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by 1_player 1925 days ago
The problem with front end development is that it's all bleeding edge and nothing that's stable and is improved for more than one hype cycle.

Suggesting more bleeding edge tech is not a good argument to demonstrate that front end development got better.

In my experience, it changed, it improved on many aspects, but it's still a pile of unstable crap running on the power of hype and over-enthusiastic junior engineers.
1 comments
qbasic_forever 1924 days ago
I get your frustration (and shared it a year ago), but you're really doing something like react a disservice by dismissing it like that as just hype. On the contrary react has evolved significantly over the years, introducing things like JSX (templating HTML + JS in the same file, now standard in every other component system), build tooling like create-react-app (zero config tooling, now standard in every JS build tool), functional component model with hooks (now copied by every other component library), and on the horizon stuff like server-side components. It has only gotten more stable, more proven, and easier to use over time.
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1_player 1924 days ago
I am not dismissing it. I appreciate what React is doing, and it is indeed revolutionary.

My point is that there has been a lot of evolution and improvement, but developer sanity is one of the few things that have just gone worse.

It is dishonest to look only at the bright side of modern frontend coding and forgetting the node_modules nightmare, the incredibly obtuse language, the slow compilation times, the myriad of CSS frameworks that are invented because CSS is an absolute pain in the arse for modern design, etc., the fact that every JS tool either is core to the whole circus and is maintained by a stressed out, underpaid person in the middle of nowhere, or has a minimum of 5k Github issues and a major version released every 3 months, and every time you get a problem you're told "haven't you tried the new alpha release of the big rewrite we've just started?".

It is absolute madness, not just frustrating. But yeah, React is cool.

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