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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

Nice. Bookmarked. Another good one in a similar vein is https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/

I don't do web stuff often, but when I do I am completely demoralized by the state of framework-itis there. It's gotten completely out of control. A fresh React project is hundreds of dependencies. The weight of that complexity is astounding to me.

Meanwhile the core cross-platform browser tech shipped by default has never been more capable and the amount of code to do common things ... isn't very much.

Front-end devs: are you ok?

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I am no fan at all of react or npm, but some frameworks do provide some helpful things that pure DOM APIs do not, so they still have a place I think.

So e.g. application state management and routing are two huge things you'll still need to implement yourself if you just use pure DOM APIs

Depending on the complexity of your app then that might not be such a big deal, but these extras are rapidly worth their weight in gold as soon as you go beyond a basic app. Unless you are using anything that needs NPM in which case you are fucked.

Another excellent resource in the same vein is the marvelous https://javascript.info/

As a front-end dev who actually like the fundamental platform and the capacities it offers, I'm both happy to see so much nice things coming our way (nested CSS, container queries, and a generally nicer JS experience since ES6) and at the same time horrified by the amount of people using components for trivial things like buttons or bold text.

And I do like framework, but so much framework and library's marketing depend on making people believe that CSS and vanilla DOM manipulation is insanely hard (it's not once you know the fundamentals), and that pulling a random package on NPM is not just quick and easy, but also the professional thing to do.

Agreed it’s out of control. But in the past year I’ve transitioned to a platform team so I’m working with devops-ish tooling for the first time. Holy shit…the amount of complexity there gives front-end a run for its money. You’ve got Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, CircleCI, yadda yadda. The amount of layered terminology in just those technologies alone is absurd.

As a mostly backend dev, maybe I'm biased but all the tech you listed there isn't layers of stuff. Each of those do something different. For all but FAANG, kube is overkill. Helm is just templating. The rest existed before DevOps was a term.

Was replying saying mostly this. I stay away from most of that kind of stuff and work in embedded-type space mostly, but when I have ventured in there, it all kind of makes a certain amount of sense as modules that layer relatively independent of each other. Because, well, most things interoperate via Rest or gRPC or whatever, without a lot of coupling.

The problem with the JS/TS/Node ecosystem is the cultural tendency there to build and proselytize frameworks. Heavily coupling seems to be seen as a positive rather than negative.

> Meanwhile the core cross-platform browser tech shipped by default has never been more capable and the amount of code to do common things ... isn't very much.

Have you tried to use this "capable cross-platform tech" to do anything non-trivial? And React isn't the only thing out there.

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