Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by daliwali 3279 days ago
>The complexity of how to render some stuff into the screen is not [my problem].

But it is. You are depending on some complex third party code to do your job, how you want to punt responsibility to someone else is irrelevant. Web developers aren't owning up to the sorry state of front-end web development, because everyone says "it's not my problem", ask Facebook/Google/whatever.

Correct and proper have little meaning if at all in web development, they're usually dictated by the biggest companies and most popular bloggers. Moreover, these definitions are constantly in flux (no pun intended). Nobody cares if your web app correctly follows the proper conventions of your framework. Front-end web developers seem to focus more on navel-gazing about the "developer experience" than results.
2 comments
harel 3279 days ago
But you're missing a context here. My context. I run two companies and contract on top. I also have a life. If any Big Company (tm) wants to give me a good solid presentation layer blackbox I'll take it and say thank you. I could develop my own presentation layer/frameword du jour/library/toolkit/whatever. But WHY would I do that when its already done. And those who did it do it full time as their day job, paid by said Big Company (tm). So i'll ride that train and use their blackbox and focus my energies where they are needed - in domain specific business logic that actually generates revenue.

I'm having fun doing it but i'm not doing it for fun.

link
mst 3278 days ago
> You are depending on some complex third party code to do your job

Yes. It's called a web browser.

The additional complexity of react is a drop in the bucket compared to the complexity of the undertlying platform.

link
harel 3278 days ago
Haha so true. I keep forgetting that... I take browsers for granted sometimes.
link
daliwali 3278 days ago
Minimalist, modern web browsers exist. A good example of this is surf [0], which is based on WebKit and is <50kb of C. That's less than half the size of React source. It obviously doesn't have all the features that Firefox or Chrome might have, but demonstrates that browsers don't have to be bloated.

[0] http://surf.suckless.org/

link