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Comment by whatarethembits | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, a framework atleast provides some ropes to hold onto while traversing the mess. Currently I'm stuck with a codebase with almost no documentation of a mess of legacy and new code with layers and layers of developers' opinions on top. The only way I'm able to figure anything is out is by tracing remnants of a light framework that's in place. I'm able to read the framework documentation and slowly unravel it, without it it'd be an even more monumental task!

I googled/linkedin developers that have worked on this codebase for the past decade and most of them appear to have this "rockstar developer" thing going on. They are opinionated, had heated debates (from what I'm told), and often rolled their own solutions whenever possible. Now we see the result of these geniuses doing their thing.

Just use a framework please, your homegrown solution is sucks. I guarantee it.

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> Currently I'm stuck with a codebase with almost no documentation of a mess of legacy and new code with layers and layers of developers' opinions on top.

If it was originally built using a framework, what framework do you think that would be? And would it still be in active development and evolving today? How do you integrate new code in a legacy or evolving framework? My experience of this says it is not really a framework vs no-framework problem, but a problem of how to keep an applications code base healthy in a world of ever changing and evolving features, developers, frameworks and technologies. I think thats the real problem you are dealing with here, and not "hot-shot developer from 10 years back didn't use the coolest stack of that time".

And it is the problem you were hired to solve. If everything was working perfectly with no new features required to be added to the legacy code base, they simply wouldn't need you.

React was somebody's homegrown solution. Same for Vue, Angular, Svelte and every other framework.

Yeah. But they got selected by the ecosystem because they were GREAT homegrown solutions. While Angular was an accidental success, it seems that Facebook really grasped early on what was happening with React, (we all benefited from the Angular experience, warts and all) and really put in the resources necessary to make React successful, for the benefit of all.

The only way I benefited from Angular was when all the companies who let the front-end dev come lately's talk them into using it; realized they had been sold a bill off goods and needed someone to get them out of their Angular mess. I made a good living off of getting people out of Angular 1's mess. The reality is Angular 1 was poor, it was so poor that the developers decided that they has missed the mark so much that they needed a complete rewrite to make a good product. Why people stuck with them after that is beyond me. I can still vividly remember taking over my first angular project and realizing that the devs that built it where so green that they had misused common concepts and terminology like what scope means and what state means and had conflated the two into a mess.

Angular was bad and it's ashamed that it's hype pretty much relegated better toolkits like Dojo and MooTools to the dustbin of history.

> they got selected by the ecosystem because they were GREAT homegrown solutions

While React has lots of great ideas, good marketing and the facebook brand is really what boosted its popularity. Popular does not necessarily mean great. There must be some other great homegrown frameworks out there, but we have never heard of them, since they did not start out as a facebook or google homegrown framework.

> it seems that Facebook really grasped early on what was happening with React,

This just is not accurate. React has also evolved a lot since its inception, they've just been careful about maintaining backwards compatibility compared to angular.

One does not preclude the other.

Ja 100% ! Ppl will argue with you and they will argue the exception not the average experience. Sure there are code messes with frameworks. I feel that ppl argue Jquery with multiple ppl and a good size project is better, just havent had enough pain. You can x my argument by 2 if its a project you join and didnt start.

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