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Comment by ktRolster | Hacker News Reader

It's great to know basic principles, and I highly recommend that.

If you want to do frontend though, you need to know some concrete things. And then you choose a framework (or more likely, some frameworks, since there's no 'one-size-fits-all'), and it no longer becomes supported. At that point you begin to feel Javascript fatigue.

But ensure that whenever you're investing time to learn, it's something that will last.

Which web framework is that? Probably none right now. But waiting is not an option, websites need to be built today.

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You're investing the time to learn the architectural patterns, which will likely either stay relatively similar over time, or morph (which will be easier for you to pick up), or they're drastically change, in which case you'll probably have a level of understanding for why they changed. And yeah along the way you'll implement stuff today and that's an important component, but learning is as much about the long game as it is the short game, and you can play that long game without having too much anxiety over these choices

Exactly. I've met too many front-end devs who are unable to separate the architectural pattern from the implementation of the library they are using. They have the larger mountain to climb when needing to learn a new framework.

"I've met too many front-end devs who are unable to separate the architectural pattern from the implementation of the library they are using."

That's because front-end development is based on a core of HTML/CSS/JS which itself does not lend very well to architectural paradigms.

People 'starting out' on the front-end, in some ways, never learn how to write propers software. They've been using weird ideas from the start.

That's actually kind of interesting. HTML/CSS/JS really are the framework. It's already a great separation of concerns (HTML for data/content, Javascript for behavior and logic, and CSS for presentation). Everything on top of it just seems like implementation details.

If you want to display documents, sure, I agree. If you need complex UIs, manually updating DOM without any kind of abstraction is definitely not a right choice.

No, CSS/HTML in theory is a good idea, separating content from presentation. In practice, the HTML still needs to know about the presentation.

I find that it's the people that don't know HTML/CSS that have the problems.

They end up reinventing the wheel repeatedly.

There's a whole lot of JavaScript devs out there that think they are front-end devs. They aren't. There's nothing wrong with that of course.

> They end up reinventing the wheel repeatedly.

You mean like altering attributes directly on elements (and proud that they had encapsulated the code in a reusable function) instead of adding/removing a class?

One of the reasons that I think it's more helpful to interview for patterns (and anti-patterns) than it is for algorithms. Especially for the front-end.

You misunderstand his point--with a few exceptions, what these frameworks are doing is fundamentally not difficult for someone with practice in the broad base of knowledge that falls under computing science

Sure, the frameworks aren't doing anything fundamentally difficult. That's why there are so many. But they are doing things that take design, coding and craftsmanship and many hours of testing and debugging to get right.

.Net

.Net has shifted a bit. I know companies that invested in Silverlight and are now rewriting that software, for example, or wrote something using Visual Basic .Net and now have to rewrite it for C#, or have software in Webforms that they have to shift to MVC, and software in MVC that's being shifted to MVC + [insert modern javascript framework here]. And once they get to that last one, they have the same problem as everyone else has here.

And now that .Net Core exists, it's almost a guarantee Microsoft will start shifting more and more of its resources to that, so companies eventually will have to invest significant resources rewriting their libraries for .Net Core, which might never support all the features they rely on.

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