6 ms·

I'm not a developer and particularly not a front-end one. I have this problem all the time. Even some of the more "obvious" ones, say, nuxtjs, I have a hard ti

I'm not a developer and particularly not a front-end one. I have this problem all the time. Even some of the more "obvious" ones, say, nuxtjs, I have a hard time to get what exactly it offers and why I should use it.

konfusinomicon 4y ago
at this point I've come to realize that all you need to know about front end frameworks anymore is that they are not jquery
- smt88 4y ago
  You are utterly wrong. There's a huge difference between even Next.js and create-react-app, even though they're both based on React. The JS framework space is huge, messy, complex, and endlessly frustrating, but you can't wave that all away just because you can't keep up with it. I can't keep up either, but I do employ people who do, and they recently moved all our build tooling to Vite, which dramatically improved our DX.
  - konfusinomicon 4y ago
    I agree! my comment was in jest and was just poking fun at the madness that is the JS ecosystem and it's often overly complex, and ever growing list of solutions to problems that could be probably be solved with a few lines of jQuery. in the words of Jack Borrough, Senior JS Developer, "JQuery, what are you, five? We use JJQuery." https://jjquery.io/ https://jjquery.io/
  - sireat 4y ago
    The hilarious thing is that this is the first time I am seeing DX in this context. Is DX meant to be Developer Experience or something different?
    - smt88 4y ago
      Yes, developer experience.
blowski 4y ago
Devil's Advocate position here. I don't know much about carpentry, and if I look at a website selling saws, I will struggle to understand the difference between different models. Dumbing down to an extent that I understand (when I probably won't buy the product anyway) risks alienating the target market that will. Due to customer demands, end-user requirements, and device fragmentation, front-end development has genuinely become _that_ demanding. So as a non-specialist in the field, you can't look at relatively specialist tools like Vite and Nuxt and expect to understand them straight away. Sure, many of us long for the halcyon days of "front end" meaning at most pulling in jQuery and embedding something in the page. But then I sound like my Grandad longing for the days when there was no internet at all.
- LtWorf 4y ago
  Developer here. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that even when we work with the thing, we can't understand the homepage of the thing. For example at my $DAYJOB I know what we do but if I didn't the website wouldn't help me to understand.
  - gmassman 4y ago
    I'm also a developer and this is a terrible overstatement. My company sells a product that isn't particularly hard to understand, and our www site makes it pretty clear what we're selling.
  - cercatrova 4y ago
    You might work at a sales-oriented company then, rather than a consumer or prosumer (self-service) oriented company. Sales-oriented company websites are purposefully opaque so as to not make a potential customer be able to easily compare and contrast tools without going through an in-depth demo for each one, led by salespeople and perhaps engineers.
- azemetre 4y ago
  This is a good point if we were selling physical goods and limited by the amount of information we can convey on a screen but we aren't. I'd honestly include things like the what and why as critical to documentation. Most libraries, tools, and tech in general are bad at documentation. It's an active choice to omit discussing these things when they should obviously be included but writing good copy is hard. IDK seems like a good thing to invest in especially if you want your tool to become a dominate player instead of an encroaching tangent. While there are separate pages for the why and comparisons for vite (but it's only comparing itself to other bleeding edge tools rather than popular ones like webpack, browserify, gulp, grunt) they should be snippets of these sections on the front page. Right now there are 6 title cards of with wasted space with very little information. Compare this with playwright's home page you and immediately know why you want to use the tool: https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/ For a personal taste thing, I'm not really a fan of these open source tools creating homepages similar to as you would see for various startups/products. My mind immediately goes "oh paid tool, oh well." They do say it's free in a lovely medium size text that doesn't standout much and is beyond the fold.
agumonkey 4y ago
It seems dev has become a subculture forest. Everything is simple if you're in that group and follow the problems and ideas around.
metadat 4y ago
You aren't alone. The frontend tooling and framework market is so flooded and noisy, with extremely high churn. At this point it's so hard to keep up with and build things with the latest thing, it's become a hilariously bad joke. What other language ecosystem is this insane?

konfusinomicon 4y ago

at this point I've come to realize that all you need to know about front end frameworks anymore is that they are not jquery

smt88 4y ago
You are utterly wrong. There's a huge difference between even Next.js and create-react-app, even though they're both based on React. The JS framework space is huge, messy, complex, and endlessly frustrating, but you can't wave that all away just because you can't keep up with it. I can't keep up either, but I do employ people who do, and they recently moved all our build tooling to Vite, which dramatically improved our DX.
- konfusinomicon 4y ago
  I agree! my comment was in jest and was just poking fun at the madness that is the JS ecosystem and it's often overly complex, and ever growing list of solutions to problems that could be probably be solved with a few lines of jQuery. in the words of Jack Borrough, Senior JS Developer, "JQuery, what are you, five? We use JJQuery." https://jjquery.io/ https://jjquery.io/
- sireat 4y ago
  The hilarious thing is that this is the first time I am seeing DX in this context. Is DX meant to be Developer Experience or something different?
  - smt88 4y ago
    Yes, developer experience.

blowski 4y ago

Devil's Advocate position here. I don't know much about carpentry, and if I look at a website selling saws, I will struggle to understand the difference between different models. Dumbing down to an extent that I understand (when I probably won't buy the product anyway) risks alienating the target market that will. Due to customer demands, end-user requirements, and device fragmentation, front-end development has genuinely become _that_ demanding. So as a non-specialist in the field, you can't look at relatively specialist tools like Vite and Nuxt and expect to understand them straight away. Sure, many of us long for the halcyon days of "front end" meaning at most pulling in jQuery and embedding something in the page. But then I sound like my Grandad longing for the days when there was no internet at all.

LtWorf 4y ago
Developer here. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that even when we work with the thing, we can't understand the homepage of the thing. For example at my $DAYJOB I know what we do but if I didn't the website wouldn't help me to understand.
- gmassman 4y ago
  I'm also a developer and this is a terrible overstatement. My company sells a product that isn't particularly hard to understand, and our www site makes it pretty clear what we're selling.
- cercatrova 4y ago
  You might work at a sales-oriented company then, rather than a consumer or prosumer (self-service) oriented company. Sales-oriented company websites are purposefully opaque so as to not make a potential customer be able to easily compare and contrast tools without going through an in-depth demo for each one, led by salespeople and perhaps engineers.
azemetre 4y ago
This is a good point if we were selling physical goods and limited by the amount of information we can convey on a screen but we aren't. I'd honestly include things like the what and why as critical to documentation. Most libraries, tools, and tech in general are bad at documentation. It's an active choice to omit discussing these things when they should obviously be included but writing good copy is hard. IDK seems like a good thing to invest in especially if you want your tool to become a dominate player instead of an encroaching tangent. While there are separate pages for the why and comparisons for vite (but it's only comparing itself to other bleeding edge tools rather than popular ones like webpack, browserify, gulp, grunt) they should be snippets of these sections on the front page. Right now there are 6 title cards of with wasted space with very little information. Compare this with playwright's home page you and immediately know why you want to use the tool: https://playwright.dev/ https://playwright.dev/ For a personal taste thing, I'm not really a fan of these open source tools creating homepages similar to as you would see for various startups/products. My mind immediately goes "oh paid tool, oh well." They do say it's free in a lovely medium size text that doesn't standout much and is beyond the fold.

agumonkey 4y ago

It seems dev has become a subculture forest. Everything is simple if you're in that group and follow the problems and ideas around.

metadat 4y ago

You aren't alone. The frontend tooling and framework market is so flooded and noisy, with extremely high churn. At this point it's so hard to keep up with and build things with the latest thing, it's become a hilariously bad joke. What other language ecosystem is this insane?