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It’s a little funny seeing vue/angular/react/whatever people discover vanilla JS. I thought classList, innerHTML, and querySelectorAll were all extremely common

It’s a little funny seeing vue/angular/react/whatever people discover vanilla JS. I thought classList, innerHTML, and querySelectorAll were all extremely common knowledge.

monoideism 6y ago
If I'm not mistaken, she's a systems programmer. More low-level stuff. She's definitely not a frontend/React/vue.js dev, as she says in the article. She's written some excellent articles on lower-level programming. But I agree that VanillaJS is not appreciated by a large number of web developers.
- bitwize 6y ago
  That's because in order to build anything of any remote sophistication, you need a framework, otherwise you are committing to maintaining an unmaintainable spaghetti mess. Just like nobody actually built Windows applications with just the Windows API -- they all used frameworks like MFC or reimplemented those frameworks in-house.
  - goatlover 6y ago
    Except for the stuff everything else runs on top of like operating systems, servers, runtimes and browsers.
  - bigiain 6y ago
    > in order to build anything of any remote sophistication, you need a framework Sure. But does the project/requirement described in the original article sound particularly sophisticated? I note that HN loads less that 150 lines of js and no framework. While there's an argument to be made that this place's frontend code is "not remotely sophisticated", it without doubt provides a huge amount of value anyway. While I agree with everybody here about the requirements for good frameworks (and good development practices) for complex or sophisticated web applications, to me at least it's abundantly clear the author of the article made the correct choice for her problem domain. Some things should resist every effort to make them more complex or more sophisticated than they need to be. Most things probably. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery I strongly believe that, while he did not know it at the time, he was totally talking there about lines of code. Bill Atkinson clearly took that philosophy to heart: "He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000." from: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
    - spion 6y ago
      The issue is that on regular projects/products, you are trying to hone on perfection by adding and removing a bunch of things and trying different stuff. This repeats for a longer period of time, say 6 months to a year. The codebase has got to be able to survive that churn in a sensible way, and certain tools like (ES6) modules, types and declarative UI descriptions that automatically update to reflect the changes really help with this process. Why does this declarative approach help? Because the more features you add, the more places can generate events that cause updates to the same DOM, and the number of possible transitions between those DOM states grows a lot larger. If the number of possible states that the DOM can end up in is N, the number of possible transitions is N^2. To a first approximation, declarative frameworks scale linearly with the number of interacting features, while imperative (the vanilla DOM API) scale quadratically.
  - ehnto 6y ago
    I don't disagree, but I see so many usages of React that are mostly static websites and sit in front of an existing MVC framework server side. I think a little bit of native JS can accomplish a great deal of the requirements for most front end work, and when it gets too complicated for native you'll know. What I would advocate against is starting with React, because then your lowest possible tooling complexity is React and it's build pipeline.
  - jtolmar 6y ago
    I just launched a commercial strategy game with a fair chunk of (DOM-based) UI elements and wrote everything in raw JS.
  - monoideism 6y ago
    I totally agree. Frameworks are needed for large projects. You either use an open source one, or build one yourself. And usually, the former is greatly preferred. However, if you're a frontend dev, you should understand VanillaJS. Just like a systems programmer should understand assembly and C. Also, there are some situations where you won't need a framework. Knowing VanillaJS and using frameworks are obviously not mutually exclusive.

It’s a little funny seeing vue/angular/react/whatever people discover vanilla JS. I thought classList, innerHTML, and querySelectorAll were all extremely common knowledge.

monoideism 6y ago

If I'm not mistaken, she's a systems programmer. More low-level stuff. She's definitely not a frontend/React/vue.js dev, as she says in the article. She's written some excellent articles on lower-level programming. But I agree that VanillaJS is not appreciated by a large number of web developers.

bitwize 6y ago
That's because in order to build anything of any remote sophistication, you need a framework, otherwise you are committing to maintaining an unmaintainable spaghetti mess. Just like nobody actually built Windows applications with just the Windows API -- they all used frameworks like MFC or reimplemented those frameworks in-house.
- goatlover 6y ago
  Except for the stuff everything else runs on top of like operating systems, servers, runtimes and browsers.
- bigiain 6y ago
  > in order to build anything of any remote sophistication, you need a framework Sure. But does the project/requirement described in the original article sound particularly sophisticated? I note that HN loads less that 150 lines of js and no framework. While there's an argument to be made that this place's frontend code is "not remotely sophisticated", it without doubt provides a huge amount of value anyway. While I agree with everybody here about the requirements for good frameworks (and good development practices) for complex or sophisticated web applications, to me at least it's abundantly clear the author of the article made the correct choice for her problem domain. Some things should resist every effort to make them more complex or more sophisticated than they need to be. Most things probably. "Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." -- Antoine de Saint-Exupery I strongly believe that, while he did not know it at the time, he was totally talking there about lines of code. Bill Atkinson clearly took that philosophy to heart: "He was just putting the finishing touches on the optimization when it was time to fill out the management form for the first time. When he got to the lines of code part, he thought about it for a second, and then wrote in the number: -2000." from: https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Lines_Of_Code.txt https://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Negative_2000_Li...
  - spion 6y ago
    The issue is that on regular projects/products, you are trying to hone on perfection by adding and removing a bunch of things and trying different stuff. This repeats for a longer period of time, say 6 months to a year. The codebase has got to be able to survive that churn in a sensible way, and certain tools like (ES6) modules, types and declarative UI descriptions that automatically update to reflect the changes really help with this process. Why does this declarative approach help? Because the more features you add, the more places can generate events that cause updates to the same DOM, and the number of possible transitions between those DOM states grows a lot larger. If the number of possible states that the DOM can end up in is N, the number of possible transitions is N^2. To a first approximation, declarative frameworks scale linearly with the number of interacting features, while imperative (the vanilla DOM API) scale quadratically.
- ehnto 6y ago
  I don't disagree, but I see so many usages of React that are mostly static websites and sit in front of an existing MVC framework server side. I think a little bit of native JS can accomplish a great deal of the requirements for most front end work, and when it gets too complicated for native you'll know. What I would advocate against is starting with React, because then your lowest possible tooling complexity is React and it's build pipeline.
- jtolmar 6y ago
  I just launched a commercial strategy game with a fair chunk of (DOM-based) UI elements and wrote everything in raw JS.
- monoideism 6y ago
  I totally agree. Frameworks are needed for large projects. You either use an open source one, or build one yourself. And usually, the former is greatly preferred. However, if you're a frontend dev, you should understand VanillaJS. Just like a systems programmer should understand assembly and C. Also, there are some situations where you won't need a framework. Knowing VanillaJS and using frameworks are obviously not mutually exclusive.