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Comment by jimbob45 | Hacker News Reader

I just can't get on board with any of these front-end frameworks. Vue, Angular, and React all seem like they're trying to lock you into their toolset such that migrating away if they die in the future (or you just wanna switch) is impossible. Not just that, they lock your knowledge to those frameworks too, so you won't have a general knowledge of fundamental pieces of web design unless you study on your own time. It seems like a new take on embrace, extend, extinguish.

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This could be the argument against any framework (frontend, backend, animation, graphing, or anything else). At this point, I think you could back any of the major 3 frontend frameworks and feel confident that your project is safe.

I am not saying that something better isn't going to come along in the future. It almost certainly will... but React isn't going to disappear overnight. Just as jQuery is still being used and supported despite the fact that there is very little reason to use it anymore (most of it is natively supported with ES6/7/8 now) other than to support legacy projects.

No one got screwed over by using jQuery. It made life a lot easier for developers for many years until many of its' features were developed into newer versions of Javascript. Many corporations have converted jQuery codebases to using React/Angular/Vue. It serves a far less valuable purpose now, but no one is worse off for having used it during those years.

You really should be using one of these frameworks. If you aren't then you are doing A LOT of extra work that doesn't need to be recreated. There are mature frameworks that have figured it out for you and to not take advantage of that is only hurting yourself. They are most likely doing a better job at things like databinding than you will ever do yourself because they have teams of people all around the world contributing to it.

Part of being a developer is knowing that you can't do it all yourself. The expectations we have make it impossible to sit down and write every line of code yourself and get a project done to the expectations of our employers, clients, or ourselves in a reasonable timeframe. I understand the fear of spending time learning something like Vue or React and then needing to learn something else in 2-3 years. But then that thing that replaces Vue/Angular/React in 3 years will only last itself for another 3 years. If you keep waiting for the permanent framework to come around then you will die waiting for it to happen. Part of being a developer is constantly learning and adapting to this ever-changing landscape. Right now React/Vue/Angular are pretty important in any front-end project on the web now and not learning them is only hurting yourself and your career.

Leaning assembler, Cobol and Turbo Pascal as my first languages, the "React isn't going to disappear overnight" made me smile: not overnight, but in the current times the fragmentation and short lifespan of every language or framework makes things worse, not better. There are bank systems still running on very old platforms and languages and these companies saved billions of dollars not changing every 3-5 years to the "framework of the day with free soda and a pancake".

Btw, I kind of like Vue, just confirming the idea that frameworks may not be the best thing since sliced bread. They can be great with some conditions that are not met. Now, they are throwaway, like jQuery you correctly mentioned.

There is a great book from 1991 called "Programming as if People Mattered." What I took from it is that UI programming has always been a mess compared to backend, in part because the domain about people, which is just an intrinsically more complicated thing to deal with. Knuth created the Knuth shuffle and now no one needs to do that again. But every UI has to recreate what Fitt's Law means for their paradigm. It's a different kind of thing.

The other point I would add to what you wrote is that five to ten years ago, we were all going crazy watching new JS frameworks come out every other week, like Ember and Knockout (to say nothing of the Grunt vs. Webpack war). It was impossible to keep up with everything going on in JS. AMD → Require → Import. Callbacks → Promises → Async. There were a ton of language evolution changes going on.

Today, things are much more stable. The big choice is React or Not React, and then Not React breaks down into the clones (Preact) and improvements (Vue, Svelte) over standard React. It's not the Wild West anymore. Similar concepts apply everywhere, and you're not taking the same kind of gamble by using a particular component framework that you were back then. The only old browser we still care about is IE11, and that's on a death clock. We're very close to entering the module JS Promise land. If web components ever gets sorted out, we'll even have compatibility of the different frameworks. It's becoming saner.

Aren’t you building pyramids with grains of sand if you don’t use a framework? I can’t imagine how much manual work it would take to drop Vue.

Well you start with grains of sand, then a month in you build your own framework, which is clearly better than anything else out there. A year goes by, new devs start, and everyone hates the monstrosity that has emerged. Such is the software circle of life.

I still prefer that method. With frameworks I'm always worried if it's me or the framework when something goes wrong. You also don't have to worry about build tools or if npm update will suddenly break your application.

I have a personal project that's about 30k lines of jQuery on one page - if you want to see an example of what that looks like:

https://www.superanimo.com/editor

I would be really interested, but it just gives me a page not found...

Is it still 404 for you if you don't mind me asking? From what location?

Over the weekend AWS reported my instance health went to Bad for a bit not sure why.

Western Canada, but I don't think that's the problem. I'm on my phone, and just noticed it looks like it loads, then redirects to /mobile which is where the 404 actually appears. Switch my phone's browser to Desktop mode send to load fine, although a little awkward to use :)

Why do you comment out chunks of code? Aren't you using Git? :-/

Hah - yes I do. The project is just a mess. The main thing that makes this project work is this great scene-graph based animation library:

https://github.com/hyperandroid/CAAT

If it wasn't for that I would have never been able to stitch together a project as difficult as this.

Haven't embrace, extend, extinguish always been used in a malicious way? I can't for the life of me figure out why any front-end framework would want to maliciously kill of javascript / web-design...

Also, I don't know if I'm just not understanding your full complaint properly, but personally I have not found your claims to be accurate, at least in my situation.

I use Vue and I feel like I've only gotten better with JS & general web-dev since. I occasionally startup smaller projects where I don't use any frameworks & I have not experienced any negative repercussions from my framework usage.

The conclusion i reached is to build your website into multiple independant SAP. Keep the general flow on the server, have it load a different html page for sections that are independant, within which you’ll use whatever JS framework you want. This way you’ll be able to slowly build new components with new frameworks while migrating the old ones when you have the time.

Don't all frameworks do this, even on the back-end? None of them are API compatible with each other.

Yes, they do, but for backend there is no common denominator, for the front end the end result is HTML, JS and CSS on the browser and it all comes to these three. THe only loose commonality on the backend that I can think of is the SQL to some point, but even that is a stretch. For front-end a framework or no-framework but manual HTML-JS-CSS will build you the same result in the end, just the amount of work is different.

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