[antirez]

Reasons why the web is such a shitstorm:

1. Big frameworks were pushed from companies to the user base, most of the software stack is, instead, organically created by the programming community. So we have things like Angular and React that are big-company-design stuff that became normal programming. It's like if every site runs on Kubernetes.

2. There was, in big companies, an extreme desire to do two things: totally isolate frontend from backend, because the internal organization of big companies has such a split, and to make applications so standardized that hiring new people, firing old people, is something possible and easy. Fast, highly reactive applications written using semantical HTML and just the amount of required Javascript are, instead, general code, and each app is a little different, or even a lot different. So those two goals are not aligned to producing great web apps, but to internal requirements.

3. We later created a generation of programmers that can't even understand a single language very well in its internals, that is: Javascript, they often know the framework, not the language, nor even CSS well enough. So they are trapped into the ecosystem of knowing React or Angular or something like that. It was enough to have a high paying job. Now, those folks, the way the were trained and the way they work makes of them not really general purpose programmers like you could find 10 or 15 years ago. And now the industry is kinda trapped into this situation also because of people abilities.

Of all that, in theory, I don't care much, I can write my stuff as I want. But:

A) The web is terrible now, it is slow, eats a lot of memory, and is fragile. So this impacts me.

B) The big salary front-end folks culture is also made of a lot of people that don't realize that they move in a very limited field of what they believe programming is, and are arrogant enough that if you do something in vanilla Javascript, fast, well coded and that works well, you will be accused to do things in a odd / old way. Many of them basically actively resist to making the web more sane.

I believe LLMs are going to change this thing, as now there is less direct exposition to the specific code, and things can be more easily refactored in versions of the same app that are saner. We will see. But nothing in programming, in the latest decades, was at the same level of mess as of front-end development.

The irony is that front-end developers highly suffer from all that, for a number of reasons: they are forced to continue learning new ways to do the same button, form, pagination, and so forth. And, also, if they are smart they understand they don't really know what programming really is in most cases, and are not happy about it.

[YmiYugy]

1. I think it's pretty clear that the frameworks sold themselves, because it's possible to see the DX benefits with anything beyond a hello world. You don't need Meta's scale. It came from the big companies because they needed it most, not because they are the only ones who benefit.

2. I agree that the frontend-backend split caused a lot of harm and it seems most places are moving on, but it

3. It's a fair assessment that many people don't understand JS well. But it's also a super quirky language with many features that probably should be considered "do-not-use". Things like messing with the prototype chain, purposefully using == instead of === etc. CSS is even worse. The defaults are weird, which is why everyone uses some form of CSS reset, many things have surprising names and refactoring in a codebase with complex usage of selectors and cascading is a nightmare.

But I wouldn't call people trapped in frameworks. It's pretty easy to switch between React, Svelte, Angular and co.

A) The gone by days of Java Applet's and Flash weren't so snappy either. Our websites also do much more. A tab of Google docs isn't slower or use more memory than a Word instance.

B) No group is ever immune to arrogance. But sure, if you write vanilla JS instead of TS, I'd think that's an odd choice. I'm not saying you can't make good things with Vanilla JS, but I don't see how that makes the Web more "sane".

LLM: When it comes to coding tools LLMs are not so different from humans in what helps them. They benefit just as much from the cleaner control flow of reactive frameworks (compared to jQuery), colocation of JSX and tailwind and typechecking of TS as us humans.

Mess: Has the Web really been such a mess lately? I think most of the messiness is far behind us. JS+HTML5 winning out against Flash and Java, standardization across browsers, XML or HTML. Was it worse than Microsoft reinventing their Windows UI framework every couple of years?