[arvinsim]

> Also the fact that the solutions don’t work very well means they’re constantly being reinvented, which means if you do the work to keep up with it all you’re rewarded by being regarded as an expert, which is nice.

This is a huge assumption. For example, I don't think any web dev enjoys wrangling with CSS positioning or workarounds because they want to be "rewarded by keeping up".

> Last year I assigned a feature to a junior dev which was quite simple. He spent two days hunting for and testing React libraries to try and build it. When he told me this I said, “Holy crap, that is overkill.” I tried to explain how easy this would be with just plain HTML and JavaScript and he didn’t understand, so we paired for about 90 minutes and the work was done.

I don't know what your feature is. But any decent web dev today has to think of multiple angles that are not present in non-frontend development

- Responsiveness

- Browser support

- Accessibility

- Internationalization

That is in addition to testing, error logging, analytics, etc. We haven't even gone to the business logic yet.

Many people underestimate how much work a good web app entails

[thomasfromcdnjs]

Yeah I'm also laughing.

The senior engineer could have just as easily wrote worse code.

Just some weird obscure Javascript floating around editing the DOM directly causing untraceable errors in the future.

React helps with lots of things;

- Testability

- Readability

- Less side effects

- Documentation

- Rendering

- Error Protection

I could rattle on forever, might be time to write a blog post, gets a bit tiring reading the HN users who think we've just made the frontend complex for fun.

Frontend development is HARD, factors include;

- Plethora of device models/sizes

- Latency / Async / Fetching (data)

- Rendering speeds based off how you coded it

- State Management / Cache Freshness / LocalStorage

- Server Side Rendering

- Code Bundling (js and css)

- Design / Transitions / UX / UI

etc

Now why is all this important? Because to be a competitive app, it simply has to be sexy and slick.

If I could do that with one style tag and one script tag, I would.

[burlesona]

1) CSS works great, and while it continues to incrementally improve, has been fairly stable since its introduction. What I meant about "solutions" that don't work well are things like React state which has gone from "not a thing" to "redux" to "redux is an antipattern" to "redux is moot because now graphql" which oh BTW means you now need a whole new API? Ok. That framework churn is because those problems are actually difficult, and to date there's no "one true way" that is pretty straightforward and covers 90% of cases pretty well. By contrast, things like "how to set up a webserver that handles HTTP requests" are easier and already well-solved in every serious language, and thus not so subject to the same degree of churn.

2) All those concerns were present in the project I worked with said developer on, and were easy to handle with the basic tools of the browser.