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It's a culture problem in the web dev world. There is an obsession with new and shiny and building something "cool". It's all about the developer experience and

It's a culture problem in the web dev world. There is an obsession with new and shiny and building something "cool". It's all about the developer experience and not the product. That's why there's such insane churn in the tooling and ecosystem. People rewrite and redesign constantly in order to work with the new cool framework.

namuol 6y ago
Insane churn? Wordpress powers over 1/3 of the web. JQuery is still doing most heavy JS lifting on most blogs/CMS-driven sites. React has dominated "real" frontend webapp development for a solid 5 years. These things don't make headlines or get retweeted. The web produces a lot of variety because it has the widest distribution and the lowest barriers to entry.
- kulig 6y ago
  5 years is not a lot of time.
  - namuol 6y ago
    I think we can count on it to be around for awhile: https://www.npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue https://www.npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  I can do very well without some of that variety. Sometimes barriers to entry are a good thing.
  - namuol 6y ago
    Not sure what you mean. You're welcome to hand-write all of your web apps from the ground up with zero dependencies and no build system. It's still the web.
ericwood 6y ago
This gets parroted a lot around here but the last 5 years or so there's really only been a few major players in the framework space. Maybe the "framework of the day" mentality was pretty strong in the early 2010's but things have cooled off significantly since then and you'd be hard-pressed to find most shops using more than the big 3-4 contenders.
- RandoHolmes 6y ago
  My experience is that it's just as relevant today. I had a front-end developer come in and add node, bootstrap, and SCSS as a dependency to a very simple app. We went from having a super simple build chain to one that now needed maintenance. And part of his argument? he "thought better" in SCSS. People have zero respect for the risk of dependencies, complicating the buildchain, or long term maintenance.
  - pbalau 6y ago
    It's a combination of arrogance, lack of skill and sheer stupidity. For an example, look at nuxtjs docs, there is an example config, that everyone seem to use, that lints on each build. Because code using 4 spaces indentation is slower than code using 2 spaces... The last ui dev I had to work with managed to produce in about 1 year a very complicated dockerfile, that was spewing, between other things, an image for e2e testing - but no actual tests and you needed a huge makefile to actually build the thing, a soup of copy-pasted config files that resulted in a vendors.js bundle of about 100 megs - there were more config files than source code, 2 branches named <username>.wip.somedate with commits that commented out some parts of a config, just to uncomment them back in the next commit. The app itself, with ssr no less, was a logo and some text, that was using some custom components, built with some third party vue component that was rendering css in js, thus you had to wait for the entire vendors.js to download before you got anything rendered. His answer to anyone questioning his choices was "this is how modern ux development works". After he was let go, I took over the ui and along with another coworker we managed to have a working version of the app in 9 days, with no prior knowledge of vuejs and nuxtjs. You can imagine how complicated the app is...
  - ericwood 6y ago

namuol 6y ago

Insane churn? Wordpress powers over 1/3 of the web. JQuery is still doing most heavy JS lifting on most blogs/CMS-driven sites. React has dominated "real" frontend webapp development for a solid 5 years. These things don't make headlines or get retweeted. The web produces a lot of variety because it has the widest distribution and the lowest barriers to entry.

kulig 6y ago
5 years is not a lot of time.
- namuol 6y ago
  I think we can count on it to be around for awhile: https://www.npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue https://www.npmtrends.com/@angular/core-vs-react-vs-vue
LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
I can do very well without some of that variety. Sometimes barriers to entry are a good thing.
- namuol 6y ago
  Not sure what you mean. You're welcome to hand-write all of your web apps from the ground up with zero dependencies and no build system. It's still the web.

ericwood 6y ago

This gets parroted a lot around here but the last 5 years or so there's really only been a few major players in the framework space. Maybe the "framework of the day" mentality was pretty strong in the early 2010's but things have cooled off significantly since then and you'd be hard-pressed to find most shops using more than the big 3-4 contenders.

RandoHolmes 6y ago
My experience is that it's just as relevant today. I had a front-end developer come in and add node, bootstrap, and SCSS as a dependency to a very simple app. We went from having a super simple build chain to one that now needed maintenance. And part of his argument? he "thought better" in SCSS. People have zero respect for the risk of dependencies, complicating the buildchain, or long term maintenance.
- pbalau 6y ago
  It's a combination of arrogance, lack of skill and sheer stupidity. For an example, look at nuxtjs docs, there is an example config, that everyone seem to use, that lints on each build. Because code using 4 spaces indentation is slower than code using 2 spaces... The last ui dev I had to work with managed to produce in about 1 year a very complicated dockerfile, that was spewing, between other things, an image for e2e testing - but no actual tests and you needed a huge makefile to actually build the thing, a soup of copy-pasted config files that resulted in a vendors.js bundle of about 100 megs - there were more config files than source code, 2 branches named <username>.wip.somedate with commits that commented out some parts of a config, just to uncomment them back in the next commit. The app itself, with ssr no less, was a logo and some text, that was using some custom components, built with some third party vue component that was rendering css in js, thus you had to wait for the entire vendors.js to download before you got anything rendered. His answer to anyone questioning his choices was "this is how modern ux development works". After he was let go, I took over the ui and along with another coworker we managed to have a working version of the app in 9 days, with no prior knowledge of vuejs and nuxtjs. You can imagine how complicated the app is...
- ericwood 6y ago