[neya]

I am not attacking any individual developer or project here, but in recent times, there's been a trend I've been observing and what you're pointing out. I call it the Hipster Driven Development phenomena* and it's just getting worse with every year. People just start by discarding established best practices in the name of being unique and cool and then wind up to the inevitable conclusion - the established best practices were there for a reason.

There's been many such trends to name a few - discarding years worth of stable codebases to try out some shiny new framework, throw away proven technologies to trade for some perceived developer convenience (Eg. PostgreSQL to MongoDB), labeling known terminologies to sound cool (Hacker vs Growth 'Hacker'). All these hipster moves come with a huge cost - they cost morale, time, money, teams, relationships. It just feels so unnatural to accept this as the norm.

In comparison, I just feel like some old dude from the 1950s rambling though these things have started to happen only the last half of the decade or so. Where did we go wrong?

Edited for OT

[efdee]

I was with you for the first two paragraphs, but I feel you invalidate everything you said by pretending separation of technologies and separation of concerns are equivalent. That reeks of dogmatism more than anything else.

[odiroot]

> I call it the Hipster Driven Development phenomena* and it's just getting worse with every year.

My impression is, that began, when highly political people started to join the JS community (and Web engineering in general).

[dotancohen]

Its funny that you mention that. After Eich was forced to quit, I've been noticing that everything related to client-side development is highly influenced by liberal mindsets, many of which are also political. I'm also a minority, but I don't want (even if I need) anybody advocating for me.

Of course, both you and me are going to be downvoted because these types oppose (downvote, "cancel") anyone who mentions their presence.

[sod]

Thanks for hipster driven development then. Frontend development - or really any software environment - would be very sad if everyone was scared to try something new or mix exiting ideas when a field seems to be already saturated by an established framework.

[olieidel]

Agree, an interesting observation! I wonder: Junior developers nowadays who learn JS and React as their first, go-to stack for web development, they haven't ever experienced the raw productivity of "just write php and upload it via ftp" or "just write it in rails/django and render stuff server-side".

They come to expect that all development is as slow as theirs, including frontend <--> backend apis (graphql), huge js complexity (webpack), breaking changes (react-router), etc.

I see lots of companies nowadays wanting to hire "React devs". It seems we're collectively forgetting how fast you can ship stuff if you just use proven technology. Makes me wonder where we're headed.

Maybe it'll be a competitive advantage to use old (= proven) technology in the future?

[cutler]

You gotta hand it to the Rails team who came up Stimulus [Reflex] as an antidote to all the SPA abuse.