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by lukev 256 days ago
As someone who has been doing frontend dev since "AJAX" was the hot new stuff...

I am deeply, deeply disappointed in the field. It simultaneously has an extremely high rate of churn and an extremely low rate of actual innovation.

After observing the discipline for nearly two decades, I am concluding that almost all the "progress" really starts to look like we're just rearranging the furniture endlessly without substantive improvements in developer velocity or end user experience.

Any given "progress" looks reasonable for a moment but is ultimately circular. We've been playing rock/paper/scissors with "better" techniques for a long time now.

1 comments

Things have been stable for a while now. We haven't had actual churn in years.

But given that there has not actually been progress either, my guess is that this is a temporary situation.

Either way, Svelte is one of those things that promise some real progress. Not one of the things that have the same amount of problems, but in a different configuration.

I guess you and I define "actual churn" differently.
I came across an old graphics project I'd made for Windows/DOS around 20 years ago. Within about a half hour I was able to compile and run it on a Linux machine with Wine, installing the latest version of the compiler and dependencies.

I can rarely get a 6-month-old JavaScript web project to compile and run this easily. Churn in node versions, npm/yarn versions, dependencies being abandoned, superseded, dropping backwards compatibility.

I agree that the churn is constant.

A HTML page, web components and no build process solves this.

Pinned package versions in npm solves this.

If you want to use the latest dependencies then yes there is ongoing management required. There are tools to help with this.