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by jiriknesl 1199 days ago
It's the most upvoted comment for a reason.

Back then, people fell in love with GMail and suddenly everyone thought they were building another GMail. This wasn't true. Most people were building an app with a couple of forms, a datagrid and maybe 2 highly interactive pages.

PHP, Python & Ruby frameworks gave perfect support for all this >10 years ago. You had jQuery plugins you added to page in 30 minutes and you had validation. In 2 hours you had a datagrid. Autocomplete, datepicker, things like this was no problem.

It was a form of egoism all the time.

Coding Sign In page was work for less than an hour. Now, in React, it's 2 days.

Look at developers now and compare them with senior devs a decade ago. My estimate is that development today is 4 times slower. Given a growth of salary at least 50%, a system back then in MySQL, jQuery, Django or Zend Framework for $40,000 is now $240,000 in React with GraphQL, Mongo, etc.

1 comments

Do you think there aren't "plugins" for data grids, autocomplete, and date pickers for React?
It's my observation as someone who leads developers well over a decade.

Development just got way more expensive, slower to get app-like feel. All this when >80% of pages in almost any webapp could be server-side rendered without big (or any) sacrifice of user experience.