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Comment by thrdbndndn | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a developer and particularly not a front-end one. I have this problem all the time.

Even some of the more "obvious" ones, say, nuxtjs, I have a hard time to get what exactly it offers and why I should use it.

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Devil's Advocate position here.

I don't know much about carpentry, and if I look at a website selling saws, I will struggle to understand the difference between different models. Dumbing down to an extent that I understand (when I probably won't buy the product anyway) risks alienating the target market that will.

Due to customer demands, end-user requirements, and device fragmentation, front-end development has genuinely become _that_ demanding. So as a non-specialist in the field, you can't look at relatively specialist tools like Vite and Nuxt and expect to understand them straight away.

Sure, many of us long for the halcyon days of "front end" meaning at most pulling in jQuery and embedding something in the page. But then I sound like my Grandad longing for the days when there was no internet at all.

This is a good point if we were selling physical goods and limited by the amount of information we can convey on a screen but we aren't.

I'd honestly include things like the what and why as critical to documentation. Most libraries, tools, and tech in general are bad at documentation. It's an active choice to omit discussing these things when they should obviously be included but writing good copy is hard.

IDK seems like a good thing to invest in especially if you want your tool to become a dominate player instead of an encroaching tangent.

While there are separate pages for the why and comparisons for vite (but it's only comparing itself to other bleeding edge tools rather than popular ones like webpack, browserify, gulp, grunt) they should be snippets of these sections on the front page. Right now there are 6 title cards of with wasted space with very little information. Compare this with playwright's home page you and immediately know why you want to use the tool:

https://playwright.dev/

For a personal taste thing, I'm not really a fan of these open source tools creating homepages similar to as you would see for various startups/products. My mind immediately goes "oh paid tool, oh well." They do say it's free in a lovely medium size text that doesn't standout much and is beyond the fold.

Different way of thinking about this - maybe the devs aren't even the target user of the homepage. If the first time a front end dev hears of Vite is via the homepage, their marketing has a problem. (I first heard of Vite maybe 18 months ago in a discussion on the upcoming Nuxt v3.)

Instead, this homepage is trying to convince some CxO this is a serious tool worth adopting.

Either way, I'd assume there's a good reason you find the homepages of so many popular projects homepages rather vacuous. I doubt it's incompetence.

Developer here. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that even when we work with the thing, we can't understand the homepage of the thing.

For example at my $DAYJOB I know what we do but if I didn't the website wouldn't help me to understand.

You might work at a sales-oriented company then, rather than a consumer or prosumer (self-service) oriented company. Sales-oriented company websites are purposefully opaque so as to not make a potential customer be able to easily compare and contrast tools without going through an in-depth demo for each one, led by salespeople and perhaps engineers.

I'm also a developer and this is a terrible overstatement. My company sells a product that isn't particularly hard to understand, and our www site makes it pretty clear what we're selling.

Sticking with your analogy, in the early 2000s we built cabinents and intricate mantelpieces and things ike that, and there were essentially no tools. In the early 2022s we still build cabinents and intricate mantelpieces, but there are a million tools. Meanwhile browser support has become way more consistent across the board and CSS has become easier, yet we think we need super complex tools to do the same tasks we did back in the day.

when I started building websites in the late 90s, I needed to support Internet Explorer and Netscape running 15" CRT monitors. Few cared much about accessibility, performance, security, SEO, experimental releases. Clients wanted a 3 page website with few design requirements. I sliced up some PSDs into HTML pages with tables on it, and uploaded it via FTP to a single server.

If I tried to run a web-based business offering that today, I'd get very litle business.

Interestingly, there's a very high chance that those HTML pages with tables crafted in the 90s still render perfectly fine today (if they're still around).

> Due to customer demands, end-user requirements, and device fragmentation, front-end development has genuinely become _that_ demanding. So as a non-specialist in the field, you can't look at relatively specialist tools like Vite and Nuxt and expect to understand them straight away.

Vite is a set of front end tooling - it provides a local dev server, allows you to work with JSX, CSS and TypeScript, as well as lets you build your app, amongst other things. It handles most things that go between editing your source files and having distribution bundles.

Nuxt is a framework for Vue, that attempts to provide a lot of defaults for your Vue apps and also supports server side rendering or static site generation. It has functionality for handling views, routing, state, configuration, as well as middleware, fetching data and validations.

You can probably describe anything in a way that people would get the gist of it straight away. It doesn't have to be all encompassing, it doesn't even have to be 100% correct, just easy to understand, maybe even with a comparison in there (e.g. npm + webpack). Many such descriptions might just fit into a single paragraph of text, or even a tooltip.

Nothing like a carpentry analogy to obliterate all nuance.

The OP said:

> Well, that it's… next gen, and it apparently can catch up with me, which is not much, since I'm not really catching up with what's going on anyway. Also, that it's "tooling". Like IDE, or framework, or maybe a chainsaw. Can't tell.

We know that it is “tooling”. But what is “next gen” and “catch up with you”? Are those terms that the appropriate audience is just supposed to get?

I am a developer and still took a while to realize what it does. Also, that snowpack is probably just as sufficient.

It's a shite landing page that communicates little, and as a front end framework, well....shouldn't we expect more?

Snowpack is no longer maintained and they recommend switching to Vite.

It feels like this big struggle and effort to end up with another jquery in a few years because in the end that's what works and feels right

But he is a developer.

They are not a specialist front-end dev.

To use an analogy closer to home, if the average front-end dev were to look at a page talking about some new C++ compiler, they'd say "wat?".

at this point I've come to realize that all you need to know about front end frameworks anymore is that they are not jquery

You are utterly wrong. There's a huge difference between even Next.js and create-react-app, even though they're both based on React.

The JS framework space is huge, messy, complex, and endlessly frustrating, but you can't wave that all away just because you can't keep up with it.

I can't keep up either, but I do employ people who do, and they recently moved all our build tooling to Vite, which dramatically improved our DX.

The hilarious thing is that this is the first time I am seeing DX in this context.

Is DX meant to be Developer Experience or something different?

Yes, developer experience.

I agree! my comment was in jest and was just poking fun at the madness that is the JS ecosystem and it's often overly complex, and ever growing list of solutions to problems that could be probably be solved with a few lines of jQuery.

in the words of Jack Borrough, Senior JS Developer, "JQuery, what are you, five? We use JJQuery." https://jjquery.io/

You aren't alone.

The frontend tooling and framework market is so flooded and noisy, with extremely high churn. At this point it's so hard to keep up with and build things with the latest thing, it's become a hilariously bad joke.

What other language ecosystem is this insane?

It seems dev has become a subculture forest. Everything is simple if you're in that group and follow the problems and ideas around.

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