Many users - who weren't programmers by training - loved CF for the ease of understanding. They had a DX paradigm that worked and I understand why people try to emulate it. It's a question of audience, and not for the HN crowd.
Except that SPA frameworks are designed to complicate things, not to make them easier to understand. And SPA framework developers are crazy expensive, mor expensive than seasoned C++ systems programmers. (The two facts are probably linked.)
Have you ever developed a complicated front-end system? Not using a vue/react style framework would be ludicrous (ie, building something like Facebook Ads UI or Google Analytics UI). I find it super bizarre you say "complicate things" when they do 100% the opposite. I would love to understand what you would use if you were tasked with building FB Ads manager interface: https://disruptiveadvertising.com/static/61a4440576bffd6e6a2...
> I find it super bizarre you say "complicate things" when they do 100% the opposite.
They're way, way overengineered for the very limited use cases they're designed for.
If you're going to ditch the browser API's and re-write the world in Javascript, why not take into consideration all of the history of GUI development and do it right? I.e., make a real layout engine, proper widget hierarchies, real encapsulation, etc.
Instead there's some sort of frankenstein in-between state where you've ditched all the benefits of native browser API's but haven't arrived anywhere that's a true paradigm shift.
TL;DR - yeah, they make some things easier to reason about, but for any sort of non-standard webapp you'll still need to write an equivalent mountain of hacks and framework adaptors.
"very limited uses" mmmmm what? Reactive frameworks are one of the widest used front-end design patterns.
You answered my questions with a bunch of theoretical non-answers that comes off like a tech purist who hasn't actually used the technologies but has a lot of opinions about them. Do you have a lot of experience designing non-trivial/complicated web apps with very heavy front-end features? "layout engine", "widget hierarchies" what _exactly_ does that mean in the context of designing something as complicated as Google Analytics/FB Biz Manager using javascript. If you are proposing not using primarily JS logic but rather server logic, or not as a SPA (or isometric hybrid like nuxt/next), then that makes me want to hear your answer even more.
