| I've said it before here, but the best web app I've built was basically Django, with bare minimum js to handle in-page effects. I've been working on a project which is being ported to React for no reason, just because it's shiny, and it's been worst than expected. Bundling the entire website into a huge js file doesn't make any sense. In practice, every time you make the slightest change, like adding a div, or changing a class name, your users have to re-download the entire thing. Webpack takes 1GB of memory and 90 seconds to build it. Firefox Dev Tools eats all my ram if I try to reload the page with it open. And Redux is just bad. So much boilerplate for a dynamic language, with constants and if clauses to decide which action to dispatch. Apparently, it's ok to have presentation logic in a component, but god forbid internal state! I do believe the reason front-end devs praise it so much is because it allows them to work solely in js, despite the end product being slow and heavy. I always compare reddit's mobile site, written in react, with Hacker News. The first takes around 7 seconds to load on my cel phone, while the latter loads instantly. No one but frontend devs care about js. The web hasn't become js centric and I bet it never will. It has become mobile first and all you need for 90% of that is css. I don't know why fb and google spend money building these frameworks, but maybe because of this: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ "But the end result is just cover fire. The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. Look closely at the software landscape. The companies that do well are the ones who rely least on big companies and don’t have to spend all their cycles catching up and reimplementing and fixing bugs that crop up only on Windows XP. The companies who stumble are the ones who spend too much time reading tea leaves to figure out the future direction of Microsoft. People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t..." Replace Microsoft with Google or Facebook... |