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Comment by abraxas | Hacker News Reader

After two decades of this churn we are back to the equivalent of JSP. It was the correct paradigm all along but millennials wouldn't be caught dead working with such a "lame" technology so they bestowed SPA on us and now they are slowly walking it back.

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Yes, we go in circles, but there are subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) improvements every iteration. Of course sometimes there are also dead ends.

It is exciting to see what the ingenuity of the next group brings, even though some existing things are lost, but hopefully not forgotten.

This.

Also it cannot be understated: apis, language and tooling are miles ahead better they were a decade ago or more.

I’m not completely sure of that. The simplicity of a backbone app, plain javascript with no build, less/sass, early days node.js or old RoR apps is becoming increasingly elusive. Not a lot of modern apps you couldn’t build with those stacks, and most of the underlying technology is the same (http/html/css/js/sql/libuv/etc).

Saying this feels like advocating for a return to horse carriages though, when the right analogy would be the brief electric car era of the early 1900s, and React as the Model T.

Ooof. No thanks. SASS can die a fiery death, and give me React over Backbone 10 times out of 10. I guess these things are somewhat subjective, but I don’t miss the pre-React days at all.

I think what changed is that people sort of realized compilers and build systems aren't just those things, they are also tools. They can be leveraged for making your code work better, automatically, and they can help you.

The dream of scripting languages you can just throw somewhere is great, but in an IDE, they really struggle. They're editor languages - you can understand them without extra context and tools, but your level of understanding is baseline more wishy-washy.

TS embodies this. It directly trades off that scriptability and ease for... really nothing. The compilation isn't a side effect, it's the entire draw. People WANT a compiler, or, at least, something similar.

We also had JSF, which was even cooler - being able to reconstruct the state server-side. It was ridiculously fast to write complex form-driver websites with that! No DTOs/schemas in different languages, no worry about how the client calls the server, what happens if it fails, etc.

The only problem is that it won't necessarily scale to some insane numbers without some care.

(Not sure why the past tense, it does work and developed still)

> It was the correct paradigm all along

Debateable.

> It was the correct paradigm all along but millennials wouldn't be caught dead working with such a "lame" technology so they bestowed SPA on us and now they are slowly walking it back.

Oh man, I wish people would stop attributing picking SPA's to not wanting to use "lame" technology. It makes them sound myopic and naive. Really naive.

You may not have been around at the time, but I certainly was. And the idea that SPAs don't (or didn't) have their place is just plain absurd.

Like "Tell me you're a backend dev who is made they have to learn new stuff to stay current" without telling me.

In fact, I'm not even sure what your argument actually is. Is it MSP vs SPA? Is it JSP vs any of the other backend languages you can still use with React? Is it templates vs JSX? What are you actually trying to argue?

Are your rose-colored glasses ignoring what a pain a decent UX was to build in those technologies? That mobile apps pushed backends to an api-only version and SPAs took over for the frontend? Are you saying people should pick old technologies wtih old tooling just because you didn't get on board with it the first time?

It's not swinging back to JSP, it's finding a middle-ground between the 2. THAT'S what progress is.

I’d venture to say that the idea of a “correct paradigm” is based on a false premise. Why would there be one paradigm to rule them all? Maybe there is more nuance. Maybe certain paradigms are better for certain applications.

I'd go a bit further and say certain paradigms may be better for certain people.

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