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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

Working on a project in Angular right now I’m really questioning if the layers of abstraction on front end code are worth the cost. The compile times and performance costs over writing standard JS are real.

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The complexity and maintenance costs of developing a real-world application in standard JS are also real.

I would only consider something like Typescript mandatory, because static typing is just so hugely important for any maintainable project. But beyond that, it's a little more work to come up with a clean MVC pattern yourself, but also perfectly feasible to not use React/Angular/etc.

Depends on scope and number of developers I guess.

Or you could design your application to not need all the bells and whistles and complicated shit that modern front-end web UIs throw in. 90% of pages could be static HTML. Probably 95% of "web applications" could be a set of forms with post-backs.

If I'm trying to make a thick-client, I'd rather build it in a language and platform that I don't have to fight quite so much.

Have you actually done it? I have, a team of 10 to 15 programmers building it for over an year (SPA, deployed on web, iOS and Android), and now I lead a team of 5 programmers maintaining it and developing new features. I will gladly pay the cost of a good abstraction for lower complexity.

Yes, I actually have. A plain old-school Razor view UI with post-backs was infinitely easier to maintain than the cobbled together mess of javascript that we've ended up with trying to move away from that old, unsexy technology. And almost everything is an order of magnitude harder to do, or to make changes to.

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