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Comment by robertoandred | Hacker News Reader

Don't use a framework, use three!

This sounds like a lot of effort just to brag about how you avoided whatever piece of tech we're considering to be evil this month.

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I did web development work in the early 2000s (PHP, MySQL) and briefly in 2013-2014. In the past few years, I explored a recent version of Angular, React, and some other framework.

The tooling seemed really nice at first, but I was actually shocked at the number of dependencies and just the overall complexity with all the layers of abstractions.

Fundamentally, these are still websites. I honestly see this as people getting bored, inventing new things to deal with their boredom, and the rest of the industry follows.

Meanwhile, the services I was writing in Java like 10 years ago haven’t really changed. We agreed Spring sucked and moved on. At a FANG where I work, we use Java and Kotlin. A lot of my data crunching jobs are in Scala. We did start using Rust for shared libraries deployed on mobile operating systems… because the entire team preferred it over C++.

But I come back to web development and there’s always a new flavor of solving the same problem. /shrug

I do not understand it too.

The cost due to the complexity is at least 10 times more.

It feels strange to me that nobody in the hierarchy consider it.

I do understand that developer like to play with new technology and don't care about the cost as long as they can play with it and get paid but the hierarchy must have seen the millions dollars lost. Why did they do not say something about it ?

I met a guy at a bar in San Jose who worked at a web startup in the early 2010's. He said they easily spent over one million in UI/UX resources just to animate form validation because the default browser validation wasn't cool enough for their brand.

This is unfair. HTMX and Alpine could hardly be considered frameworks.

React, by comparison, is absolutely massive. It's complicated. It requires compilation, and often a complex build configuration. You still need a backend server, so it won't obviate Django.

Your comment speaks to a larger debate, but it's a rather disappointing contribution.

> [React] requires compilation

technically, but not in the same way e.g. Svelte does. the syntax used by React, JSX, is simple local syntactic sugar:

  <Foo x={a} y={b}>...</Foo>
  // ↓
  createElement(Foo, { x: a, y: b }, ...)

i.e. basically a macro, no real "compiling" going on

If you need to run it through a "transform" step, in this context, it's compiling. What it ultimately gets transformed to, and the implications of that, is a different discussion

alpine has one dependency and htmx is dependency-free, and both are very small[1][2]

so it is a very lightweight combination on top of plain-ol' HTML

[1] - https://bundlephobia.com/package/alpinejs@3.5.2 [2] - https://bundlephobia.com/package/htmx.org@1.6.1

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