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Comment by blovescoffee | Hacker News Reader

First "Web guys" is such a demeaning way about talking about real and serious engineers solving real and serious engineering problems. If you don't think frontend engineering solves serious problems, I don't think your opinions about it are serious.

All real world programs are stateful. You need some tooling and/or conventions to handle that in a clean way. I recommend this blog post about React Query that talks about some challenges and solutions on the frontend for state management: https://ui.dev/why-react-query

You're questioning the importance of optimization on a website for hackers/tinkerers/engineers?

You need optimization for page speed, SEO, animation, elegance, pushing the boundaries...

edit to address: "Which optimization does that need?"

Optimistic updates, debouncing, handling large responses, cache, etc. etc.

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Can you recommend a blog post about “state management” in non-frontend? E.g. some server or maybe a desktop app like e.g. your backup manager. Because my whole premise is that the “problem” is self-imposed, which react is literally the part of.

If you don't think frontend engineering solves serious problems, I don't think your opinions about it are serious.

I don’t think “frontend” is at all serious, because I have developed user-facing systems since around 2000, and “frontend” (which we called gui controls back in the day) was never a biggest story, when it was worth telling at all. Mostly complex distributed accounting software with various integrations at all levels. I’m not afraid of appeals to serious engineers with serious problems, cause I am one of them and can question it freely.

If I appear somewhat toxic, that simply reflects the toxic positivity about the absurd state of things in web dev. It is a collective delusion which suddenly disappears when people get forced out if it, by e.g. going htmx route. Not advocating for htmx specifically, it just happens to be a perfect litmus test. Same for php, people still use it outside of “frontend” bubble and don’t know that “managing” their “state” is a hard problem that requires tens of versions of the best framework of the month.

> Can you recommend a blog post about “state management” in non-frontend? E.g. some server or maybe a desktop app like e.g. your backup manager. Because my whole premise is that the “problem” is self-imposed, which react is literally the part of.

It's largely unnecessary there because those can talk directly to the database and use it as their data store without a large performance penalty. Plenty of server-based systems like PHP don't even have persistent state to manage, whatever wasn't stored in the database is discarded when the response is sent.

> It is a collective delusion which suddenly disappears when people get forced out if it, by e.g. going htmx route.

There is a performance penalty here where every state change is a web request. That's a large part of where frontend state management libraries began, with Backbone providing objects that would be synced with database tables and acted like a local cache.

I was talking more about thick clients. Htmx and php were just examples where “it” disappears in webdev. So please don’t take them as good examples for this topic.

There is a performance penalty here where every state change is a web request. That's a large part of where frontend state management libraries began

That mode of operation is actually anti-frontend. Frontend (thick client) means that you have a local context with manual or eventual syncronization (aka [auto]save and [auto]update). Using these modern “state management” frameworks this way is double fault, cause you basically simulate 1.0 in 2.0 via now mostly useless approach that didn’t make much sense to begin with.

Request penalty is not a new thing. 20 years ago LAN servers had connection properties similar to the modern internet. Somehow (and I say this ironically, it’s very straightforward “how”) db servers, app servers, thin and thick clients and bare apps worked without “managing state” via some semi-functional but not really DSL language wrapping anominations. Only web, which was always a second class dev env invented the problem from its own poor childhood: jquery et al, no concept of permanent storage, poor io-unaware language until around 2015.

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