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I can't think of any job postings I've seen recently that only wanted straight-forward web development. Everything was asking for a major framework + other supp

I can't think of any job postings I've seen recently that only wanted straight-forward web development. Everything was asking for a major framework + other supporting libraries for the front end. I'm only 40 and also screaming at the clouds, but I simply don't have the luxury of ignoring some of the larger things like React that gave me a job today. This is the market pressure which is driving things towards more abstraction. Another iteration will add more abstraction on top of that. I'm fairly certain it can't be stopped now. Doing so would mean convincing tech leadership to start actively managing what technologies go into their products and striving for a "less is more" or minimalism approach.

epistasis 2y ago
I'm in the fortunate position of not needing to care much what people are hiring for. Instead I'm more interested in what can I create, and to a lesser extent what sort of team could be scaled on the technology. One of the projects I'm currently contributing to is a massive web app that's nearing 30 years old, all written with a C core and served over CGI in Apache, from an age when C was necessary to process the amount of data that was getting processed per request... I do think there are somewhat perverse incentives in the job market to be up to date on the latest trend in order to maximize the ability to hop onto the most in demand platform. Which makes sense from the developer perspective! But then it also means that devs and even management feel pressure to churn the tech stack on existing working code continuously, to keep abreast of the changes. There's a lot of devs that don't want to be considered stuck on an "old", e.g. PHP, stack, and sometimes management wants to be hiring the devs that are trying the hardest. So to me it feels like a lot of change for changes sake, or in other words the design space of web languages are being fully explored at a great pace, using real world projects. I don't think it's technically incorrect or wrong, but it is probably just a "not for me" part of the ever expanding tech world.
- fragmede 2y ago
  PHP just released version 8.4.2 today, so if that's your ball of wax, and you're working on your own projects, have at it. I wrote some PHP earlier this year for this one project. React pulls together a bunch of language features so that writing full blown apps in html, css, and JavaScript is less of a multi-level, multi-language templated nightmare for the developer who's writing it. Facebook was built on PHP so it's possible to build a fully featured web app using PHP and JavaScript, but that's also that's where React came from. React isn't just change for changes sake. PHP and hand rolled JavaScript can take you where you want to go, but getting there with React is just a bit more comfortable because it isn't a pile of templates with two languages you have to keep in your head simultaneously, and you can more easily debug it. For the cost of learning new ways of doing things, there's inheritance and composability. it's far from perfect, but, imo, it got popular because of how much easier it is to wrap your head around a pile of react components than it is a pile of php templates and its attached pile of JavaScript.

epistasis 2y ago

I'm in the fortunate position of not needing to care much what people are hiring for. Instead I'm more interested in what can I create, and to a lesser extent what sort of team could be scaled on the technology. One of the projects I'm currently contributing to is a massive web app that's nearing 30 years old, all written with a C core and served over CGI in Apache, from an age when C was necessary to process the amount of data that was getting processed per request... I do think there are somewhat perverse incentives in the job market to be up to date on the latest trend in order to maximize the ability to hop onto the most in demand platform. Which makes sense from the developer perspective! But then it also means that devs and even management feel pressure to churn the tech stack on existing working code continuously, to keep abreast of the changes. There's a lot of devs that don't want to be considered stuck on an "old", e.g. PHP, stack, and sometimes management wants to be hiring the devs that are trying the hardest. So to me it feels like a lot of change for changes sake, or in other words the design space of web languages are being fully explored at a great pace, using real world projects. I don't think it's technically incorrect or wrong, but it is probably just a "not for me" part of the ever expanding tech world.

fragmede 2y ago
PHP just released version 8.4.2 today, so if that's your ball of wax, and you're working on your own projects, have at it. I wrote some PHP earlier this year for this one project. React pulls together a bunch of language features so that writing full blown apps in html, css, and JavaScript is less of a multi-level, multi-language templated nightmare for the developer who's writing it. Facebook was built on PHP so it's possible to build a fully featured web app using PHP and JavaScript, but that's also that's where React came from. React isn't just change for changes sake. PHP and hand rolled JavaScript can take you where you want to go, but getting there with React is just a bit more comfortable because it isn't a pile of templates with two languages you have to keep in your head simultaneously, and you can more easily debug it. For the cost of learning new ways of doing things, there's inheritance and composability. it's far from perfect, but, imo, it got popular because of how much easier it is to wrap your head around a pile of react components than it is a pile of php templates and its attached pile of JavaScript.