[cryptica]

I'm tired of the dogma that's behind all the hyped up software development tools and techniques.

For years, I was telling people that React and related tooling was a bad idea, that it adds a lot of unnecessary bloat which is not worth it. Everyone (like 99% of developers) disagreed with me and kept insisting that it was a simple solution.

Fast forward half a decade, now pretty much everyone agrees that React adds a lot of unnecessary bloat... The level of bloat just had to get truly appalling for people to actually notice (I swear a lot of projects seem to take 10 minutes to build). It took 5 years for people to accept the PREMISE of my original argument.

But now even though a lot of people finally accept the premise, they are still desperately trying to rationalize the existence of their favorite hyped up tools in any way they can.

I'm tired of explaining to people that "simpler solutions are better than complex ones". If any idea should be recited dogmatically, that should be it. Someone should write a book about it so that people can repeatedly whack themselves over the head with it until it gets through their thick primal skulls.

[krainboltgreene]

You may want to check the temperature again. The react community is still huge, still growing, and still improving. React jobs are still widely available and new companies get started using react (or transition to react).

You aren't the first person (or the last) to care about payload size to the browser. Everyone cares about that, including the React core team.

[cryptica]

>> React jobs are still widely available

I don't doubt React's effectiveness as an economic tool for job creation. No economic tool is able to turn a simple 1-person job into a complex 100-person job as effectively React does. The Federal Reserve Bank loves React.

But is it the most effective tool for writing web apps? Not by a long shot.

[ng12]

> But is it the most effective tool for writing web apps

What's your preferred alternative, pray tell?

[cryptica]

If you use VueJS without a compiler or bundler during development (and yes, this means no TypeScript), you can achieve an amazingly productive development experience. If you can resist all the tools which try to bait you into adding a bundling step, you won't regret it.

It takes a lot of effort to figure out how to use VueJS without the bundling step and it can feel constraining initially, but the simplicity pays off in the long term.

I'm quite annoyed though that VueJS team has been moving towards TypeScript and bundling. Am I the only person who thinks that front end work is too simple to need type safety?

Front end programming is like riding a bike, after a while, you don't need the training wheels anymore; they just slow you down and deprive you of real enjoyment.

Also, there is a joke my colleagues used to say about front end:

"Front end work is like building a house of cards. If it collapses, no one gets hurt. On the other hand, back end work is like building a house out of wine glasses..."

[ng12]

Can't say I agree. The relative cost of bundling is minimal. I don't really think about my setup at all -- it's such a minute part of my daily workflow.

Anyways, your disdain for front-end development will probably preclude a lot of people from taking your stance seriously.

[cryptica]

If you had actually tried it properly, you would not disagree, it's really that self-evident.

[ng12]

> "simpler solutions are better than complex ones"

Everything is a tradeoff. React adds bloat but simplifies development. If any idea should be recited dogmatically it should be "software development is too complicated to live by blanket statements".

[cryptica]

>> Everything is a tradeoff

Solutions do have tradeoffs, but if I tell you that breathing is important, we don't really need to discuss tradeoffs...

Simplicity is that important.

I'm getting more this way every year and I've been coding for over 15 years. I'm yet to find the bottom in terms of how simple things should be; things can almost always be made simpler and simplifying things as much as possible nearly always pays off (except if you get paid hourly and care more about salary).