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Absolutely. I tried to push us to try Svelte at my last job at BigCo for over four years, to replace an internal templating system. We didn't even use React or

Absolutely. I tried to push us to try Svelte at my last job at BigCo for over four years, to replace an internal templating system. We didn't even use React or Node yet, so not only we had to convince the old guard to adopt something new, but also deal with the React-grown crowd protesting. You can't imagine the amount of flak I've taken for that. Managed to get it on a back-of-the-house system, while we built a massively complex React app for the main product. Everyone who worked on it loved it, but was still considered risky. Now that it has a gazillion GH stars and is mentioned in 1 out of 3 blog posts, of course things are much easier.

solardev 4y ago
Man, on one hand... evaluating frameworks is just part of the job, right? Same as evaluating a vendor service, or a third-party package, or an architecture or a pattern... On the other hand, novelty burnout is a real thing. Javascript has mutated so much in a short period of time that it's become impossible to keep up with -- especially once you factor in frameworks and tooling. Times like this, I wish vanilla JS/ECMAscript was more powerful out of the box. For a language designed to work with the HTML DOM -- the ONLY language that works natively with it -- it is so woefully underpowered. Why do we need a framework at all to do a simple stateful AJAX UI? =/ For many sites and apps, the business logic SHOULD be the focus of dev time, but it's not... it's implementing trivial business logic inside of the ever-growing monster that is the JS ecosystem. There are 1000 ways to do anything in JS, but never just one good way.
- neon_electro 4y ago
  And if you haven't been hyper-focused on learning every bit of "modern JavaScript" in the last 5 years, employers definitely love to disqualify you just because you were happily working on "legacy tech" instead of catching up on React and every other JavaScript-heavy approach to Web development. I'm bitter, and I'm not opposed to moving on and learning this stuff, but it's like employers barely understand the value of HTML/CSS relative to how much React is prioritized/used as a single qualifier. I have "1-2 years experience" with React & friends if that matters, and I consider myself a 10 year Web development vet.
SebastianKra 4y ago
Four years ago? When Svelte was still in it's infancy? You're absolutely right to have received pushback for that. I would still consider Svelte somewhat risky today. You're lucky that Svelte has taken off but it could have easily been abandoned and you could be stuck with an outdated framework. Three years ago, someone at my company made the bad call to use Aurelia. It didn't take off, and we are still stuck with this decision. I'm not claiming that the success is random - Svelte is clearly a far better framework than Aurelia. But the weaknesses often become apparent only later into development, and so it's safer to bet on established approaches.
- ricardobeat 4y ago
  Depends on your perspective. Svelte first came out in 2016, and by that time I'd been following Ractive.js, the author's previous framework at The Guardian, for years already.
- no_wizard 4y ago
  Aurelia is maintained though, as opposed to being completely dead at least. However I imagine there isn't alot of community libraries to leverage with such a small ecosystem.

solardev 4y ago

Man, on one hand... evaluating frameworks is just part of the job, right? Same as evaluating a vendor service, or a third-party package, or an architecture or a pattern... On the other hand, novelty burnout is a real thing. Javascript has mutated so much in a short period of time that it's become impossible to keep up with -- especially once you factor in frameworks and tooling. Times like this, I wish vanilla JS/ECMAscript was more powerful out of the box. For a language designed to work with the HTML DOM -- the ONLY language that works natively with it -- it is so woefully underpowered. Why do we need a framework at all to do a simple stateful AJAX UI? =/ For many sites and apps, the business logic SHOULD be the focus of dev time, but it's not... it's implementing trivial business logic inside of the ever-growing monster that is the JS ecosystem. There are 1000 ways to do anything in JS, but never just one good way.

neon_electro 4y ago
And if you haven't been hyper-focused on learning every bit of "modern JavaScript" in the last 5 years, employers definitely love to disqualify you just because you were happily working on "legacy tech" instead of catching up on React and every other JavaScript-heavy approach to Web development. I'm bitter, and I'm not opposed to moving on and learning this stuff, but it's like employers barely understand the value of HTML/CSS relative to how much React is prioritized/used as a single qualifier. I have "1-2 years experience" with React & friends if that matters, and I consider myself a 10 year Web development vet.

SebastianKra 4y ago

Four years ago? When Svelte was still in it's infancy? You're absolutely right to have received pushback for that. I would still consider Svelte somewhat risky today. You're lucky that Svelte has taken off but it could have easily been abandoned and you could be stuck with an outdated framework. Three years ago, someone at my company made the bad call to use Aurelia. It didn't take off, and we are still stuck with this decision. I'm not claiming that the success is random - Svelte is clearly a far better framework than Aurelia. But the weaknesses often become apparent only later into development, and so it's safer to bet on established approaches.

ricardobeat 4y ago
Depends on your perspective. Svelte first came out in 2016, and by that time I'd been following Ractive.js, the author's previous framework at The Guardian, for years already.
no_wizard 4y ago
Aurelia is maintained though, as opposed to being completely dead at least. However I imagine there isn't alot of community libraries to leverage with such a small ecosystem.