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Comment by tomc1985 | Hacker News Reader

tomc1985

I miss the days when jQuery reigned supreme, and all the tenderfoot magpie developers didn't yet have the twinkle of React in their eyes

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I don't; it was an improvement when BackboneJS came out so I could reason about larger scale applications, and another improvement when AngularJS came out so I could build and write tests for logical, reusable components, and another when React (especially in 2022) was there and reduced these components to simple JS functions.

That said, I don't like how complicated modern day front-end development is, to the point where you need a university degree to even try and fathom some of React's inner workings (e.g. https://reactjs.org/blog/2019/11/06/building-great-user-expe...) etc.

Oh god, Backbone. I absolutely hated that framework. It didn't even seem to do anything, it seemed like I had to implement all of the logic myself. Except I had to do it their way, for some reason, and practically nothing made sense. (I haven't touched it in years, though, so my memory is probably distorting my experience)

I like the idea of React, just not what it has turned into. The amount of tooling that it has created to do things that should be simple (but aren't because of the runtime and/or the programmer), and the gymnastics it goes through so that people can have their precious (often unnecessary) SPAs, is ridiculous. That, and JSX continues to be an abomination that shits all over separation of concerns so that smoothbrains don't hurt themselves trying to reason over it.

Re: React, have you looked at Vanilla custom elements:

https://javascript.info/custom-elements

I've been using them lately and I think they are the bees knees.

Yeah I have been looking them over and they seem very interesting. Have not tried them yet.

Would love for there to be One True Way(tm) without the framework question.

HTMX + custom elements + Alpine.js = love

I remember doing pocs with observables, angular and react back when they were all way new and thinking observables really makes the other two unnecessary.

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