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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

When you maintain your own software for periods of time that outlast front-end engineering trends or IC's entire career tracks, your opinions might change.

Plenty of software runs untouched for decades. A lot of it powers your interactions with people on HN right now, from drivers, to font rasterization and backing layer UI composition. There are bugs in codebases that have taken 20 years for people to even notice. It happens.

When people don't have to worry about trivial details, they can focus greater efforts.

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At once I sympathize with your viewpoint and also have to say that React is the longest I've ever seen a Javascript thing stay in the notoriously fickle good graces of the frontend world – short of perhaps jQuery.

Railing against it is railing against the best-in-class example of what you want... even if it still falls short of what you want. A decade is nothing to sneeze at.

But it hasn't really lasted has it?

We've had React 1 (components) and now React 2 (hooks), they just managed the transition better than angular and so gobbled that market share.

jQuery stayed mostly stable, there was only one version that I can remember where it was a bit of a hassle to upgrade it. But it's quite a while ago now, so could be mis-remembering.

Right, exactly. Had Angular.JS slowly implemented what is now just Angular, they wouldn't have displaced so many people so fast.

I think it still would have happened, but it's a shortsighted read into competitive analysis to not understand how this happened.

It has lasted as a project. Are you saying that no library should try to improve their performance, internals or API?

There was many versions of jQuery. I remember the days of hacking Drupal to load multiple versions because it shipped with an older version, but we needed a newer one for other dependencies.

I’ve been around this space for over a decade. Software that’s easy to change, tends to outlive the rest.

React has more staying power than almost any other JS library I’ve seen. And they’ve maintained backwards compatibility on par with Windows.

The other day dang was mentioning how HN struggling under the popularity of the GPT4 thread[0]. But even then, surely HN has seen some code updates. If you look at HN as a product (and not a codebase), the unofficial/official algolia search engine is an addition.

What runs untouched for decades?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35157344

And yet, I‘ve said no to projects that would‘ve earned me a nice sum because they were started at a nice pace with a dev that intended to build his own frontend framework, and it slowly grew into an eldritch horror.

I feel that. I have even done that myself.

Typically written by folks who aren't even aware of the problems they are trying to solve, no tests, and event and timer leaks.

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