[player2121]

> As an experienced front-end developer I must say that I don't really understand why the complexity of building websites is growing instead of going down.

Complexity of building dynamic documents is actually going down. If you are to build a typical web site from 200x using modern browsers, you wont need jquery or anything like that. Networking, security - everything became 100 times easier and faster.

But if you want to build a desktop application using DOM as a rendering layer, then it is a different story.

[koboll]

I challenge anyone who believes "the complexity building websites is growing" to go ahead and build a web app relying on multiple complex state machines with imperative jQuery calls, and then tell me it's less complex than the equivalent in React.

[wolco]

The complexity comes from getting the tooling installed now and packages.

If I can't just include a file things are going to get more complex.

State machines are a method to solve a problem that could be expressed in other ways to make it fit the language better.

[ratww]

> If I can't just include a file things are going to get more complex.

But the tooling and npm packages are all optional. You can import React from a CDN and use stuff like htm [1] or domz [2] instead of a JSX compilation step.

Or you can use Vue instead of React (their tutorial starts by using Vue via CDN).

If you're able to only support 95% of the browsers, you can use most modern ES6 features, including ES Modules and async/await.

If you still need the tooling, there are options like Parcel [3] or Poi.js [4] that require zero configuration. You don't really need the complexity of Webpack.

--

[1] https://www.npmjs.com/package/htm

[2] https://www.npmjs.com/package/domz

[3] https://www.npmjs.com/package/parcel

[4] https://www.npmjs.com/package/poi

[wolco]

I've used vue by including it. I've used react by including it and babel.

When I tried to include other packages they were only available through npm (some had cdn versions but most did not). You don't get access to the entire ecosystem without the tooling.

[tmzt]

You can use a site like https://unpkg.com/ to include files from most npm packages using a script tag.

[woat]

What is complex about the tooling?

If I want to implement a rich text editor in my website, it will be as easy as 'npm install ...' and an import statement in the relevant file.

Is there an advantage to make a state machine to solve this?