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by aaronbrethorst 3751 days ago
For the majority of cases that I've seen, these arguments are simply excuses to avoid doing real work. It's way more fun to decide whether your amazingly awesome Unicorn startup is going to use React or Angular, or Express vs. Rails, or whatever than it is to actually go through the hard work of building a customer base and making money.
6 comments

The problem (from my perspective) is that the job market follows. It's good at that--always following.
And so we use React in our project (even if it makes no sense to) because then we can put it in our resume. And thereby contribute to the problem.
YES! totally agree

For a subset of us, framework authors, open source contributors, etc. It's very useful to keep up to date on the latest trends.

For example, the Angular team has borrowed techniques from React. It helps for them to keep up with things.

For people like me though, let's be honest. I don't need to do the latest thing.

Funny you said that, I was looking into ng2 and they've borrowed a few things from the React community. It's all good, I'm glad to see that "framework A is better than framework B" mentality die away and everyone just uses the right tool for the right job.
maintaining software is a real thing.

for the majority of cases i've seen, these arguments are to save developers time and the company money.

my gut & feelies tell me there is truth to "it doesn't really matter what technologies you use" but my brain and experience tell me that is objectively false.

The reason "it doesn't matter what technologies you use" is because successful software gets rewritten multiple times anyway.

It matters a lot eventually, but having an "eventually" to worry about is a nice problem to have.

(There's also a big perspective difference between being an entrepreneur writing initial code for a project vs. an engineer hired to maintain & grow that code. Code quality, architecture, and technology choice matters a lot to an engineer who will be working with it directly. It matters a lot less to a business that can swap out engineers until they find ones who enjoy working on that codebase. The fact that you even have money to hire engineers usually indicates that the existing code is getting the job done. The business only gets screwed when the code quality is so bad that nobody can make sense of it, and the environment changes in a way that requires modifications.)

but, there are many instances where software would not get rewritten with proper technical foresight in the first place.

i take your point none the less- there are contexts where it doesn't matter.

Totally agree. One problem I find arises from this is that there are no boring workhorses. Time and time again I need boring crud screens, for the admin side of applications, but there is no easy default to choose. ExtJS tends to do the trick, but it's not cheap.
> Time and time again I need boring crud screens, for the admin side of applications, but there is no easy default to choose.

crud is often a feature of frameworks. crud should be an external tool like documention tools (doxygen...).

This week's JavaScript flavor special is vanilla.
Would love to see "Enterprise HN" with Node and React and Redux (with server-side rendering), and how it compares (whether horribly or awesomely).
https://vuejs.github.io/vue-hackernews/#!/news/1

Not exactly any of these technologies, but it is using more javascript at least. I think the example is pretty awesome actually.

> and how it compares (whether horribly or awesomely).

Given only the tech stack, it can go either way, depending on whether the implementor takes the easy, lazy route or actually puts some thought and hardwork into it. The problem is, as per good old Sturgeon's law, 90% of sites take the lazy route, and end up with tangled monstrosities that look like offerings to the Flying Sphaghetti Monster.

(Also, it's interesting how quickly 'cool new tech' can become 'Enterprise' shudder when it's widely abused and misused.)

> Also, it's interesting how quickly 'cool new tech' can become 'Enterprise' shudder when it's widely abused and misused

Is this the hipster corollary to coding? Sure, Java was cool when only 100 people were using it...

That's already a pretty "modern" enterprise stack. I'd expect enterprise HN to run on Java EE (with an Oracle DB of course) :D
Well, there's Designer News...
Have you seen hn.algolia.com?