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Comment by im_down_w_otp | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty sure all this complexity for complexity's sake is directly correlated to the pattern of satisfying investor demands for justification of money raised, which then leads to massively overhiring all sorts of engineers, which then leads to a lot of implicit and/or explicit "make work" necessary to provide the illusion of productivity.

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Maybe some of it also has to do with curiosity. Web development isn't the most fulfilling work intellectually, and when I find myself drawn to interesting ideas I want to play around with them somewhere. Of course the cookie cutter web app I maintain feels like the perfect candidate.

I'm not sure I follow. This is what I heard:

1. Template composition + event handlers is a solved problem.

2. Solved problems aren't interesting problems because they're already solved.

3. Churning the superficial shape and structure of this solved problem into ever more fractured and complex abstractions keeps it interesting.

AngularJS is a prime example. Two-way data was a solved problem until people realized it wouldn't scale.

Single Page Applications solve a lot of problems (ex better UX, offloading load from the server, better separation of concerns) but they introduce a lot of new ones (ex SEO, UI unresponsiveness, etc).

This is the steady and painful march toward progress. Add new functionality, identify the weaknesses, ditch the useless functionality, recycle the good parts and start again to test new assumptions.

I disagree that investors are the cause, though I appreciate the sentiment. Communities develop from leaders, and the only leader Node & Javascript has ever had was Ryan Dahl. From what I can tell, Ryan blindly applied unix principles to the server in a garbage language. I don't know why he thought that was a good idea; maybe he was just fuckin bored. That sentiment, that tiny is better, was like patient zero, and the frontend community with no leader of it's own, cargo-culted it to infinity.

These idiots literally invented a principle that people now refer to as "composibility". Really it means that your library is fucking tiny and does nothing.

The only form of leadership present in the frontend development community are large companies, like Facebook. So what happens is a developer who works for Facebook inherits Facebook's brand power within the community, and a bunch of junior developers who don't have a clue assume developer X is Uncle-fuckin Bob. Inmates running the asylum.

There is no pragmatic thought leadership in Javascript; only children looking for recognition and a podium at an O'Reilly conference.

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