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Comment by jollyllama | Hacker News Reader

The state of front-end dev can only be explained by madness or intentionally creating barriers to entry and hedging for job security.

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Been a front end dev on and off for nearly 15 years. The DX is as good as it’s ever been now. JS/TS have become nice languages and deployments on platforms like Vercel are an absolute breeze and Tailwind means I don’t have to decipher anyone’s CSS class naming convention.

Whenever I see people say things like “we are back where we started with file based routing” I see it more that we’ve remembered what was good about the old days and cherry-picked that good stuff.

Tailwind is great, but I consider it an outlier. They went and made a stand-alone compiler so you don't have to use NPM build processes. It works very well.

It's less that people take issue with JS/TS itself and more the frameworks that use it and the associated dependencies and tooling. The complaints in the article are very representative of my experience.

Never attribute to malice...

I actually always tought of web frontend to be the easiest to start with. But that only applies to starting a very simple project from scratch without external dependencies. Afterwards the complexity grows very, very steeply.

Starting new fully featured web project takes me whole day. And if I want to use recent version of the stack, everytime I have to forget everything I knew and start again, because everything changed totally since I did it last time.

Very accurate. At first, it's all fun and games and you're adding this and that npm dependency. The crying comes later.

Why not just vendor the stuff, if it's a tiny wee thing that isn't worth an edge in the dependency graph?

I'd say it's lack of barriers to entry, boot camp ninjas that maintain dozens of packages.

The fact that some newbie would upload is-odd[1] to npm doesn't surprise me. The fact that it has half a million weekly downloads - it's blind leading the blind.

And framework complexity - I find that consistent with mid level programmers being fascinated by complex solutions and top scale teams needing to deal with the pile of shit they are building on (DOM/JS)

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-odd

If you're a satisfied user of is-odd, you may be interested in is-is-odd[1].

https://www.npmjs.com/package/is-is-odd

1 weekly download - not impressed. Should have PR-ed it into some third level dependency of Angular or something.

you know what really bothers me? i want to build airplanes, but the people who make the parts have made it so, so complicated. all i want to do is fly around - but because some moron wants job security, they've made it needlessly complex. wings, body, engines: that's all it takes.

I'm not a pilot, but from my understanding, small Cesna type planes haven't changed much over the last few decades. Contrast with the rapid churn of front end development.

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