A few months ago (around the Christmas break) I decided to build a web UI for something. The last time I personally touched “front end” HTML or JS was when IE5

A few months ago (around the Christmas break) I decided to build a web UI for something. The last time I personally touched “front end” HTML or JS was when IE5 was a thing, although I’ve done a lot with server side TypeScript and the Node ecosystem. I spent a couple of days evaluating the options, coming at this with fresh eyes, but not as a beginner to programming or architecture, and found the following: - Ember makes the most sense to me personally, but at the time the stable ember packages pulled in several dependencies npm called out as vulnerable, and editor support was not great. The webstorm plug-in basically didn’t do anything useful. Finally, it was not obvious that TypeScript was a first class citizen, which put me off. - Vue seemed ok, if a little harder to reason about than Ember - I can see why people like it but there didn’t seem to be a compelling reason to put effort into it. - React is hands down the “winner” of the ecosystem, is easy to get up and running with and has great editor support. As someone that generally likes functional programming, the concepts clicked nicely. TypeScript was first class, TSX seems nice enough. In the end, the limited time I had meant I just wrote a native Mac app with SwiftUI, and resolved not to touch web stuff for another 2 decades if I could avoid it. I have a huge amount of respect for people who can keep the front end web ecosystem straight in their head - I really don’t understand why people consider “back end” the more complex technical domain.