations, but we've matured as developers. It's no longer throw a .js file, a .css file and an .html file at a browser and woo hoo you have a site. It requires more time and bootstrapping, but the promise is code that breaks less often and is easier to maintain. It also means we have front end developers that are now specialists in different facets of frontend, such as builds, data layer, typing, feature development and framework design. Notice these are meta jobs. In order to meet the demands put upon us by our former velocity, we often have to resign ourselves to blackbox libraries and such, which don't always contribute positively to one's stack. Just today we ditched a node module we'd been using because the owner refused to update it. We should be building more internally than we do.

benbristow 7y ago
Building your own frameworks and libraries is always a minefield. Too often I’ve seen it done badly. Unless you’re a big company best to use what’s already out there if you can reasonably