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The ecosystem exploded because of a few core advances (ES6 finally coming out, Babel coming into light, the CommonJS approach to modules, the rebirth of functional programming on the frontend, etc).

This is behind us now. If you sit in forums, chat rooms and other JS centric communities, you'll see that the dialog is pretty different.

It's no longer "Let's build a new tool!" (oh there's some of that, but they rarely hit the spotlight). It's "How do we make this tool work in this edge case we didn't think of".

There's still a framework every other day, but they're usually built on top of the core things now, and no one really pay attention to 99% of them anymore.

If you remember the early days of Java and SOAP with the new SOA framework a day, this is pretty similar. It's settling down.

Good ideas get standardized.

Ideas from Coffeescript made it into es6, Promises, fetch, etc. Once there are sufficient standards that solve the pain points, the fragmentation will go away. JS is playing catch-up because it was pointless to advance the language when IE didn't even support the existing standards and had 90% market share. Now it has to distill all the good ideas from the past 2 decades and other languages in short order. The chaos is understandable.

Standardization isn't enough. No browser implements ES6 modules thus the webpacks and co.

How the modules get loaded isn't specified either. All that's specified ATM are the syntax and static semantics. The loader spec probably has to be finished before any browser implements es6 modules.

And when they do support ES6 modules, I will kick my builder out the door, but until then there is no other way of keeping sane among the thousands of lines of JS.

> This just doesn't make any sense. None of this is nice. It's all ugly and complicated. There's no beauty to these tools.

Um. That applies to all software... but not especially to React and Redux. Or what are you comparing with?

Is there anything in particular you dislike about React, or Redux, or Babel?

I don't think this ecosystem is going to "collapse" at all. Something else will come along, as always. Until then, it's a fine set of tools.

You don't need to feel despair about choosing tools.

Spending weeks to learn an ecosystem of dynamic web programming... yeah, what's wrong with that? How quickly would you prefer to learn?

I learned to use React in a couple of days, for what it's worth. It's remarkably straightforward and the API surface area is small.

Redux is such a simple idea that I accidentally invented nearly the same thing before I even knew about Flux: put your app's state in a global immutable object, then use values to represent actions that transform the state. It's not ugly or complicated.

You don't need to be tricked by peer pressure either. You can be as conservative and cautious as you wish.

Why all this... whining?

> Redux is such a simple idea that I accidentally invented... >put your app's state in a global immutable object, then use values to represent actions that transform the state. It's not ugly or complicated.

i agree that react is fairly simple..it's the other pieces to get it to be a complete solution that are just ugly and complex. I'm sorry but flux and redux are another layer of abstraction that are much harder for new starters to grasp. The advocates are so deep in the echo chamber that you don't realize how daunting all this.

> I'm sorry but flux and redux are another layer of abstraction that are much harder for new starters to grasp. The advocates are so deep in the echo chamber that you don't realize how daunting all this.

As always in a large enough population, there exists multiple dichotomies. Its a difficult problem; In this case, some people want better(more specific) tools, and others want less choice and time to learn one tool well. There is no really good answer to this, given that you can't please everyone, and software empowers minorities to fulfill their visions regardless of the majority. Ideally we can just hope that all evolution is cyclic (explosion of ideas, consolidation of ideas, repeat) and overall we stay in a healthy equilibrium. However, this is a problem in all aspects of life, from fashion to food. Even within computer science its not a problem unique to JavaScript.

JavaScript without Babel, React + (Flux | Meteor | Redux | Relay) is a non-starter. Some may also swap out for: Angular | Ember | Backbone + jQuery. And almost always there are additional "custom"[0] homegrown frameworks on top of or alongside everything else. Java without (Spring | Guice), Lombok, (AspectJ | Spring AOP), Guava, (JodaTime | Java8), ApacheCommons, (Log4J | SLF4J), (Hibernate | ...) is a non-starter. Some may also swap out for: JavaEE + (Glassfish | JBoss). And almost always there are additional "custom"[0] homegrown frameworks on top of or alongside everything else.

I'm just using Java because I have to deal with it daily. However, undoubtedly this is a problem across any language or tool that has a large enough population.

[0] "custom" is in quotes because developers that create them always claim they are general purpose, regardless that in reality only one application has ever used it in production.

JS scene desperately needs a moratorium on tooling just like Python did on language features 5-6 years ago.

Actually the language also needs a total freeze in features. ES5, ES6, transpilers, this and that and bla bla. I used to love language geekery, not so much after a few years of JS exposure. And now there is WebAssembly which is supposed to be a "game changer". Fuck that. I don't want the game to change anymore, I just wanna play.

Or perhaps, I'm just getting old.

I don't understand this argument at all. You don't have to be on the bleeding edge. In fact I recommend against it for nearly all cases. If you want to write standard ES5, and skip all this stuff, you can! There is no one holding a gun to your head telling you to keep up "or else".

I pick and choose the tools I need. Some are new, some are old. This goes for any language I use, too, not just JavaScript.

I'm still using browserify, knockout and lodash for all my projects, been using knockout for over a year and it has been rock solid, had zero issues that where traced back to knockout, browserify has worked very well for me same with lodash.

I keep an eye on what is coming down the pipe but I don't buy into anything until it's been around long enough for me to get a good grasp on what the lay of the land is.

In the meantime I have a working stack that allows me to accomplish anything I reasonably need to and I know it'll work.

For those not au fait with Knockout, recent releases add HTML components, deferred and pure computeds and in 3.4 they increased performance through hot paths over 100% making it insanely faster.

I like it a great deal.

It's a cognitive load, a burden. The paradox of choice, anxiety etc.

> This just doesn't make any sense. None of this is nice. It's all ugly and complicated. There's no beauty to these tools. There are no fundamental tools either. Everything is evolving too quickly. You've a choice of 25 frameworks, libraries, tools that change every day and break between versions. The complexity is growing and the ecosystem is getting extremely fragmented.

Yah, it's like XML all over again, when you describe it that way.

> You've a choice of 25 frameworks, libraries, tools that change every day and break between versions.

And this is what the author has said too, and then presented a list of tools for different purposes to one doesn't fall into analysis-paralysis.

Since past few months, JS community and settling down and tools are getting stable and long lasting. Surely, new ones are being developed everyday, but a standard is being set with React-Redux-Webpack family.

Maybe a new generation of JS tools will come up when Web Assembly becomes mainstream, but until then, I think React is here to stay.

Yeah... until the mountain of poorly documented plugins built on Webpack causes it to collapse just as Grunt, and Gulp did before it.

The first time I used Webpack... I wanted to punch someone so badly... their documentation for the Webpack plugin they wrote didnt mention that it would also turn all my SCSS/CSS into JavaScript. Imagine the disaster that was. This is the experience I have over and over again. I expect a 'plugin' to plug into things without requiring me to read every line of the plugin's source code... if I have to do that I may as well write my own tool. Community displeasure builds until someone writes a new tool and we get yet another mass exodus to that tool in the hope it will be better. It seems to be about 18 months to 1 year.

I suspect the entire JavaScript ecosystem is suffering from an effect similar to Dunbar's Number, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

There becomes 'too many libraries' and after a certain point, the tower collapses again to a smaller pool of new dependencies because we cannot without much "fighting the tide" maintain a mental model with the level of complexity necessary to keep all these dependencies in our heads while working.

It is extremely hard to believe that anything in the JavaScript ecosystem will be a standard or 'here to stay' for any timeframe greater than a year or so.

Both React and Angular has existed for more than a year. Angular is a couple of years old and still works although they have new version.

> It's all ugly and complicated. There's no beauty to these tools.

Which succesful, widely adopted languages have beauty to their tools?

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