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Comment by ng12 | Hacker News Reader

I always find it interesting that the people who unabashedly admit they have minimal front-end experience usually have the strongest condemnation of the current tools.

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Don’t worry. People with a lot of front-end experience, in this case me, also condemn the current tools.

Can I ask what sort of front-end frameworks/tools you use that you also condemn?

Most of them are merely abstraction layers for capabilities the browsers already provide. Rarely do they offer anything more. The big selling point is that they help organize the logic in a declarative way or automate a bunch of tiresome tasks that wouldn’t be there in the first place had you not used a mountain of tooling.

There are only 2 APIs in the browser: DOM and the web APIs. As far as writing cohesive logic that does wonderful things that’s on you. Most JS developers would rather it not be on them and instead adopt an Invented Here Syndrome mentality. The fear of writing any original code is very real.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invented_here

20+ years of web experience, and the current tools are mostly trash.

It's more understandable if you think about it the other way around: people who don't like the current front-end tools usually try to avoid contact with them. Which these days, mostly means not doing professional front-end development.

I'm a WPF dev. I wouldn't mind learning iOS / Android / QT or whatever heavy client framework and language.

But when I see the mess that front end web dev have to deal with, yes I'm very skeptical !

I've built UI's with Qt, Gtk, swing, VBA, Access, winforms, WPF, TK, html/css and more I can't remember and I stay away from front end webdev these days because the tools are such a tyre fire and way less productive than what we were using > 20 years ago.

I find the people that like most of the current tooling grew up with it, don't know any better and don't want to learn.

> Qt, Gtk, swing, VBA, Access, winforms, WPF, TK

These aren't web-native so I don't think the comparison is particularly salient. Building on the web is a business requirement, all the tools are to make that requirement manageable.

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