Comment by snide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by snide | Hacker News Reader

I'll be the contrarian. I'm in my mid 40s and have been designing / developing for the web now for 25 years professionally. I built my personal site in Astro, Svelte and Xata because they were all new technologies and I enjoy learning new things. The fact that things change so much is actually a reason I've remained so excited about my work for so long. I love the learning part of things so much, that when I'd grown into being a corporate executive I generally missed that daily churn of learning and eventually gave it all up so that I could take an IC job to code again.

Is this good for business? Probably not. Is it fun for me? Absolutely. Sometimes the road calls to you more than the destination. We're all wired a little different.

Side note. I love the author's art and couldn't find a place to purchase it.

I’m kinda in the same boat but lately (last few years) have been frustrated as I’ve ventured outside of web tech in seeking new things and found so many nice things in other platforms that its just sad to see “progress” trying to catch up innovation that has happened elsewhere.

I’ve tried closure, elixir and a bit of haskell and all have so many great lessons that are yet to be learned elsewhere.

After developing professionally in PHP, ruby, python and javascript and trying out other languages and frameworks at some point one can see so many great ideas that you can’t really use because the language doesn’t allow it. Like how much more would we have to wait for a normal low level lib for javascript/node, or even things like the pipe operator.

Various frameworks and libraries allow you a glimpse of whats possible, but then when one reads ip on the inspiration behind them and tries them out in their “native” environment, it just kinda sad how much can be lost “in translation”.

Speaking for myself personally, I think this is where standards have helped. Yes, new ideas spring about from frameworks and languages, but typically I see the standards cementing the good parts beyond them.

5-15 years ago I couldn't write native CSS. Today? I prefer it. It's improved to such a degree that I think most people aren't even aware of how much better it's gotten, because they escaped to Sass / CSS-in-JS for years.

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