Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

Comment by neilv | Hacker News Reader

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One reason to use CGI is legacy systems. A large, complex, and important system that I inherited was still using CGI (and it worked, because a rare "10x genuinely more productive" developer built it). Many years later, to reduce peak resource usage, and speed up a few things, I made an almost drop-in replacement library, to permit it to also run with SCGI (and back out easily to CGI if there was a problem in production). https://docs.racket-lang.org/scgi/

Another reason to use CGI is if you have a very small and simple system. Say, a Web UI on a small home router or appliance. You're not going to want the 200 NPM packages, transpilers and build tools and 'environment' managers, Linux containers, Kubernetes, and 4 different observability platforms. (Resume-driven-development aside.)

A disheartening thing about most my recent Web full-stack project was that I'd put a lot of work into wrangling it the way Svelte and SvelteKit wanted, but upon finishing, wasn't happy with the complicated and surprisingly inefficient runtime execution. I realized that I could've done it in a fraction of the time and complexity -- in any language with convenient HTML generation, a SQL DB library, and an HTTP/CGI/SCGI-ish library, plus a little client-side JS).

I found that ChatGPT revived vanilla javascript and jquery for me.

Most of the chore part is done by chatgpt and the mental model of understanding what it wrote is very light and often single file. It is also easily embedded in static file generators.

On the contrary Vue/React have a lot of context required to understand and mentally parse. On react the useCallback/useEffect/useMemo make me need to manually manage dependencies. This really reminds me of manual memory management in C, with perhaps even more pitfalls. On vue the difference between computed, props and vanilla variables. I am amazed that the supposed more approachable part of tech is actually more complex than regular library/script programming.

> I found that ChatGPT revived vanilla javascript and jquery for me.

I used jQuery in a project recently where I just needed some interactivity for an internal dashboard/testing solution. I didn't have a bunch of time to setup a whole toolchain for Vue (and Pinia, Vue Router, PrimeVue, PrimeIcons, PrimeFlex and the automated component imports) because while I like using all of them and the developer experience is quite nice, the setup still takes a bit of time unless you have a nice up to date boilerplate project that's ready to go.

Not even having a build step was also really pleasant, didn't need to do complex multi-stage builds or worry that copying assets would somehow slow down a Maven build for the back end (relevant for those cases when you package your front end and back end together in the same container and use the back end to serve the front end assets, vs two separate containers where one is just a web server).

Only problem was that jQuery doesn't compose as nice, I missed the ability to nest a bunch of components. Might just have to look at Lit or something.

I've had a similar experience. Generating Vue/React scaffolding is nice, but yeah debugging and refactoring require the additional context you described. I've been using web components lately on personal projects, nice to jump into comprehensible vanilla JS/HTML/CSS when needed.

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