4 ms·

No, the exhausting part is not a new framework, it's being pitched The Next Revolution when it's just a horizontally-iterative variation on a domain that people

by weego 5y ago

No, the exhausting part is not a new framework, it's being pitched The Next Revolution when it's just a horizontally-iterative variation on a domain that people continue to reinvent without ever actually making a difference. Someone need to step up to the bigger picture of how we stop the entire JS side of the industry repeat the same mistakes that not only other domains have already dealt with but that the JS community seems destined to repeat themselves.

beepbooptheory 5y ago
Having actually read the article, I thought what it had to say about "transferable knowledge" spoke to this general complaint quiet nicely. Whether you think its the right answer or not, I'm not sure.
- weego 5y ago
  I just feel like it's trying to force the 'A-ha!' moment that the first rails demonstrations had for most developers at the time, when that ship has long sailed. I'm probably just jaded. There's nothing actually wrong with what they're doing at all, it's just 20 years later and there's an overwhelming feeling of 'is this all we've achieved?'
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    It's almost like each new generation of programmers needs to go through the same cycles of possible solutions. Those of us who are older see a rehashing of old arguments. Those who are younger, are seeing those arguments for the first time. I wouldn't worry too much about it. High schoolers make me cranky and my parent's generation is completely out of touch. My parents and grandparents felt the same at my age. :)
  - danjac 5y ago
    Rails was a full-stack framework that took care of everything from database models down to frontend AJAX integration, so you literally could build a very basic blog that actually saved stuff to a database within 20 minutes. Remix is yet another frontend framework that you have to manually wire up to some other library or service to do anything useful.
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      Rails is... ;) (7.0 was released last month)
franciscop 5y ago
The big component libraries in Javascript are +10 years old (except for Vue.js, which is "only" 7 years old), everything else that came afterwards is just a rehash/horizontal iteration as you say, be it Next, Gatsby, or Remix. If you learn e.g. React well, using any of these frameworks is fairly easy. Which is kind of cool IMHO; this means the core libraries remain the same and then the ecosystem improves around. It's a world of a difference between React early days manual setup, the big advancement that was Create-React-App, and then again some other minor but amazing leaps like esbuild or vitejs. I can setup a fully-featured React app and be productive in seconds, with amazing nice things to have that traditionally had to be manually configured in other languages (linter, transpiler, hot module reload, etc).
eternityforest 5y ago
The problem is browsers. On desktop you can keep expanding a framework as much as you want, for decades. Even 30MB is nothing. When we have more transparent compression in filesystems it will natter even less. Browsers are still stuck in the age of every kilobyte mattering, but we try to use them for 21st century things. Not a reuse friendly environment. This should be ideally fixed on the browser end I think. React and Vue and all the rest could fly to Google and have a big meeting on what to add to browsers that would make it possible to implement all these frameworks in 1k of code. With more core language support, maybe we could finally have things like Qt and GTK, mature continually maintained libraries that have everything you need and are just there, without you having to worry about the code size.
- frogperson 5y ago
  I have always wondered why there isn't more hacking on the browser side of the web. Why don't we see attempts to replace javascript with python or lua or something diifferent? Why not replace http or html? I guess what I'm asking is, what could the web be if we take a step back and re-evaluate javascript at all instead of just the frameworks that rely on JS?
  - vagrantJin 5y ago
    Quite simply because HTML and JS work and works well for what it was intended. Your suggestion is like trying to make an F1 car from a Diesel locomotive. There should be another app, with an altogether different protocol to suit current needs because clearly, we are going to end up with browsers as Operating systems.
    - eternityforest 5y ago
      Browser sandboxing currently seems to work, users vaugely have a sense of how to avoid hacking on the web. A new protocol would have a lot of catching up to do, and would probably just be... a modified browser, because browsers are amazing at GUI stuff. Browsers as OSes work fine, aside from the fact that all the advanced features aren't real standards, and everyone other than Google tries to kill them, so you can never be sure what's going to get deprecated later.

by weego 5y ago

beepbooptheory 5y ago

Having actually read the article, I thought what it had to say about "transferable knowledge" spoke to this general complaint quiet nicely. Whether you think its the right answer or not, I'm not sure.

weego 5y ago
I just feel like it's trying to force the 'A-ha!' moment that the first rails demonstrations had for most developers at the time, when that ship has long sailed. I'm probably just jaded. There's nothing actually wrong with what they're doing at all, it's just 20 years later and there's an overwhelming feeling of 'is this all we've achieved?'
- kayodelycaon 5y ago
  It's almost like each new generation of programmers needs to go through the same cycles of possible solutions. Those of us who are older see a rehashing of old arguments. Those who are younger, are seeing those arguments for the first time. I wouldn't worry too much about it. High schoolers make me cranky and my parent's generation is completely out of touch. My parents and grandparents felt the same at my age. :)
- danjac 5y ago
  Rails was a full-stack framework that took care of everything from database models down to frontend AJAX integration, so you literally could build a very basic blog that actually saved stuff to a database within 20 minutes. Remix is yet another frontend framework that you have to manually wire up to some other library or service to do anything useful.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    Rails is... ;) (7.0 was released last month)

franciscop 5y ago

The big component libraries in Javascript are +10 years old (except for Vue.js, which is "only" 7 years old), everything else that came afterwards is just a rehash/horizontal iteration as you say, be it Next, Gatsby, or Remix. If you learn e.g. React well, using any of these frameworks is fairly easy. Which is kind of cool IMHO; this means the core libraries remain the same and then the ecosystem improves around. It's a world of a difference between React early days manual setup, the big advancement that was Create-React-App, and then again some other minor but amazing leaps like esbuild or vitejs. I can setup a fully-featured React app and be productive in seconds, with amazing nice things to have that traditionally had to be manually configured in other languages (linter, transpiler, hot module reload, etc).

eternityforest 5y ago

The problem is browsers. On desktop you can keep expanding a framework as much as you want, for decades. Even 30MB is nothing. When we have more transparent compression in filesystems it will natter even less. Browsers are still stuck in the age of every kilobyte mattering, but we try to use them for 21st century things. Not a reuse friendly environment. This should be ideally fixed on the browser end I think. React and Vue and all the rest could fly to Google and have a big meeting on what to add to browsers that would make it possible to implement all these frameworks in 1k of code. With more core language support, maybe we could finally have things like Qt and GTK, mature continually maintained libraries that have everything you need and are just there, without you having to worry about the code size.

frogperson 5y ago
I have always wondered why there isn't more hacking on the browser side of the web. Why don't we see attempts to replace javascript with python or lua or something diifferent? Why not replace http or html? I guess what I'm asking is, what could the web be if we take a step back and re-evaluate javascript at all instead of just the frameworks that rely on JS?
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  Quite simply because HTML and JS work and works well for what it was intended. Your suggestion is like trying to make an F1 car from a Diesel locomotive. There should be another app, with an altogether different protocol to suit current needs because clearly, we are going to end up with browsers as Operating systems.
  - eternityforest 5y ago
    Browser sandboxing currently seems to work, users vaugely have a sense of how to avoid hacking on the web. A new protocol would have a lot of catching up to do, and would probably just be... a modified browser, because browsers are amazing at GUI stuff. Browsers as OSes work fine, aside from the fact that all the advanced features aren't real standards, and everyone other than Google tries to kill them, so you can never be sure what's going to get deprecated later.