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Comment by pgamble | Hacker News Reader

Relatively new react developer here (still learning in fact!), I liked this article although it shook me a bit and made me wonder "am I wasting time with some of this stuff? maybe I should be looking ahead to the next 'best framework'". Id be interested in hearing people's thoughts: what would be best to learn for maximum applicability in the ~3 year timeframe?

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Hmm. Toughie.

React kinda ate the web world well, so it's not a terrible bet that it'll keep it going for 3 years...

If you like data layer / DB stuff (and if you're strictly a frontend dev) my suggestion is to just get comfortable with SQL / Postgres / SQLite, and just dbs in general, as that stuff has remained pretty darn stable for a while. Only really replaceable by even-simpler (though less versatile) approaches like giant plain key-value stores, file-system-style storage (NoSQL), or added versatility to Excel spreadsheets (lol it may be more viable to let companies just keep using those than moving to a DB nowadays just to let office workers use what's comfortable). I learned SQL 15 years ago and still glad to have it now surprisingly - though it's maybe sometimes more powerful than I need. But good value there.

For frontend: JS, React, npm, docker containers, maybe Vue?... that's about as deep granularity as I'd go for predicting what'll keep another 3 years. Libraries, state management, all the tooling, etc etc - you'll probably relearn more than 3 times over during that... Welcome to (a hopefully well-paid) hell.

It's easy to second guess your tech choices based on various thinkpieces and comments when you're new. React will still likely be the top framework in 3 years. There are a lot of powerful network effects in being one of the oldest component based frameworks in JS. It's also held up strongly in the nearly 10 years since it was released. That being said I do agree with other comments that you should consider yourself a web/JS/HTML dev first and foremost independent of any framework.

Depends on what you are learning for. If it is for a job, then react has the most openings by a large margin and will likely stay like that for a while.

Don't call yourself a react dev, it's unlikely this framework will be around in 10 years time (see what was popular in frontend dev 10 years ago). Call yourself a developer and try to learn the core tech, if you're a web developer that means javascript and html.

All these libraries are built on JS, understanding JS is the safest bet you can make.

Learn the theory, not the framework.

Completely disagree. Theory is useless without application. For some people, the best way to learn is to start making projects immediately. Theory will come later.

lol this is the wrong job for that. Join a game development team that uses assembly and C and cares about filling a gpu efficiently if you want to learn real programming. Here theory is philosophizing about the best way to organize a garbage dump to take our mind off the shoveling.

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