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Comment by Donzo | Hacker News Reader

One of the best things about working for myself is that I write all my web stuff in vanilla JS.

While I occasionally make errors, they are easy to identify, understand, and debug because the native features of JS are well-understood by modern browsers.

Sometime in the last decade, modern web development moved on without me. I can no longer recognize what people are doing with all of these package managers and why they are doing it.

I guess from a corporate stand point, it makes sense. You'd want your developers to be like widgets or sprockets, easily replaceable. Hot swappable. Otherwise these guys might build Daedalus-like spaghetti-code mazes and no one will ever be able to replace them.

As a one-man operation, I'll stick with vanilla. It's easy to understand and it works forever.

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> I guess from a corporate stand point, it makes sense. You'd want your developers to be like widgets or sprockets, easily replaceable. Hot swappable. Otherwise these guys might build Daedalus-like spaghetti-code mazes and no one will ever be able to replace them.

Corporations got owned here, though. The web ecosystem managed to create this whole big spaghetti of a toolchain, and now they get to command great salaries to keep it all working. A vanilla JS developer would actually be more of an replaceable widget or sprocket than a modern web developer, but modern is now "industry standard", so corps don't even know they're overpaying.

I guess it depends on how complex the app is, but pulling vue into a page is trivial and gives you a lot of functionality without having to use vue files , es6, or a bundler. After building things with vue and the reactivity it gives you, writing traditional js code to turn knobs manually seems tedious. Vue (or react) eliminates ui state bugs which was probably the biggest source of bugs for me. I fail to see how, under any circumstances, jquery is a better option for handling the dynamic portions of your page .

I work on my own as well and I learnt a long time ago the less dependencies I have in my code the easier my life is.

Sure that works, especially if you tend to write more web sites than advanced web applications. But that is true for back end as well, a one man operation can write Python or Java in a style and using libraries from 10 years ago and it would work perfectly fine. But depending on what they are doing they might not be as productive as they could be.

If you want to try for example React it is incredibly easy to get started. Just if you want to check out what the fuzz is about.

https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html

This made me chuckle, since modern Python and Java styles are very, very similar, if not identical in places, to those of 10 years ago. Some of the libraries have changed, but many are the same as well. Shoot, I can still run Python code I wrote 10 years ago on the latest version (yep, that means something originally written for Python 2.3 can run fine on Python 3.6).

And no, that doesn't make Python and Java old hat or redundant.

You can run 10 year old JavaScript as well, no problem. But Java written today is pretty different from Java written 10 years ago and the Java frameworks are very different.

My point is that you can write code in the style from 10 years ago in any stack but for some reason people seem to take pride in it in the JavaScript world just because they cannot be bothered the actually learn modern development. Not to mention they tend to exaggerate the difficulty of getting started. Compare the tooling, build chain and language features of a JavaScript stack with for example Java. It is not like the JavaScript one is more complicated.

You don't need something like React if you are doing a simple web page but a lot of people ARE building more advanced web applications these days and then it is probably best to just suck it up and learn a modern stack because the old ways of development is not really suited for it.

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