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Comment by awinder | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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