[schindlabua]

And I think the Javascript problem exists because frontend/UI is just a very complicated domain, in the sense that frontend is a big messy ball of side effects. If you've been around and saw the web grow up, and saw all the new ideas all those libraries brought to the table (jQuery deferreds becoming async/await, 960 grid slowly morphing into flexbox and css grid, etc etc) then all the breaking changes make sense, we're still in a discovery stage in the frontend. Though now that I'm not doing much FE these days I get a feel for how frustrating it is to keep up to date. The current metaframeworks also solve interesting problems (that I'm not sure I had tbh) and no doubt new web standards will follow from them. But yeah if you're a new developer who doesn't have all those years of context it must be insanely confusing to swim in a sea of libraries and frameworks without having a good grip on the core web platform.

[ajmurmann]

It seems that in addition to the issue were some things were actually tedious to do, there has also always been a drive to wow users (or really other devs?) by doing something that pushes the boundaries of what's possible. Once someone has done it, everyone is expected to do it and now work is tedious again. A simple example is how back in 2009/10 everyone was all excited about rounded corners. You had to cut all these assets and got a more complex DOM but it became table stakes. So CSS got an attribute for this. Then we needed fancy grids everywhere and fourteenth elements on mobile which was tedious till frameworks did some of it. I think the wow-treadmill doesn't exist like this on the backend because nobody sees it. The closest equivalent is scaling your architecture for a level that your app will never need.

[mplanchard]

I’ve been writing JS since the PHP and jquery days, so I’m not unfamiliar. I understand these libraries are doing complex things, but they also seem to love churning for churn’s sake (react hooks is an example, svelte v5 is another, eslint entirely deprecating their old config format is yet another).

I don’t mind learning or using a framework to do complicated things. I mind when the ecosystem as a whole makes it so much harder to get real work done and instead forces everyone to do busywork like switching tsconfig to eslint, then switching eslint config to the new flat format.

[schindlabua]

Hooks were great. But yeah eslint flat config is probably also better than the old format but we could have easily done without that breaking change you're right.

The churn is part of why I try to do mostly backend these days, especially with the current state of tooling. Like when react came out it was immediately clear it was going to be a mainstay, I can't imagine nextjs in it's current form to be around in a few years because it's very terrible and I want the metaframework dust to settle a bit before diving back in.