[masa331]

Your focus on things being "modern", which is no indicator of value except for hipsters and recruiters, made you forget about the third conclusion with which you might come away from setting up a monolith application:

3. Wow, this actually works. I am so productive and i can actually get my work done quickly, the same way as hundreds of thousands other normal developers out there. And then i can have a free time and mind free of stressing over what's cool or not

It's about what you value. If it is your time and happinnes, if you mainly want to just build stuff to solve real world problems, then choosing good old monolith application will get you there safe and fast in 90% of situations.

If you value to be hip and cool, then Deno, hydrating whatever, edge servers and sorely lacking areas of modern web development will 100% get you there.

[Dangeranger]

My thoughts weren't really meant to be a condemnation of monolithic web app frameworks, just a summary of my conclusions after using them for years.

The reasons I have for justifying use of React, JSX, GraphQL, etc. have nothing to do with being "hip and cool" and everything to do with happiness and productivity. Using modern tools is both more enjoyable and more productive in my experience, as someone who used Ruby-on-Rails with templated pages for four years.

[DecoPerson]

“Modern” also means the solution may benefit from reflection on past solutions.

The accounting software I use, written in 2004, evolved over the decades starting from 1980s software. It all works (hence, I’m using it now), but comparing the user experience and source code of various features developed at various times reveals a lot about what “modern” means.

Here’s a few things:

Standardisation: Modern software tends to use proven designs, such as SQL over a bespoke query language.

Performance: The strictness of ABIs and APIs makes it difficult to restructure for the sake of optimisation without introducing undesirable breaking changes. Old codebases may be essentially “frozen” and stuck on old versions of libraries. Fresh software can use the latest versions of libraries, with their new APIs & ABIs and whatever optimisations come along.

Fundamental coding improvements: Old languages don’t have ergonomic, performant closures (see lambda functions in Python). New languages do (see arrow functions in ES6). Replace “closures” with any core language feature, like null coalescing, match statements, object & array destructing (or even better: pattern matching assignment), or hygienic macros. (Let’s not discuss async/await as that doesn’t lie in the “unquestionably better” column.)

Better error messages & debugging: Over time, we collectively as developers have figured out what helps and what hinders when trying to track down troubles.

——

I also build stuff that solves real world problems. I once used Python and Django for everything. Now, I’ve moved to Node.js, TypeScript, React, and generally that ecosystem. It works far better than Python+Django. My development speed is blazingly fast in comparison, and the results stand up — they’re shippable.

Once I was familiar with Python & Django, they got the job done.

Now, I’m familiar with TypeScript & Node, they get the job done better.

Familiarity is that invisible force that, in its absence, prevents us from distinguishing things that don’t work from things that do work but are just different from what we know.

[replygirl]

> I am so productive and i can actually get my work done quickly, **the same way as hundreds of thousands other normal developers out there.**

i seek out new technologies because i want to be _more_ productive than the average engineer. i don't believe there are hundreds of thousands of developers who are more productive than someone who makes an effort to learn stuff like deno, vite, unjs, fauna, etc. as soon as possible