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No, the front-end world is just insane. I've been a frontend developer since early jQuery days. I do React every day and I hate it. Solid.js is better, it's bas
by jokethrowaway 2y ago
No, the front-end world is just insane.
I've been a frontend developer since early jQuery days. I do React every day and I hate it.
Solid.js is better, it's basically React done right but there's still plenty of unneeded overhead.
My code was not messy with jQuery but the code quality heavily depended on how good developers were.
I've seen plenty of bad: back then it was easy for kids writing markup to call themselves developers and charge a lot of money. Nowadays they wouldn't even be able to start a React hello world.
Back then, in the right circles, using templates for individual components was not uncommon. I remember working on some really nice application with individual context for each component and template rendering. I even had a nice router dynamically loading pages and updating the body via xhr while keeping the navigation intact and working even without JS.
Oh and there was no transpiling: no waiting for minutes to build development bundles, no complicated hot reload (damn, you just refreshed, it was so fast). Just a layer of minification going in production.
Anyway it was great back then, the only problem we had was crossbrowser compatibility.
Nowadays we just cargo cult the latest frameworks that some entitled developers from a fang used to get a promotion.
The complexity is through the roof for no reason and for no gains in productivity. If anything developers are way less productive these days.
I also wanted to jump on the HTMX bandwagon, but I found it too limiting and not providing a lot of value out of the box.
These days I use react for client work but if I have to whip out some frontend I just use plain JavaScript + mustache templates instead of components.
The JS browser api is great today, you don't need anything else.
Also AI is pretty great at generating plain JS.
On CSS front: the battle for semantic CSS has been lost (a battle we lost since bootstrap).
The standard is too complex, nowadays you might just use tailwind classes and treat those as what CSS was back in the day.
You can still compose them and make semantic classes out of them (even though they discourage it) and you don't need to worry about a lot of CSS bs rules, stupid defaults and exceptions.