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> frontend Complexity Demon having a grip on the entire industry Is frontend web development more complex than it needs to be? If so, how?
by 49531 4y ago
> frontend Complexity Demon having a grip on the entire industry
Is frontend web development more complex than it needs to be? If so, how?
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y agoHehe, good one! Oh, you're serious? :D
- zero_shift 4y agoIf it's so bad, you're welcome to write your applications in vanilla JavaScript, with no shims, in flat files without modules calling 1998 era DOM APIs. There's a reason most people don't, however.
- throwaway892238 4y agodeveloper see javascript think "looks frozen yogurt came out wrong end, but can do job". end up building castle of wrong end frozen yogurt. some say better than no castle. grug say why building with no-no soft serve in first place. (grug know answer: more shiny rock)
- zero_shift 4y agoPlease stop the grugposting, it is impossible to read.
- throwaway892238 4y agoyou in thread for grug story! no like, no read!
- zero_shift 4y agoMade me smile, have my upvote
- beckingz 4y agoalways be grugposting
- pelagicAustral 4y agoAverage js zealot.
- recursive 4y agoVanilla js has modules though. You don't need a build step to use modern APIs.
- throwaway9d6ef 4y agoMeh, grug just <script src="/js/mithril.js"></script> and ES6 at past job. Way less headache not needing build crap, just one blub maven Spring repository. Big ball of whatever may be seen as bad practice, but is honestly no worse than "best practices". Maybe not best for resume oriented development. Guess I had the luxury of only needing to support one browser.
- recursive 4y agonpm, babel, webpack, module compatibility, et al
- crooked-v 4y agoThe whole CJS/AMD/UMD/ESM nightmare has included some prominent devs intentionally breaking packages for certain build types because 'ESM has been around for a while, why haven't you updated yet?'
- koonsolo 4y agoYou are free to develop everything in vanilla JavaScript and run your coded scripts straight in the browser. Very non-complex. But the team that uses npm, babel, webpack etc will crush you both on development speed and stability.
- klysm 4y agoYeah it's not like the complexity doesn't come with some wins. The tradeoff has some serious negatives but there are good reasons those tools are used so widely.
- e111077 4y agolet's be real. nobody is crushing anybody in development speed with webpack. Use rollup esbuild or vite
- skolskoly 4y agoand this is why I have to use nitter or invidious to avoid the wrath of the complexity demon
- strikelaserclaw 4y agoi think the crux of the matter is to use the right tool for the job once you fought hard not to use that tool. Too many devs see something shiny and want to incorporate it into their workflow somehow, this is what introduces bad complexity, instead you should try very hard not to use something shiny until you realize overwhelmingly that using it would be a net win.
- collyw 4y agoIncredibly so. Our frontend devs gave us a talk on React (mainly for backend devs, who know enough frontend to fix bugs). Diagrams with arrows here there and everywhere. NPM install downloads a significant chunk of the internet just to display a hello world page. Compared to what I was doing in Django with server side templates and a bit of JQuery a few days ago this is incredible. It takes twice the works, for very limited benefit in our case at least. Most web apps are just displaying some data and a bit of form validation.
- Tade0 4y agoThat's just React, which both has the highest market share and a culture of following the latest fad combined with piecing together applications from multiple tiny modules(because "it's a library not a framework"). Also jQuery becomes slow and unmaintainable very fast, especially considering that modern frameworks do a lot of tricks to increase performance, like detecting a row swap in a list. Next gen frameworks like Svelte and SolidJS managed to avoid some of that because they compile to a minimal, Vanilla JS app which is easy to read. Especially Svelte at least gives you a decent stack trace.