[codingdave]

I have yet to meet a front-end dev that gets hostile when you show them how their code can be improved. On the contrary, the folks I have worked with are thrilled to improve their craft.

Unless of course you are not showing them improvements and are instead just shitting on their work. Yes, people do get hostile to that approach.

[austin-cheney]

Then you and I are talking to different people. Fortunately, I don't work in JavaScript for employment any more. As a frame of reference just the mere mention that a site could be 50-200x faster by dumping React creates conflicts of interests for impacted developers and the results are typically not immediately welcoming. That isn't shitting on anybody's work, especially if you provide guidance for improvement, but if a large group of developers cannot function without React their perception of "shitting on their work" will be less objective.

[johnfn]

It doesn't surprise me that you got a lot of people upset at you. "Dumping React" is not a viable strategy for the large majority of organizations. This would be like saying that you could improve performance by rewriting the backend into Rust.

[austin-cheney]

Perfect example of what I am talking about.

People want faster software... until they are confronted by challenging decisions. JavaScript can be very fast. JavaScript, in the browser, reports a page load of about 0.06 seconds for my large personal SPA and that includes state restoration. That is determined by using: performance.getEntries()[0].duration in the browser.

When conflicts arise people most frequently become emotional and complain about the situation than make any decision towards resolution one way or the other. That is a psychological problem called cognitive conservatism[1]. About the half the time that emotional output is some form of deflection, such as hostility. Cognitive conservatism is only allowed to exist when there is insufficient pressure on the thought leaders to impose a resolution.

Its okay to say you don't really want to be faster.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatism_(belief_revision)

See also cognitive complexity: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_complexity#In_psycho...

[agos]

Insinuating the person you’re discussing with has a psychological problem is also not a great way to win minds

[austin-cheney]

I did no such thing. That you see such is an example of front end developers seeing everything through emotionally tinted glasses. If you want to talk numbers we can talk numbers, but it doesn't matter if the first matter is whether or your not the numbers offend you.

[johnfn]

> When conflicts arise people most frequently become emotional and complain about the situation than make any decision towards resolution one way or the other. That is a psychological problem called cognitive conservatism[1]. About the half the time that emotional output is some form of deflection, such as hostility. Cognitive conservatism is only allowed to exist when there is insufficient pressure on the thought leaders to impose a resolution.

Please consider that it is your own behavior which leads to these responses. When you are getting repeated "hostile" reactions from everyone you try to state your case to, instead of insisting that everyone else is wrong, it might be wise to look inwards and ask yourself if you are the problem.

It is interesting that you claim that the only reason you can think of that people disagree with you that they are emotional. Have you considered that you might be wrong?

[austin-cheney]

It’s not about right or wrong. It’s about the numbers. You are either faster or not. People that are easily offended really want it to be all about right or wrong. The only reason I can think of abandoning or discarding evidence is emotion. Whether that is right or wrong I don’t care.

[johnfn]

The success of an organization is very rarely dependent solely on website performance. Speed is just one dimension in a vast and multi-dimensional optimization space. Spending time improving performance means you are necessarily not spending time improving one of those other vectors. It is a question of priorities - and suggesting that others who say that other priorities are more important are "emotional" is failing to grapple with that reality.

I don't doubt you have been correct to say performance can be improved. Performance always can be improved. It just likely doesn't matter.

[simonw]

I take it you've never suggested to a front-end dev that maybe their contact form doesn't need a 1MB+ of JavaScript framework and could just be HTML that submits to a backend.

[philipwhiuk]

Live-form validation? Auto-complete? Any of these ringing a bell?

It's almost like there are genuine UX improvements being done

[Zardoz84]

You know that pure HTML have it ? and if you need a more complex validation, a few lines of js does the magic. Same if you need live autocomplet.

[simonw]

Good point, HTML with no JavaScript at all has pretty good validation built in now. Try entering an incomplete email address on this demo page: https://tools.simonwillison.net/html-validation-demo

[simonw]

That should be a few dozen lines of vanilla JavaScript.