4 ms·

Sometimes I wonder what the point of those web frameworks are. I find them harder to use than plain HTML/CSS/JS.

medicineman 6y ago
From some comments I read around here regarding the greatness of JavaScript, it would seem that a key benefit is that it allows more non-programmers to become developers. So, since I think it follows, one could say the benefit of those frameworks is that it allows more specialization and make-work for the aforementioned hoi polloi.
Zelphyr 6y ago
Part of the downvotes to your comment may be coming from the fact that this framework is (I'm assuming?) a joke. Otherwise, I completely agree with you. The last few projects I've worked on I used vanilla HTML/CSS/JS and I found it so much better than using any of the popular front-end frameworks. I didn't have megabytes of dependencies before a single line of production code was written. I didn't have to spend time trying to understand any Webpack incantations.
- nucleardog 6y ago
  Honestly this stuff all just makes me feel really old. In a past life that wasn't even that far away, I implemented single page sites with smooth transitions and all sorts of fun stuff in a few lines of CSS. There was like 1kB of JS thrown on top to add a bit of "nice to have" functionality. I implemented an entire clone of Flappy Bird in like 50kB. The bulk of that was a polyfill so it worked on IE8. I implemented a curling game that would open up a webcam in the background and continuously capture and process images to try and detect shapes you'd drawn on paper. When it detected one it would trace the shape and decompose it into a convex shape as that's all the physics engine supported, then render this on a 65" touchscreen coffee table and let you curl with your custom shaped rock with realistically calculated physics including an appropriate density for your curling rock based on the volume of the same you'd created. It would calculate scoring and use websockets to communicate that to another device which was hooked up to a TV that displayed a leaderboard. This was all in about 500kB, and the bulk of that was the physics engine (what could've been a "computer vision" library was like a kilobyte of vanilla JS). There was no effort made to prune unused code or anything because it was never loaded over the network or required to be optimized for load times and I only had a week to build it. I honestly cannot even begin to comprehend how we're shipping static websites with 1MB+ of JS. Damn kids, get off my lawn.
5560675260 6y ago
Frameworks are excessive for documents and presentations. They start to shine in development of apps, where you have to wrangle views, manage data bindings and react to user input in nontrivial ways. It's possible to roll out your own boilerplate and utility methods, but it's almost always counterproductive - this is not a part of task you have at hand and you'll miss on structure and conventions invented by framework team that really had resources to do it.

From some comments I read around here regarding the greatness of JavaScript, it would seem that a key benefit is that it allows more non-programmers to become developers. So, since I think it follows, one could say the benefit of those frameworks is that it allows more specialization and make-work for the aforementioned hoi polloi.

Zelphyr 6y ago

Part of the downvotes to your comment may be coming from the fact that this framework is (I'm assuming?) a joke. Otherwise, I completely agree with you. The last few projects I've worked on I used vanilla HTML/CSS/JS and I found it so much better than using any of the popular front-end frameworks. I didn't have megabytes of dependencies before a single line of production code was written. I didn't have to spend time trying to understand any Webpack incantations.

nucleardog 6y ago
Honestly this stuff all just makes me feel really old. In a past life that wasn't even that far away, I implemented single page sites with smooth transitions and all sorts of fun stuff in a few lines of CSS. There was like 1kB of JS thrown on top to add a bit of "nice to have" functionality. I implemented an entire clone of Flappy Bird in like 50kB. The bulk of that was a polyfill so it worked on IE8. I implemented a curling game that would open up a webcam in the background and continuously capture and process images to try and detect shapes you'd drawn on paper. When it detected one it would trace the shape and decompose it into a convex shape as that's all the physics engine supported, then render this on a 65" touchscreen coffee table and let you curl with your custom shaped rock with realistically calculated physics including an appropriate density for your curling rock based on the volume of the same you'd created. It would calculate scoring and use websockets to communicate that to another device which was hooked up to a TV that displayed a leaderboard. This was all in about 500kB, and the bulk of that was the physics engine (what could've been a "computer vision" library was like a kilobyte of vanilla JS). There was no effort made to prune unused code or anything because it was never loaded over the network or required to be optimized for load times and I only had a week to build it. I honestly cannot even begin to comprehend how we're shipping static websites with 1MB+ of JS. Damn kids, get off my lawn.

5560675260 6y ago

Frameworks are excessive for documents and presentations. They start to shine in development of apps, where you have to wrangle views, manage data bindings and react to user input in nontrivial ways. It's possible to roll out your own boilerplate and utility methods, but it's almost always counterproductive - this is not a part of task you have at hand and you'll miss on structure and conventions invented by framework team that really had resources to do it.