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Not even a day after the post about HTMX not living up to its promise! There are only two certainties in life, death and frontend churn.

by ipnon 2y ago

JodieBenitez 2y ago
> the post about HTMX not living up to its promise You read that wrong.
birdgoose 2y ago
I'm fairly certain the tone of the HTMX post (https://htmx.org/essays/future/ https://htmx.org/essays/future/) was positive about its future of becoming "stable" (as opposed to "stale").
Cthulhu_ 2y ago
> frontend churn. Frontend churn hasn't been as much of a thing for years now, see e.g. https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-frameworks/ https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-framewo.... If you stuck with Angular or React 10 years ago, you're still good today. jQuery is even older but still on 75% of websites (https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library), and Bootstrap is on nearly a quarter. Frontend churn is only a thing if you try to stay on the left side of the Gartner Hype Cycle.
- owebmaster 2y ago
  React churned itself.
- ricardobeat 2y ago
  That’s only true on the surface: if you chose React, you had to rebuild and relearn everything about once every two years. Averages out to about the same workload as following the latest fad. Maybe more, since refactoring legacy code is 10x harder than building from scratch.
  - agos 2y ago
    this is just not true. even the worst offenders (looking at you, react-router) do not require to "rebuild and relearn everything". What an unnecessary hyperbole.
    - iforgot22 2y ago
      I really do have to relearn react-router every time I use it, then I pin it to that version so it doesn't break later. Last time was v6, now there's v7 since Nov '24. Besides that, React churn isn't too bad. I have to fix builds, but I don't have to relearn everything about React. Unlike Angular.
    - ricardobeat 2y ago
      Maybe not React itself, but the ecosystem as a whole. I can list some of these changes that generated a lot of work from memory: - the move from in-browser JSX compilation to build tools / webpack - the move from class components to functional components and hooks - all the changes related to ES6 classes and modules + build system - server-side components - Flux -> Redux - Redux -> MobX -> Relay -> Redux Toolkit -> Context API -> Zustand / Jotai / Recoil -> react-query (next: zero?) - Next.js and Remix, 7 react-router versions (latest with major breaking API changes again) - Signals and more SSR stuff (I stopped looking at this point) And this is ignoring all the React Native churn over the years as I imagine not everyone is involved with that. Even if your particular project didn’t go through all of these migrations, you had to relearn things to be able to work in other/newer projects. It’s impossible to measure, but having written and used a ton of different frameworks, I really do feel like the overhead of keeping up with the changes was equal to or larger than learning a new one every couple years.
      - iforgot22 2y ago
        Also Typescript, if your team started using it.
      - gr4vityWall 2y ago
        From that list, I believe Server-Side Components is a big offender in terms of complexity. React Router changing its API so often felt unnecessary too. I wouldn't call all of that churn though, as I believe most devs only had to deal with a subset of those. Some who got into React in 2019 could be writing the same kind of code today. Frontend as whole, on the other hand...
- flamwenco 2y ago
  Angular of 10 years ago... you mean the 1.0 framework that's wholly incompatible with 2+ because it was a ground up re-write?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- iforgot22 2y ago
  React didn't have hooks 10 years ago, but at least they're compatible with classes
mpweiher 2y ago
Which post was that?

Not even a day after the post about HTMX not living up to its promise! There are only two certainties in life, death and frontend churn.

by ipnon 2y ago

Not even a day after the post about HTMX not living up to its promise! There are only two certainties in life, death and frontend churn.

JodieBenitez 2y ago

> the post about HTMX not living up to its promise You read that wrong.

birdgoose 2y ago

I'm fairly certain the tone of the HTMX post (https://htmx.org/essays/future/ https://htmx.org/essays/future/) was positive about its future of becoming "stable" (as opposed to "stale").

Cthulhu_ 2y ago

> frontend churn. Frontend churn hasn't been as much of a thing for years now, see e.g. https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-frameworks/ https://2022.stateofjs.com/en-US/libraries/front-end-framewo.... If you stuck with Angular or React 10 years ago, you're still good today. jQuery is even older but still on 75% of websites (https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library https://w3techs.com/technologies/overview/javascript_library), and Bootstrap is on nearly a quarter. Frontend churn is only a thing if you try to stay on the left side of the Gartner Hype Cycle.

owebmaster 2y ago
React churned itself.
ricardobeat 2y ago
That’s only true on the surface: if you chose React, you had to rebuild and relearn everything about once every two years. Averages out to about the same workload as following the latest fad. Maybe more, since refactoring legacy code is 10x harder than building from scratch.
- agos 2y ago
  this is just not true. even the worst offenders (looking at you, react-router) do not require to "rebuild and relearn everything". What an unnecessary hyperbole.
  - iforgot22 2y ago
    I really do have to relearn react-router every time I use it, then I pin it to that version so it doesn't break later. Last time was v6, now there's v7 since Nov '24. Besides that, React churn isn't too bad. I have to fix builds, but I don't have to relearn everything about React. Unlike Angular.
  - ricardobeat 2y ago
    Maybe not React itself, but the ecosystem as a whole. I can list some of these changes that generated a lot of work from memory: - the move from in-browser JSX compilation to build tools / webpack - the move from class components to functional components and hooks - all the changes related to ES6 classes and modules + build system - server-side components - Flux -> Redux - Redux -> MobX -> Relay -> Redux Toolkit -> Context API -> Zustand / Jotai / Recoil -> react-query (next: zero?) - Next.js and Remix, 7 react-router versions (latest with major breaking API changes again) - Signals and more SSR stuff (I stopped looking at this point) And this is ignoring all the React Native churn over the years as I imagine not everyone is involved with that. Even if your particular project didn’t go through all of these migrations, you had to relearn things to be able to work in other/newer projects. It’s impossible to measure, but having written and used a ton of different frameworks, I really do feel like the overhead of keeping up with the changes was equal to or larger than learning a new one every couple years.
    - iforgot22 2y ago
      Also Typescript, if your team started using it.
    - gr4vityWall 2y ago
      From that list, I believe Server-Side Components is a big offender in terms of complexity. React Router changing its API so often felt unnecessary too. I wouldn't call all of that churn though, as I believe most devs only had to deal with a subset of those. Some who got into React in 2019 could be writing the same kind of code today. Frontend as whole, on the other hand...
flamwenco 2y ago
Angular of 10 years ago... you mean the 1.0 framework that's wholly incompatible with 2+ because it was a ground up re-write?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
iforgot22 2y ago
React didn't have hooks 10 years ago, but at least they're compatible with classes

mpweiher 2y ago

Which post was that?