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Comment by bichiliad | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I empathized a lot with this. I spent a lot of time at work writing non-frontend code, and felt pretty rusty once I moved back to it. There are a ton of fuzzy things to learn: what's the right way to require a module? build systems are common practice now? what happened to bower? are there differentiators between node and browser libraries?

Worse yet, every time you search for a topic, there are dozens of conflicting community-generated articles, just because the landscape changes so quickly. I don't think there's a solution apart from "watch what the industry is doing" and "be patient."

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Yeah, front-end dev is a mess right now, and it probably will be for a while. I think a simple description of what we're living through is the low level primitives (DOM and JS) are locked in and are gradually becoming more powerful.

Meanwhile developer world doesn't love working on complex apps using low level primitives, and since the web is pretty easy to grok there are a million devs who feel like "oh man I can write a good higher level framework/pattern/tool on top of this," so they charge off and make it.

And the thing is, most of the tools being built are reasonably good and useful, but it is overwhelming trying to keep up.

What I suspect will happen is that the more successful patterns will become more and more deeply entrenched until there are only really two or three accepted "good ways" to build stuff, and then you'll see a few major libraries in each of those camps that rise to the top, and this will all start to settle down into boring old tech as the hipsters run off to tackle some new hot ecosystem.

We're probably still a few years out from that, though :)

It's already happened. There are basically already 2-3 good patterns: Vue, Angular and React. It's just that the existing patterns are far from perfect so the industry continues to evolve at a breakneck pace.

This helped dinosaurs like me:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16139791

No.. it's "watch what the industry is doing and learn it ". Or, admit the front end is now a full specialization that you don't have, and understand you're not qualified until you learn some new tools and akills.

I've been having this argument constantly at work. Everyone loves our SPA, but they still want to be able to hire really cheap front-end devs to do maintenance. Having back-end devs do MVC and designers doing CSS and light interactivity is a totally valid model, but doing SPA requires specialist knowledge.

I understand why business people are reluctant to view front-end as a real engineering discipline from a cost-perspective, but trying to get a SPA for a JSP prices is silly and unrealistic.

Yep, I've fought this fight multiple times. The latest iteration for me has been managers trying to repurpose React devs into React Native ones at a moment's notice. React Native isn't a replacement for years of familiarity with a platform and knowledge of it's quirks and complexities. If anything it's another level of abstraction and an extra layer of complexity to deal with. And I say this as a veteran React dev who is very much in love with it.

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