This isn't even going into what an utterly horrific editor it is that is plagued with bugs and is missing basic IDE features like a functioning autocomplete, refactoring etc. Mind you, at one point I was celebrating because they finally added highlighting your cursor line in an update after the extensions I used to add that broke. That's how bad Xcode was circa 2015 when simple text editors had those features baked in. If you're comparing Xcode to Eclipse and ranting about JS, then feels like you kept up with how engineering has evolved for Android and JS in maybe 5-10 years. In contrast, it feels like Xcode only adds incrementally miniscule changes and every time I look at it, they seem to not have improved it much at all
All this isn't even getting into what an awful experience simply updating the damn thing is. Why does it have to download 20GB every couple of months and why does it fail so often?
I'm sorry I'm so aggressive but nothing has made my hairs more gray than trying to work with Xcode. It is appalling that it's basically the only way you can develop apps for the Apple ecosystem
By analogy, if we answered this way about mobile phones, it'd be like someone asking 'how should I do mobile development?' and someone else responding 'good luck, you have to pick between Windows phone and Blackberry and Palm and iPhone and ...'
In 2024, that's easy: you develop for iPhone and Android, and if you have to pick one, make it iPhone. Simple.
Similarly, for JS, you pick React Native. It's dominant and the alternatives are like infinitesimals - so small you can ignore them.
"What about..." Again, you're thinking of the options that lost. It's 2024, React Native won. So you just use React Native. It's not complicated.
The web has the best tooling out of any platform because it's the biggest platform. It also has the best documentation... because it's the biggest platform.
I don't know what your point is, that web development is hard or complicated? Writing web apps are way easier than writing iOS apps.
It’s still too low-level. We shouldn’t be writing div over and over with different interacting class properties. Something like SvelteKit’s level of frontend/backend integration feels 5 years too late.
Ultimately it seems like the web ecosystem gets trapped in local maxima (“put JS in everything!”) and really seems to avoid actually creating useful, productivity-enhancing primitives. And that comes from loving the trinity of web tech so much you cannot imagine life without them.
This is why we have frameworks like React with components, so you don't have to do this.
Even if you don't want to use a framework, you can use Web Components which allow you to create "productivity-enhancing primitives".
I've been a web developer before (all the way back to and before the ExtJS days) and while I _can_ do it I really prefer not to. The web does not have "the best tooling out of any platform" or "the best documentation... because it's the biggest platform". The tooling tends to be all over the place (until Visual Studio Code takes over the planet... :/) and frameworks like React or Vue hide a lot of complexity that you have to dig into if something goes blooey. This is not to mention the page bloat or security holes you get when you include some handful of analytics "libraries".