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Comment by mstipetic | Hacker News Reader

Just because something is old doesn’t mean it’s correct, this is such a curmudgeon take. Things we have have evolved over a long time, have been started hastily (JavaScript) and there’s no reason to believe we’re not in a local minimum and something much better is out there.

I personally believe the js model is completely wrong for the browser and something like an actor model would fit much better.

I’m not saying we should jump on every hype train, and personally really dislike the react ecosystem but I also think we should encourage exploring new approaches. CSS, html and js evolution is driven by the exploration of these new frameworks and they’re very different than what they were just a few years ago

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I agree, it's exciting to have the industry trying gazillion things and see the survivors that get pushed into standards. It's much less exciting to have your project tied to frameworks (generic statement, not about Tailwind) that rot, requires massive rewrites on update, are unstable and forces you into non-standard stuff that tends to not interoperate well with the external world.

I'm puzzled to see the popularity of such frameworks while boring technologies often are well documented, well tested, highly stable, provide acceptable dev efficiency, readable by any dev, and often comes with much better performance.

I'm probably just a grumpy old man yelling at clouds.

I feel we need a club for grumpy old men that yell at clouds! I'm only 34 but after 10 years doing this I now fully understand what my seniors were trying to teach me when I started.

Boring technologies that work and will continue to work with the minimum of lock-in and fuss long into the future are what get me excited now.

I’m a bit older but I’m getting progressively more annoyed by this attitude of my peers, and increasingly think it’s an excuse not to learn new things.

I know plenty people that are stuck in Python and are some middle mangers and just yell bah! at everything new.

I’ve worked through the whole stack, am now heavily in elixir, work in a cutting edge LLM company and feel I’m better than I ever was. There’s a balance.

Agreed, balance is needed in every aspect of life. The conservatism of many experienced developers is likely an over-correction and the result of some scar tissue. There's always room for growth and trying new things, but with those lessons learnt in the back of your mind still.

I've shifted career and work as a photographer now, so remain ultra-conservative in my technology choices because I know I don't want to expend the time and mental energy to adopt over-complex solutions. It's less about how old/new they are, and more using the right tool for the job.

PS: Glad to see Elixir cropping up more and more. I loved using it before I changed careers, and still keep tabs on it. I've got an idea for a small API/service that might benefit my work, and unless I stumble upon a more appropriate choice, it'll likely be based on Phoenix.

it's kind of a trope now in social media for people to look contrarian against current web tech. There are whole twitter influencers out there that are not known for any achievements but just pooh poohing popular frameworks. Just an easy way of grabbing some status, I guess. And platforms love the engagement it brings.

I can see a top tier game engine developer talking with skepticism about current web tech, but it's more often coming from something like enterprise java devs from the 2000s that used to take months fudging with class hierarchies to deliver a basic form GUI. The kind that must take any opportunity to denounce electron apps but would never give up VS Code and go back to Eclipse.

In my job I have to learn about new Frameworks, shiny new way to do things and how they break existing workflows and architectures.

I like learning new things but the industry shouldn't follow latest trends for any project. https://boringtechnology.club/

Evolution is very hard to beat.

CSS is not static. It has been getting better and better all the time and keeps improving.

Yes because SCSS and various other new technologies have tried stuff out and we took the best back to CSS. No reason to think tailwind won’t influence css. For me it’s an improvement upon the style attribute which we have been neglecting and have been told not to use for some reason. I think it’s great to be able to adapt a component locally without putting a one off class somewhere which we have been doing before.

there's evolution and there's insanity.

it only took ~20 years to get a working vertical align (which was available in HTML from basically day 1, might I add). similar for grid to be available and it still kinda sucks.

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