[wmccullough]

I keep seeing this general attitude about frontend, but I have a serious question: What’s the better alternative? I’m not asking this rhetorically because I have an answer, I just keep seeing the same remarks with no decent solutions. Is it time for the way we deliver the web to be rethought? Are we really in the golden age of the frontend but everyone is being too much of a hipster to realize it?

What’s the solution here?

[bunderbunder]

I don't know, either, but it does seem that the latest crop of frontend libraries (React & friends) is optimizing for a very high level of richness that simply isn't needed for most sites. Which is fine, but where it gets worrisome is when that lofty level of complexity is the only thing people know how to use.

I recently got to watch someone spend nearly a full week fiddling with building a React app for filling out a form for submitting a batch job on an intranet site. It's a lot of code, and it's non-trivial to understand how it works, what with all the async methods and clever state management and whatnot. It needs to be built, which is a thing, and building it requires having the right environment setup. (Its build speed reminds me of my C++ days, too.) I wouldn't be surprised if someone's already talking about incorporating Docker into its future.

At least to me, that's a rather arresting amount of time and money to see being sunk into a job that could have been accomplished with a simple HTML form on a static page.

[80386]

I see a lot of frontend devs these days who remind me of the interview horror stories about enterprise C++ guys getting a question like "how would you pull 10,000 phone numbers in NNN-NNN-NNNN format from a gigantic HTML page?" and responding by laying out an architectural plan for a hulking >1kLoC monstrosity, because they'd never heard of (nor could they imagine) grep.

On the other hand, obscene overengineering is probably a good way to build a portfolio. Nobody will get hired for demonstrating that they can build an HTML form on a static page.

[devxpy]

https://github.com/nucleic/enaml

We're just starting. IMO, if we started from a better language than JS, we would take stuff like data-binding in react for Granted, since it would be much easier to this stuff it in other languages.