Isn't it a fun time to be a front-end developer?
Back in the day anyone could hack together a bit of JS for their website and get something up and running, even if it was a bit Heath Robinson. You actually still can do this but you wouldn't necessarily come away with that impression from reading about front-end development. Cynically, it sometimes feels like front-end developers are overcompensating for years of JS derision from "real" programmers with the plethora of tools and technologies you "need" to know.
If people want to use this, well, they're welcome. I can even see some benefit to a very lightweight UI/framework, especially if you don't have to worry about any version of Internet Explorer below 11, because the browser APIs these days are pretty comprehensive, and tend to behave reasonably consistently. Likewise CSS. [1]
Still, I can't get in any way excited about yet another library/framework. Go ahead and use it if you like but don't be trying to evangelise me about it.
([1] As an aside: I will say that IE11 is still something of a problem child in terms of not supporting some things I use, or not supporting them well - flexbox is an obvious example. Conversely, "scumbag" Chrome can be a problem child simply because it lets you get away with doing things that you shouldn't be allowed to do at all. E.g., `element.style = 'display: none'` instead of `element.style.display = 'none'`, meaning that when you come to test your code in other browsers... it breaks.)
That's a first. Is that a common saying somewhere? Does it refer to literal oral sex with a goat?
More like compensating for JavaScript's very real shortcomings.
I'm pretty new to it still, and boy do I disagree with this. I hadn't touched web development for about five years, prior experience being largely JavaScript-free after being chased well off by an employer's MooTools monstrosity, and coming to the modern JS world, with React and even Redux (though I think its APIs feel really clunky), was awesome.
These tools are less "Heath Robinson" and more prove that you understand what your stuff is doing, but that's a feature--I'd rather put in the spadework up front and be more assured of it doing expected things when it runs.
The frontend equivalent is dropping a script tag on a page and uploading it by FTP.
But there's a reason backend communities accepted devops long before frontend. Between all of the various BE platforms, all with their own dependency management intricacy, all the various databases, big data stores, queues, streams, object stores, cache systems, containers (docker, VMs, etc), the OS (for FE you can just drop your stuff on S3 and stick a CDN in front and it will scale to near infinity...try to scale your rails app like that for giggles).
BE is 100x worse.
Meanwhile I have 20 year old object pascal code continuing to work and run in production.
Even iOS which is a fast moving target provides fantastic compatibility with older code that I wrote in 2009
There are several libraries/frameworks that enable us to write Web Components now, even though browser support for the spec isn't fully there. E.g. [Aurelia](http://aurelia.io/) and [Polymer](https://www.polymer-project.org/) have great features, component APIs, and cross-browser support.
...
> There are several libraries/frameworks > browser support for the spec isn't fully there.
The irony is lost on frontend developers
No.
I came to frontend development on the peak of web 2.0 craze, when 10mb of jQuery "bells and whistles" on a corporate front page was considered hip and progressive. No matter how awful these 10mb of animation scripts were, they ran faster than 1mb of "highly optimised" react spa today.
Additionally, this 'fatigue' with front-end is getting a bit over told, I suspect it might be more alienation from developers who hacked jquery scripts together and feel they need to transition to app frameworks (I see so many simple websites and landing pages as react etc now).. where as those sites should just transition to vanilla js + dom..
The thing about inspired frameworks and 'churn' isn't a javascript/front-end thing, it happens everywhere, constantly... how many IOC, DI, ORM frameworks did Java and .NET have..
A lot of people got a lot of productive work done 'hacking' together jquery and jquery-ui scripts. The result wasn't pretty and was a bit of a maintenance nightmare.
They are not only a bit of alienated by having to work with frameworks, but they're expected to be as productive with these frameworks as they were hacking together jquery scripts and snippets, but are still the 1-man or 2-man developers within a wider business.
These frameworks are great in a business built around the web such as a SAAS business, but a lot of people are in businesses where their saas part is secondary, or are trying to maintain sites which just aren't the main product of the business.
They're pressured by well meaning but often misguided higher-ups to use the latest and greatest and feel the pressure of churn.
So so so true... but I can give a correction to the size of the team. I personally witnessed 10 to 45 man teams doing things as simple as a web app with a sole function being "login, enter account number to send money to, enter amount of money to send, and press the button"
While 45 is a bit of exaggeration on my side, as it counts team's own accountants, HRs, and 20 something PMs, "change manager" types, and other obscure managers of managers
Cyclomatic complexity went up many times. Going over a simple for loop in under 100 kilocycles for client side page generation was considered ok back 10 years ago. Even then, browsers had no problem with that.
Compare that with 20 plus layers of deep merges, with closure tricks, with prototype swapping on the fly in a transpiled observer pattern style input event handler - things like that you have in relatively simple SPAs today
Here's how I describe it: https://medium.com/front-end-hacking/how-it-feels-to-learn-j...
I just submitted it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15108546