| I wish we had more historical overviews like this. The number of new developers has been outstripping the number of old developers in most environments and this has been happening for at least the last 15 years. Thus, we come back to Richard P. Gabriel's Worse is Better, or at least the essay's focus on the importance of social components of a project[1]. N.B.: not implying Redux is worse than any of the other discussed projects. Newer generations cannot possibly have the time to go through the history and tradeoffs of various frameworks that used to be extremely popular and the reasons people moved on. Too many previous frameworks and too few posts like what you just wrote. Besides, where to start? It's not like TAOCP is going to have a chronology of Browser UI frameworks. Instead, the tendency is to leverage the rapidly developing ecosystem and work with the projects that have the largest numbers of stars on github, etc. If you are a very large well heeled eng. organization with a capability to enforce the use of particular frameworks, it is in your interest to popularize them. You will pay and encourage your engineering org to, among other things they do, market it to the dev. community. If there are enough engineers in your org (say: tens of thousands), you will begin exerting a tremendous concentrated influence on the Open Source community. At the same time, for everyone else who does notwork inside a 10K+ engineer org, the lack of future maintenance and upgrades presents such a huge downside risk to not using the most popular open source frameworks. The open source community moves so quickly that you run into the risk of being stuck with maintaining the reusable components you plucked from other open source efforts. The backwards compatibility guarantees are so much lower than what they used to be. The browser world is still figuring out how to link dependencies[2], let alone generate a stack that is stable enough where you don't have to continually update your UI codebase if you want to keep continuing to reuse other people's widget code. So you tend to stay with the pack. React is the new most popular thing? OK, let's do React. Redux is the new way? OK, Redux. Pick anything else and you risk being stuck with a stack that rapidly loses the ability to interoperate with a huge majority of new Browser UI open source code. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better [2] https://medium.com/webpack/the-state-of-javascript-modules-4... |