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Yeah. I know React quite well, there are legitimate use cases where it shines, but... What we've lost is the ability to say "let's make a website today" and ju

Yeah. I know React quite well, there are legitimate use cases where it shines, but... What we've lost is the ability to say "let's make a website today" and just start making UI without build tools or crazy install trees or massive libraries that need maintenance and security updates, and drop it on a server somewhere. I keep thinking I can have that back... ES6 imports are fully supported now, modern CSS is amazing, all we really need is an SSR/a11y-friendly way to do some kind of nestable HTML macro/component, and we can party like it's 2007 (but with grid, and import statements, and all the other new shiny objects).

lolinder 2y ago
As I'm thinking about this, the main thing that is left before I could imagine a build-free website/webapp is TypeScript support in the browser. Even just esbuild-style stripping of types would be enough, but I can't imagine bringing myself to write even a small amount of JavaScript without types any more. Even without that, a tiny system that just depends on tsc should be within reach at this point.
- evilduck 2y ago
  I wouldn’t personally make these tradeoffs but for the sake of argument if you're willing to write substantially more type info into JSDocs (AI tooling may alleviate this nowadays) you can retain most of the coverage and assurances without using anything Typescript adds to the syntax superset while still using it for type checking during development. Even without the type-heavy JSDocs you might be able to alter your coding style to lean into easing and increasing inference (more classes instead of types or interfaces) and get pretty far. Honestly though, I just never really run into use cases where I need to "make a page in a day" and where modern tooling gets in the way. I'm comfortable with create-react-app, NextJS, Gatsby, and a couple other things, I can definitely put a new static asset project from one of those on a VPS by shuffling files over scp in the timespan it takes to make a pot of coffee, and I would strongly prefer having those tools than trying to be "pure" for hand-wavy reasons and unproven benefit.
codethief 2y ago
> and we can party You go party but for a large team (or group of teams) I will still prefer the explicitness of data flow and the type safety that Angular/React/Vue/… give me.
stickfigure 2y ago
As soon as you said "SSR" you've brought in a complex build system and server infrastructure. But if you just want a simple web page with some javascript or even a react spa, it's not a whole lot of buttonclicks. Super easy to get deployed on something like cloudflare pages too. IMO it's easier today than it was back in the html forms era.

lolinder 2y ago

As I'm thinking about this, the main thing that is left before I could imagine a build-free website/webapp is TypeScript support in the browser. Even just esbuild-style stripping of types would be enough, but I can't imagine bringing myself to write even a small amount of JavaScript without types any more. Even without that, a tiny system that just depends on tsc should be within reach at this point.

evilduck 2y ago
I wouldn’t personally make these tradeoffs but for the sake of argument if you're willing to write substantially more type info into JSDocs (AI tooling may alleviate this nowadays) you can retain most of the coverage and assurances without using anything Typescript adds to the syntax superset while still using it for type checking during development. Even without the type-heavy JSDocs you might be able to alter your coding style to lean into easing and increasing inference (more classes instead of types or interfaces) and get pretty far. Honestly though, I just never really run into use cases where I need to "make a page in a day" and where modern tooling gets in the way. I'm comfortable with create-react-app, NextJS, Gatsby, and a couple other things, I can definitely put a new static asset project from one of those on a VPS by shuffling files over scp in the timespan it takes to make a pot of coffee, and I would strongly prefer having those tools than trying to be "pure" for hand-wavy reasons and unproven benefit.

codethief 2y ago

> and we can party You go party but for a large team (or group of teams) I will still prefer the explicitness of data flow and the type safety that Angular/React/Vue/… give me.

stickfigure 2y ago

As soon as you said "SSR" you've brought in a complex build system and server infrastructure. But if you just want a simple web page with some javascript or even a react spa, it's not a whole lot of buttonclicks. Super easy to get deployed on something like cloudflare pages too. IMO it's easier today than it was back in the html forms era.