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>Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure I think this is the important thing here. Everything feels less stable, and more prone to

>Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure I think this is the important thing here. Everything feels less stable, and more prone to breaking, on the modern web. You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is essentially a black box, ready to break (or misbehave) any time.

selimnairb 6y ago
At some point, there is an irreducible amount of complexity. At that point, adding things like over-wrought frameworks to “make things easier” for the developer ends up pushing the complexity around, like an air bubble trapped under a screen protector.
- toast0 6y ago
  There's necessary complexity, and then there's extra complexity. IMHO, a lot of frameworks just add extra complexity. Now that we're in the twenties, you don't need nearly the level of browser compatability shims like at the turn of the century. Sure, bleeding edge features need that, but most sites don't need any of that. Certainly news and shopping fit well enough with turn of the century browsers, so everything else is fluff (and retargetting, ugh). It's the same with a lot of server side frameworks; especially PHP frameworks. I've never been able to grasp what a PHP framework can do that PHP can't, other than burn 50ms of cpu before outputting anything.
  - cutler 6y ago
    Yes, we now have what everyone fought for in the 00s - browser support for web standards - as well as full ES6 support yet here we are with front-end devs falling like flies from burnout. It's like CPU speed bumps - all we do is just invent more complexity to whittle away the gains we've made. Makes me just want to revert to procedural PHP and jQuery/vanailla JS.
martinald 6y ago
This is a really rose tinted view of the world. Writing JavaScript works ok now the language and browser support has matured. 10 years ago it was a complete nightmare. Regardless without a framework it ends up with you reinventing core framework features anyway. Yes, a framework driven app is more complex if the page/app is extremely simple. But if it is of any complexity a framework driven app is going to be far easier to maintain and reason about in 99% of situations.
- darkhorse13 6y ago
  Your comment is a common retort, but I think it highly depends on what I'm building. If I'm building something simple, like a CRUD app, I really don't need a framework and won't end up reinventing core framework features. Give me basic templating and server-side rendering and I'm good to go.
Drew_ 6y ago
> You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is essentially a black box, ready to break (or misbehave) any time. Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks.
- q-big 6y ago
  > Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks. But the frameworks get out of fashion faster than you can obtain deep knowledge of them.
  - Drew_ 6y ago
    Being concerned with a technology "falling out of fashion" is a personal problem not a problem with any framework. In any case, this is not a concern when using mature technologies which are the ones you should be using.
  - rdel 6y ago
    What framework was popular 4 years ago and is now unmaintained? This is a common remark that was true maybe 10 years ago but hasn’t been in quite a while. React, Angular, and Vue all have dedicated maintainers and millions of users, and have for several years now.
  - vsareto 6y ago
    This is starting to no longer be true. We've held Angular/React in the top spots for a while now. Vue is probably next in line. However, both front-end and back-end are substantial enough now and have enough frameworks and environments that it's really hard to do well at both. I'd much prefer more specialization, which would hopefully lead to higher quality.
    - minusf 6y ago
      i am not sure there are true top spots in the javascript world. in my circles more and more people look at svelte to try to get away from frameworks altogether. new tooling is always just around the corner: there is a webpack killer annonced every couple of months. this very site is full articles "why we switched from/to react", etc. in the javascript community "stability" is anything with a bit less churn than the bleeding edge. i think it will result in a massive burnout for a whole generation of developers.
goatinaboat 6y ago
You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. Bootstrap + jQuery on the front end, Flask or similar with CherryPy on the backend. SQLite or Postgres if you need it. That will handle 99.9% of websites, it will be cheap and easy to develop and host, and deliver a great experience to the end user.
- azangru 6y ago
  > Bootstrap + jQuery on the front end Why? CSS can do layout with grids and flexboxes just fine, while es6 plus the modern browser api are as ergonomic as jquery. Why pull these dependencies from a decade ago?
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    CSS can do layout with grids and flexboxes just fine I never bothered to learn CSS is why. Bootstrap looks good and consistent with what users expect and requires almost zero effort to use.
mmcnl 6y ago
This is partly true, but I would also like to state things have much improved. I can vividly recall the 2000s where practically every website would look and behave differently in different browsers. I recall a lot of debugging client-state using poorly scripted PHP websites. Tooling so much more advanced and things "breaking" have moved from the user to the developer. In the jQuery days (or even before that) it was very hard to find out if everything was working as it should. Early feedback is a good thing. Understanding a framework is part of understand what you are shipping to the customer or user. Sure, it might seem more complex, but at least complexity isn't pushed down to the browsers and users.
- ramin_hal9001 6y ago
  > I can vividly recall the 2000s where practically every website would look and behave differently in different browsers. That was a time before the web became more standardized as an app platform. Corporations like Microsoft with .NET, Sun with Java, and Adobe with Flash, were all competing take over the whole world of write-once-run-anywhere frontend apps, become the platform of choice, and lock everyone into their way of doing things. Also there was no distinction between desktop computing and mobile computing as mobile computing back then was still underdeveloped. Now the web is the frontend platform of choice. Ostensibly the platform isn't owned by anyone but the WC3 consortium (which is good), but practically speaking, Google won since everything is WebKit now (which is worrisome). And this has not yet so far solved the problem of the web being built on an incredibly poor programming model that make everyone want to use virtual-DOM frameworks and CSS preprocessors. Hopefully, web assembly will replace the status quo and let people develop front-end apps using better programming languages and frameworks than just the ones the compile to JavaScript.
genericstorage3 6y ago
You'll eventually need js. If server side renders html, now your client is coupled to server side both on api and on html. That's bad. Now 1 component will be: server side html, client side html, css and js.
- darkhorse13 6y ago
  >That's bad Nice generalization. Tell to that to the thousands of absolutely massive companies running on server-rendered HTML how they need to adopt cutting edge JS.

selimnairb 6y ago

At some point, there is an irreducible amount of complexity. At that point, adding things like over-wrought frameworks to “make things easier” for the developer ends up pushing the complexity around, like an air bubble trapped under a screen protector.

toast0 6y ago
There's necessary complexity, and then there's extra complexity. IMHO, a lot of frameworks just add extra complexity. Now that we're in the twenties, you don't need nearly the level of browser compatability shims like at the turn of the century. Sure, bleeding edge features need that, but most sites don't need any of that. Certainly news and shopping fit well enough with turn of the century browsers, so everything else is fluff (and retargetting, ugh). It's the same with a lot of server side frameworks; especially PHP frameworks. I've never been able to grasp what a PHP framework can do that PHP can't, other than burn 50ms of cpu before outputting anything.
- cutler 6y ago
  Yes, we now have what everyone fought for in the 00s - browser support for web standards - as well as full ES6 support yet here we are with front-end devs falling like flies from burnout. It's like CPU speed bumps - all we do is just invent more complexity to whittle away the gains we've made. Makes me just want to revert to procedural PHP and jQuery/vanailla JS.

martinald 6y ago

This is a really rose tinted view of the world. Writing JavaScript works ok now the language and browser support has matured. 10 years ago it was a complete nightmare. Regardless without a framework it ends up with you reinventing core framework features anyway. Yes, a framework driven app is more complex if the page/app is extremely simple. But if it is of any complexity a framework driven app is going to be far easier to maintain and reason about in 99% of situations.

darkhorse13 6y ago
Your comment is a common retort, but I think it highly depends on what I'm building. If I'm building something simple, like a CRUD app, I really don't need a framework and won't end up reinventing core framework features. Give me basic templating and server-side rendering and I'm good to go.

Drew_ 6y ago

> You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is essentially a black box, ready to break (or misbehave) any time. Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks.

q-big 6y ago
> Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks. But the frameworks get out of fashion faster than you can obtain deep knowledge of them.
- Drew_ 6y ago
  Being concerned with a technology "falling out of fashion" is a personal problem not a problem with any framework. In any case, this is not a concern when using mature technologies which are the ones you should be using.
- rdel 6y ago
  What framework was popular 4 years ago and is now unmaintained? This is a common remark that was true maybe 10 years ago but hasn’t been in quite a while. React, Angular, and Vue all have dedicated maintainers and millions of users, and have for several years now.
- vsareto 6y ago
  This is starting to no longer be true. We've held Angular/React in the top spots for a while now. Vue is probably next in line. However, both front-end and back-end are substantial enough now and have enough frameworks and environments that it's really hard to do well at both. I'd much prefer more specialization, which would hopefully lead to higher quality.
  - minusf 6y ago
    i am not sure there are true top spots in the javascript world. in my circles more and more people look at svelte to try to get away from frameworks altogether. new tooling is always just around the corner: there is a webpack killer annonced every couple of months. this very site is full articles "why we switched from/to react", etc. in the javascript community "stability" is anything with a bit less churn than the bleeding edge. i think it will result in a massive burnout for a whole generation of developers.

goatinaboat 6y ago

You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. Bootstrap + jQuery on the front end, Flask or similar with CherryPy on the backend. SQLite or Postgres if you need it. That will handle 99.9% of websites, it will be cheap and easy to develop and host, and deliver a great experience to the end user.

azangru 6y ago
> Bootstrap + jQuery on the front end Why? CSS can do layout with grids and flexboxes just fine, while es6 plus the modern browser api are as ergonomic as jquery. Why pull these dependencies from a decade ago?
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  CSS can do layout with grids and flexboxes just fine I never bothered to learn CSS is why. Bootstrap looks good and consistent with what users expect and requires almost zero effort to use.

mmcnl 6y ago

This is partly true, but I would also like to state things have much improved. I can vividly recall the 2000s where practically every website would look and behave differently in different browsers. I recall a lot of debugging client-state using poorly scripted PHP websites. Tooling so much more advanced and things "breaking" have moved from the user to the developer. In the jQuery days (or even before that) it was very hard to find out if everything was working as it should. Early feedback is a good thing. Understanding a framework is part of understand what you are shipping to the customer or user. Sure, it might seem more complex, but at least complexity isn't pushed down to the browsers and users.

ramin_hal9001 6y ago
> I can vividly recall the 2000s where practically every website would look and behave differently in different browsers. That was a time before the web became more standardized as an app platform. Corporations like Microsoft with .NET, Sun with Java, and Adobe with Flash, were all competing take over the whole world of write-once-run-anywhere frontend apps, become the platform of choice, and lock everyone into their way of doing things. Also there was no distinction between desktop computing and mobile computing as mobile computing back then was still underdeveloped. Now the web is the frontend platform of choice. Ostensibly the platform isn't owned by anyone but the WC3 consortium (which is good), but practically speaking, Google won since everything is WebKit now (which is worrisome). And this has not yet so far solved the problem of the web being built on an incredibly poor programming model that make everyone want to use virtual-DOM frameworks and CSS preprocessors. Hopefully, web assembly will replace the status quo and let people develop front-end apps using better programming languages and frameworks than just the ones the compile to JavaScript.

genericstorage3 6y ago

You'll eventually need js. If server side renders html, now your client is coupled to server side both on api and on html. That's bad. Now 1 component will be: server side html, client side html, css and js.

darkhorse13 6y ago
>That's bad Nice generalization. Tell to that to the thousands of absolutely massive companies running on server-rendered HTML how they need to adopt cutting edge JS.