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Comment by shp0ngle | Hacker News Reader

The article is not very specific so I can't really tell one way or other

5 year plan is sounding really bad, though

Yeap! We can't predict the future but we can all be very surprised if whatever tech is picked today is still a good fit, or even still exists, in 5 years. Especially in the javascript space.

As a sibling mentioned, this isn't really true in the JS space anymore. The JS frameworks and react/vue have pretty much won, so now you one of those UI kits and whatever build system/ancillary tooling your framework says you use. There might be churn under the covers, but the framework abstracts that away for you (though occasional migration issues are bound to come up with big changes).

it's always quiet before a storm :) It'll be fun to fast forward five years and see whether there wasn't some big disruptive change and everyone is now using rust++ for client dev or something? :D

This is becoming less true than it once was. React has been ‘this month’s JS framework’ for 10 years now.

Anecdotally React was not in serious contention (for corporate use) until about 2016 or 2017.

And React itself has not remained a stable API (rise and fall of hooks).

This is a reasonable take, and I mostly share it. None of us were especially happy about that plan! However, and I alluded to this on the episode, it wasn’t actually a five year plan to get to a very specific endpoint. It was, instead a 3–5-year plan to make steady incremental changes to our entire system in ways that meant that if we realized our end destination needed to change (e.g. from React to Svelte or something not even built yet) 2 years along, that was totally fine.

It's not clear to me what ended up happening. Did they start a rewrite from scratch in React?

They started a rewrite-from-scratch of all the apps, including mobile, using a custom in-house server-driven UI framework with a Kotlin DSL backing it, without so much as doing a proof of concept to find the tricky parts first. And by “started” I mean “committed to it” before anyone had so much as written a line of code to spike it out. Which, YMMV, but to me that seemed then, and still seems now, just wild.

Yeah. I hope they're at least doing it gradually. As in, rewrite a small component and have it run side by side with the rest of the original app, then rewrite another one and so on.

Oh.

Well, that sounds horrible, and will definitely take more years than rewriting it to React.

It's more FUN though!

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