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Comment by pech0rin | Hacker News Reader

I have started JavaScript/TypeScript development over the past year or so. Coming from the Ruby, Python, and Java community its really interesting to me to see how many of the same problems that say, Rails for example, solved about development are being re-hashed over and over again.

I'm not a JS hater by any means, I find using something like Remix to be a really nice way to build web applications. Its mainly the whole ecosystem/community surrounding it that feels like its starting from scratch all the time that I find to be sort of infuriating. Sometimes I wanna shout THESE THINGS ARE ALREADY SOLVED. But maybe I'm becoming an old dude and just yelling at the servers.

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"Rails on the front-end" has been solved by Rails members (particularly Yehuda Katz) – it’s Ember.js.

Same philosophy – batteries included with a focus on developer productivity and don't reinvent the wheel.

But it comes with the same catch as Rails.

While Rails is not the most sexy and popular thing on the backend as Go/Node/Rust, same is Ember.js compared to React/Vue/Svelte/Next/etc.

But after about 10 years of writing code, developers start to care less about sexiness and popularity and just want to provide value and build things with velocity and little friction, rather than arguing what folder structure to use or which router package to install.

> Rails on the front-end" has been solved

And that's when it's even needed at all, in many cases server side rendering is perfectly fine and serves the user better than a shoddy SPA justified by the only concern of SSR being "obsolete"

I feel the same as an old school PHP dipping into JS land occasionally. Lots of problems were solved, but of course somebody needed to create a fancy new “framework” and a new solution. Stuff like “static site generation” dont need over 300 new and different frameworks to solve it but i guess thats just engineering. We like to do it ourselves instead of “trusting” the old farts.

I used PHP for years since it's quite popular in this part of the world.

For someone like me, "server-side rendering" introduced in JS land (particularly for React projects, but not only them) is one of the stupidest things I've seen in my life. We had this solved in the 90s and it didn't require converting a client framework into a server one (all while pulling in 2000 dependencies), and a multi-stage build process. Thankfully, the whole IT sphere is large enough now that we can just pretend this kind of stuff doesn't exist and avoid companies that use it.

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