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Comment by quest88 | Hacker News Reader

Stop it. You know what they mean.

"What they mean" isn't correct or reasonable and is largely part of the same grumbling groupthink that willfully refuses to come to grips with the realities of the tools they've decided they don't like.

React is not large, is of moderate complexity (most of the complexity of "a React app" lives well outside of React itself), and can be stripped down to a fully static templating language without much effort. As I've linked elsewhere, I turned React into an email templating engine once because I don't like Handlebars; rendering JSX as static, no-JS HTML is a one-liner when you throw it a React component.

Using React for a static website is totally fine.

So is not using it.

Being weird about it is not fine.

My hot take: there's a general feeling of looking down on "web devs" or UI/front-end stuff. It's not really necessary to have React for a portfolio site, but it's not really an issue if they do.

I wouldn't consider myself a frontend developer--I've run infra teams, built backends, built desktop applications, all that too--and I'd definitely agree with that.

There's a lot of strange smugfacing about using fit-for-purpose tools that translates into the shitting on people by the old-at-heart and the underinformed. Like, stepping away from JavaScript for a second, you still see people getting mad about C++ on HN and defending the use of C outside of a micro because "just be a good programmer" even though maybe a few dozen such good programmers have ever existed. It's very weird and it's one of the things about this profession that bothers me a lot.

I am fortunate that I have reached a place in my career where I can simply refuse to have that sort of person on my team.

Beautifully said. Ironically (or maybe not), the worst engineers I've worked with in the last 15 years are strictly backend engineers who vocalize how frontend is easy / isn't real software engineering / etc.

One’s free to code their portfolio in COBOL if they find a way to do it. It’s the underlying narrative of the “oh look, there are things called HTML + CSS + JS that work so well and they’re even faster” behind this kind of posts that tbh makes them quite insufferable.

Agreed--it ignores that JSX, even baked statically, was a pretty nontrivial life improvement for front-end development because you got to get away from text manipulation as a first-class citizen.

I guess I don’t? Are you referring to the framework comment? Next.js is a great example of a react _framework_. It’s opinionated, it provides tools to make a fully-fledged website. If you just drop react into a site with a script tag, you get what react offers. You get a way to manipulate a virtual dom and render components.

Instead of saying “you understand what they mean”, please give an example of how I mis-stepped. I don’t want to come off as antagonistic for no reason.

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