I've always enjoyed the change and the re-start of standardization efforts reminds me of the fun of bad old days without the massive browser incompatibility. Fo

I've always enjoyed the change and the re-start of standardization efforts reminds me of the fun of bad old days without the massive browser incompatibility. For me the transitions weren't about being "forced" to do anything but rather a continuing quest to find something that sucks less. I've been on the w3c/mozilla bandwagon since '98 so I've avoided 90% of the plugin thrashing you mention. The DOM libraries are different interfaces over the same underlying API so they work the same. For the MVC libraries, I've been exploring the space since 2008 (I was writing docs to release my version of the Backbone library when Jeremy released Backbone and his code was better) so I don't see it as new and upcoming. Having a build seemed obvious when I started writing 10k+ sloc apps since I'm not going to put it in one source file and making 30 requests for js is terrible and I had a rake script I copy/pasted around for years before the node build systems showed up. AMD always seemed like a solution in search of a problem to me and I just concatenate everything. For what it's worth, we're about to go through another generational shift in frontend tech. There are a few major developments in the pipeline: ES6 generators and Web Components. Generators allow for different async flow control patterns [1] which greatly changes the feel when writing JS. Component systems (Ember, Angular, Polymer, React) offer significantly improved state control and huge code savings. If you aren't already using one, you will be in the near future but it's still early enough that it's unclear which will come out on top. There's a set of emerging standards work around enabling self-contained Web Components (shadow DOM, template tag, scoped CSS) but these don't dictate how you structure your code so there's still room for conflict. [1] https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/blob/master/API.md#promisecoroutinegeneratorfunction-generatorfunction---function https://github.com/petkaantonov/bluebird/blob/master/API.md#...