> For a simple web hello world you need a huge build and compile pipeline.
These frameworks were not created to solve “Simple hello world” apps.
These frameworks were not created to solve “Simple hello world” apps.
If your career can be significantly affected by devs fresh from bootcamp
I've experienced a few companies where "boot camp yahoos" wound up essentially running the show to ruinous effect. Why? They had numbers, essentially, and management was too hands-off to prevent it.
To give a specific example: we had a product where our UX was basically: fill out this HTML form to apply for a financial product. Traditional dinosaur-style server side rendering was more than enough.
The front end boot camp yahoos somehow wound up forcibly moving us to React. They got that pushed through and approved before anybody knew about it because they gave a bunch of BS stats to management who didn't care and also didn't have the technical chops to spot the BS.
The end result was that simple changes to the UX (like adding a question to the form, or removing it) required 1,000+ lines of code across multiple repos. Hundreds of hours dealing with that mess for zero gain instead of actually doing things that made the company money or improved our process in meaningful ways.
Senior ICs had no real chance to oppose this plan, and many of them were happy simply to get "React" onto their resumes.
So yeah, problems aplenty, but it's possible to be an IC and have one's shit rocked by this kind of thing through no real fault of one's own.
(I'm not crapping on React specifically here. It is powerful and there are use cases where it excels. I am also not crapping on junior or boot camp engineers. They are doing their best. It's a management problem.)
However, that real seasoned engineer is a small
fraction of the "dev team" and gets overwhelmed
by the boot camp developer's group thinking -
their opinion is just as good as the guy with the
CS degree they figure, after all, their boot camp
crowd seems to win the debates!
This wasn't a rant against React. It was about the inmates (or junior devs) running the asylum.
Please don't do that; it's effectively turning "makes minimum wage" into an insult. There are plenty of people that earn minimum wage that are good people, doing their best, and (in many cases) doing a very good job. This is exactly the kind of wording that turned various minority terms into insults, as we shouldn't be doing it.
I have also had a couple of CSS wizards that wrote all the styles by hand - sounds great until someone has to fix it, even a senior designer. In short, a well-used framework that's understood is not necessarily easier, but it does lead to an agreed-on set of abstractions that make things easier to understand. Angular and React are very much there for a reason.
That’s insanely powerful and massively reduces complexity in highly interactive apps, because it means you no longer need to think about “user did this, update this here now, and here and here” chains, and can just do “user did this, update the state” and have that state update render potentially hundreds of changes across the app without needing to do additional implementation.
But if you aren’t disciplined with maintaining, or don’t understand the difference between pure functions and side effects, and fall back to hacks to try to “make things render” or “stop wasting render cycles” you’ll end up with even more complexity than necessary.
Using react as another version of `getElementById` leads to a horrible mess much worse than writing vanilla javascript, and most people who have that complaint are doing it to themselves by fighting react either unintentionally or on purpose to show how it can be bad when abused.
Raw HTML and CSS is much easier to understand, and mandatory to understand because at the end of the day creating HTML and CSS is the only goal, but higher level abstractions can be super useful to manage complex projects, and the mental models and abstractions are the actual benefit.
Getting me "on-board" quickly with some basic furniture is quite helpful, although it requires IKEA-level infrastructure and investment to get these things in front of the buyers which is definitely not easy. Dare I sare ridiculously complex?
I have worked on international teams where it was a running joke the individuals had ended up assembling the same Ikea furniture on three continents.
Now that I'm older, in an old space, my priority is EMPTYING IT so I can go about my life. I now appreciate how permanent your space can be if you carefully deliberate each addition.
The demands of the PM maybe, most users just want something the works and gets out of their way.
> very fast and smooth ui population
Neither of which your average JS/SPA/behemoth is actually good at.
> and pretty animations.
I’ll give you this though, JS web apps certainly do rep some pretty animations, often at the cost of thrashing my CPU and ram.
Crazy idea, but maybe, if instead of spending ages building “interactivity” we just built “applications that worked”, we might actually have less mess, and build better products.
Having seen systems be built up over time that do significant things (or run on many platforms, or have lots of abstractions) a lot of the time the tougher parts are.. well, complicated. Some of those tools are to make things better for a lot of programmers working on the same project. You have to have some amount of structure then. Sometimes it’s so business people can create content.
“Why doesn’t it work simply” is often a business decision.
One still can simply drop html file and sprinkle it with jQuery.
The real promise of these is web forms with a little interactivity. Anything more complex and you start to fight with it to drop back down to the level where it’s manageable.
It’s the fighting with it that’s the issue; my experience is that a lot of devs go in to “force this stupid framework to work” mode and blow up tasks that should be 10 lines of code with no edge cases into 50 or 100 which “mostly works, good enough.”
React is by far the most adopted framework for desktop-level or near-desktop-level web applications.
Makes you feel clever.
Idk what else to tell you.