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Fads are tempered by a community of people anchored in a deep understanding of the technology. As talented as many FE engineers are, I can count on one hand the

by daenz 4y ago

Fads are tempered by a community of people anchored in a deep understanding of the technology. As talented as many FE engineers are, I can count on one hand the number that I've met that have a deep understanding of things like await/async + Futures, closures, DOM trees, etc. These things are (perhaps unfortunately) required to do FE work, yet the engineers using them don't fully understand them, so they don't know how to discern if helper libraries are actually helpful. Additionally, I'd argue FE draws more junior people in general, because of the theoretical rapid feedback loop, and the fact that you can "make something that looks cool" with relatively little effort (relative to a BE engineer). These junior people add confusion to the chaos of the community because they don't know what they don't know, so they're cocksure about their opinions. And as long as they've "made something that looks cool", even if the architecture behind it is hot garbage, it buys them cred in the community. Somewhat related, I've been using Flutter for a recent FE project and I'm in love with it. It's more for webs/mobile applications than websites, but the ergonomics of it feel like a coherent vision. The people maintaining it (Googlers) are excellent, and the Dart library community seems to know what they're doing. Furthermore, the FE design choices are based on Material Design[0], which is backed by (some informal) research by UI and UX professionals, so you don't have to sweat usability quite as much as you would starting from scratch. 0. https://material.io/components?platform=flutter https://material.io/components?platform=flutter

randomtwiddler 4y ago
It's interesting how you can look down on front end for being new and naive while suggesting that Google is a fine reliable tech stack provider. I'm the opposite of everything about this post. A very experienced dev (>20 years professional experience) that has moved primarily to the front end recently in my career (gradually over 4 years). I won't touch flutter simply because the sole vendor and essential dependency is Google. Fads are present in every corner of development. As is "not invented here" or the general draw to green field.
- daenz 4y ago
  If you're looking for a response, you're not really giving me much to respond to. Why do you think Google doesn't provide a "reliable tech stack" ? In any case, I wasn't suggesting that specifically (though I tend to agree with it), only that they have a coherent ergonomic vision by competent engineers.
  - randomtwiddler 4y ago
    Google doesn't have a track record of long term support for their projects. They readily cancel them when they want to. I would hate to invest precious years into tech and apps to have the rug pulled out from under me because flutter entered the Google graveyard. They do have competent engineers, and if they get sufficient community buy-in, I'll be much more open to it.
    - daenz 4y ago
      That's fair. I feel more confident about Google's OSS (like flutter) surviving than I do about Google's consumer products. The flutter community is very strong, and as far as offerings go, it's (imo) the strongest product that abstracts UI/UX development over web and mobile, and the demand for that abstraction is very real. Plus having Dart (which feels a bit like Java, but less verbose) as the foundation language raises the bar in terms of library code quality (compared to Javascript at least)
      - randomtwiddler 4y ago
        BTW, nice to have these kinds of pro and con conversations about random tech. I don't get it at work as much as I'd like. A lot of open source projects die when their corporate investor closes shop. The community is often just dependants who want to use the tech but don't have the ability to keep it running. And it is usually not big enough to come up with the funding for a foundation to run maintenance and development. Flutter is very ambitious as a project. I have more direct experience with other similar projects like react native, which really struggles despite the investments.

by daenz 4y ago

randomtwiddler 4y ago

It's interesting how you can look down on front end for being new and naive while suggesting that Google is a fine reliable tech stack provider. I'm the opposite of everything about this post. A very experienced dev (>20 years professional experience) that has moved primarily to the front end recently in my career (gradually over 4 years). I won't touch flutter simply because the sole vendor and essential dependency is Google. Fads are present in every corner of development. As is "not invented here" or the general draw to green field.

daenz 4y ago
If you're looking for a response, you're not really giving me much to respond to. Why do you think Google doesn't provide a "reliable tech stack" ? In any case, I wasn't suggesting that specifically (though I tend to agree with it), only that they have a coherent ergonomic vision by competent engineers.
- randomtwiddler 4y ago
  Google doesn't have a track record of long term support for their projects. They readily cancel them when they want to. I would hate to invest precious years into tech and apps to have the rug pulled out from under me because flutter entered the Google graveyard. They do have competent engineers, and if they get sufficient community buy-in, I'll be much more open to it.
  - daenz 4y ago
    That's fair. I feel more confident about Google's OSS (like flutter) surviving than I do about Google's consumer products. The flutter community is very strong, and as far as offerings go, it's (imo) the strongest product that abstracts UI/UX development over web and mobile, and the demand for that abstraction is very real. Plus having Dart (which feels a bit like Java, but less verbose) as the foundation language raises the bar in terms of library code quality (compared to Javascript at least)
    - randomtwiddler 4y ago
      BTW, nice to have these kinds of pro and con conversations about random tech. I don't get it at work as much as I'd like. A lot of open source projects die when their corporate investor closes shop. The community is often just dependants who want to use the tech but don't have the ability to keep it running. And it is usually not big enough to come up with the funding for a foundation to run maintenance and development. Flutter is very ambitious as a project. I have more direct experience with other similar projects like react native, which really struggles despite the investments.