[acdha]

> If any of those frameworks at any point did half the things React + Next-like frameworks accomplished and the apps/experiences we got since then, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

This is interesting because every Next/React project I see has a slower velocity than the median Rails/Django product 15 years ago. They’re just as busy, but pushing so much complexity around means any productivity savings is cancelled out by maintenance and how much harder state management and security are. Theoretically performance is the justification for this but the multi-second page load times are unconvincing.

From my perspective, it really supports the criticism about culture in our field: none of this is magic, we can measure things like page-weight, response times, or time to complete common tasks (either for developers or our users), but so much of it is driven by what’s in vogue now rather than data.

[ricardobeat]

+1 to this. I seriously believe frontend was more productive in the 2010-2015 era than now, despite the flaws in legacy tech. Projects today have longer timelines, are more complex, slower, harder to deploy, and a maintenance nightmare.

[c-hendricks]

I'm not so sure those woes are unique to frontend development.

[chuckadams]

I remember maintaining webpack-based projects, and those were not exactly a model of simplicity. Nor was managing a fleet of pet dev instances with Puppet.

[acdha]

Puppet isn’t a front end problem, but I do agree on Webpack - which is one reason it wasn’t super common. A lot of sites either didn’t try to bundle things or had simple Make-level workflows which were at least very simple, and at the time I noted that these often performed similarly: people did, and still do, want to believe there’s a magic go-faster switch for their front end which obviates the need to reconsider their architectural choices but anyone who actually measured it knew that bundlers just didn’t deliver savings on that scale.

[chuckadams]

I do kind of miss gulp and wish there was a modern TS version. Vite is mighty powerful, but pretty opaque.

[ricardobeat]

Webpack came out in late 2012 and took a few years to take over, thankfully. I was lucky to avoid it at dayjob™ until around 2019.