[xab9]

Oh boy, it's a bit far fetched if not downright cynical (or maybe I'm oversensitive and this was not meant to be a response to people who cry about minute long cached webpack compile times or megabytes of angular payloads).

Frontend complexity went through the roof in the last ten years and compared to desktop software (not geocities) our developer tools and end results are not that great (ymmv).

But that's just my personal opinion, after fifteen years of web development and growing up along the c64 - 286 - pentium road, debugging in Watcom and fooling around in Turbo Vision.

[adventured]

It seems like it has gone through the roof in just the last three or four years. I believe the added tools & complexity is an overwhelming negative in nearly all instances, unless you're building at hyperscale (which very few are). I keep seeing things like dental groups spending a lot of money to rebuild their sites in React for absolutely no good reason, it's all a big joke.

I've been doing full stack development for two decades essentially non-stop, and I detest the new era of front end. I'm learning Go instead of anything more to do with front end. I put a bunch of time into Vue and React; the effect it has had, is to push me to banish those from what I build and pursue increased simplicity instead: JS minimalism.

I'm rather in love with Go. It's simple, small, very easy to pick up, and extremely fast. It actually reduced complexity and made speed & power more accessible rather than less, the exact opposite of what's going on in front end (which is adding complexity and bloat). I blame it on the dramatic speed-up in JavaScript, the front end junk will keep expanding in bloat perpetually until it fills in the speed gains. It reminds me of the joke, about Andy Grove providing the increased transistor counts and Bill Gates figuring out new ways to waste them.

[wildrhythms]

Javascript speeding up really has nothing to do with the front-end bloat. I think the problem is that there are a lot of (new?) developers in the frontend space who focus on learning a library (like Angular or React or Vue), and because these libraries have grown so complex in an attempt to solve any frontend problem that might be thrown at them, developers no longer feel the need to write a website without it.

I'm not a purist by any means, but I do think we've come to rely far too heavily on frontend libraries... And not just a reliance, but an expectation of things like single-page applications. I'm sad when I see developers pulling 4-5MB of minified javascript on a page load for something that could have been accomplished in CSS or maybe a dozen lines of JS. :/