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This is the pure distillation of everything I hate about front-end development right now, especially as presented by posts on HN and meetups. Look upon my fram

This is the pure distillation of everything I hate about front-end development right now, especially as presented by posts on HN and meetups. Look upon my frameworks, ye mighty, and despair. I can't really blame the native folks for laughing at us anymore. We've gotten so wrapped up in ax-sharpening that we've just made the entire ecosystem a morass of sadness and bloat. I wonder if this would've happened if it wasn't so hip to write these things, if money wasn't sloshing around so freely (in some parts of the country, anyway) and sustaining such haphazard growth.

pbiggar 11y ago
There's an argument to be made - and I'm going to make it - that the reason people keep building new frameworks is that existing ones don't solve their problems all that well. As a result, you can expect them to keep being made, until all their problems are solved. Obviously, there isn't one frontend framework that is perfect right now, and we're not going to get there unless people keep building new ones that solve the problems that come up. Inevitably these will create new problems, that a new framework will solve until there are no more problems to solve!
krisdol 11y ago
All I know is I don't know how to learn front end anymore. I started delving into react and flux, but when trying to do personal "real world" projects it seems like there is no end of unsupported opinion on every aspect -- disregarding the confusing levels of ES6 adoption across examples (ranging from no ES6 features used to "this isn't even ES7 yet"), It seems like everyone has a different answer for where to throw in a new abstraction. I still don't know what dispatcher to use, if I should even use a package. And the frameworks, they're all advertised "lightweight" swiss army knives of code, but I can't really figure out objectively why one should even be used in the first place. It seems that there are a dozen implementations of every idea with a slight change here or there. I used to find github activity as a good way to judge whether a framework was well-supported and popular enough to be relatively future proof, but even that's not a good way to go as few packages make it to 300 commits in the JS ecosystem. All this just to display a webpage.

pbiggar 11y ago

There's an argument to be made - and I'm going to make it - that the reason people keep building new frameworks is that existing ones don't solve their problems all that well. As a result, you can expect them to keep being made, until all their problems are solved. Obviously, there isn't one frontend framework that is perfect right now, and we're not going to get there unless people keep building new ones that solve the problems that come up. Inevitably these will create new problems, that a new framework will solve until there are no more problems to solve!

krisdol 11y ago

All I know is I don't know how to learn front end anymore. I started delving into react and flux, but when trying to do personal "real world" projects it seems like there is no end of unsupported opinion on every aspect -- disregarding the confusing levels of ES6 adoption across examples (ranging from no ES6 features used to "this isn't even ES7 yet"), It seems like everyone has a different answer for where to throw in a new abstraction. I still don't know what dispatcher to use, if I should even use a package. And the frameworks, they're all advertised "lightweight" swiss army knives of code, but I can't really figure out objectively why one should even be used in the first place. It seems that there are a dozen implementations of every idea with a slight change here or there. I used to find github activity as a good way to judge whether a framework was well-supported and popular enough to be relatively future proof, but even that's not a good way to go as few packages make it to 300 commits in the JS ecosystem. All this just to display a webpage.