[creakingstairs]

Sure it adds complexity, but isn't that what abstractions are for? We are talking about grokking how data flows in _a web app in Rails_. I wouldn't think usual workflow requires going into actual inner workings of React :p

[AstroBen]

Well React doesn't come by itself. You need a router, probably some way of managing shared state, bundling, compiling your TypeScript, and 7 other libraries

The more stuff you add on the harder everything is to understand, and the less stable your app becomes until suddenly you need specialists for every piece just to keep things chugging forward. Everything needs greasing and maintenance over time..

..and then in 4 years the React team decides "oh you know what the way Svelte is doing things is actually way better.. we'll need a re-write to integrate their ideas". Now what?

"that wouldn't happen! so many businesses depend on React!".. uh they have no obligation to make things compatible with whatever you've built. They're not working for you. What happened with AngularJS? Vue 2?

Hotwire is easy to understand (React "just renders it" is a massive oversimplification)

If Hotwire rewrites? I create a private fork and continue on. Who cares

If I want to tweak how Hotwire works cause it'll benefit my app specifically? I do it myself

I'm not against adding complexity.. but if you care at all about longevity and long-term productivity then adding React really needs a tonne more consideration than it gets

[creakingstairs]

I think we fundamentally agree that we want to be careful about adding complexity to a project. Funnily enough there have been many times where I really thought Hotwire equivalent would have cut down a lot of complexity. I've also actively looked at web components at work and for hobby projects to see if we could make/keep things simpler.

But maybe I'm biased because I've been working with React for a long time, I don't find it too daunting to manage dev tools around React. When React was young, I remember that there were _a lot_ of ecosystem churn but now it's more-or-less settled and I don't think it's too bad.

I don't know how Hotwire works that well as most of my experience is around Elixir's LiveView, but at least for LiveView, there is also quite a bit going on under the hood to make it performant for large lists and to handle error states gracefully. And I (maybe incorrectly) assume Hotwire is similar, so I feel like it may not be not as simple as you say. (Edit: it is simpler than React though!)

[AstroBen]

It also doesn't need to be all or nothing. I've become a big fan of progressive enhancement or an islands approach. Default to SSR and scale it up as needed

[lambdaone]

Once you give up any hope of understanding the inner workings of the frameworks you are using, you're no longer a programmer, you're a cargo cultist. Now compound this a dozen levels deep, with systems piled on systems built by people who don't understand the other systems they are building on top of, and you have the current mess.

[spoiler]

Every engineer in our industry is a Cargo cultist by that definition. Including experts. Where do you draw the line? I'm sure you have one, but your line is no less arbitrary than mine or someone elses.

[lambdaone]

A competent programmer should be able to at least conceptualise every level from the transistor up - not necessarily completely understand, but at least know roughly what it does, and what it rests on, and what rests on it. Transistors, gates, logic, state machines, instruction sets, assemblers, parsers, compilers, interpreters, operating systems, memory allocation, graphics, browsers, that sort of thing. Not at all unreasonable for someone with a decent computer science degree, surely?

Of course, you don't have to know any of that to grasp how to bang a page together with today's web frameworks; but you end up with the resource-hogging unmaintainable security disaster that is the modern web in the process.

[spoiler]

Ok, but I've worked with people who are pretty good with web dev, but I guarantee you they don't know how memory gets requested from the operating system.

Like, sure it helps in some contexts, but in their context it would largely be irrelevant.

For the wast majority of people, it's fine for them to know basic tradeoffs between stdlib container types. Most web performance problems today come from misusing tools, whether container types, bad algorithms, memory leaks (and I don't think knowing how an OS manages memory would help them in JS for example), DOM pollution, or oversized assets or whatever. And my take is that that people are often too overworked to care about it, rather than lacking awareness about these things lol

On the other hand, if you're a systems engineer, then you absolutely do needs to know all of this stuff.

And I bet you they'd navigate stuff like better than a systems engineer, because that's more useful to their day to day!

[lambdaone]

Exactly. You don't need to really know how to program to use web frameworks, and web programmers are much cheaper than systems engineers. It's a no-brainer in short-term business terms. But there's a always a price to be paid for decisions like this, and this overhead is it.

Experience of similar tradeoffs tells us it will only get worse over time, and LLM-generated web programming will make the whole process get even worse even faster.