[WhyNotHugo]

I appreciate the sentiment, but can't agree fully. I used vanilla JS for many years before AngularJS even existed (and I also tried AngulasJS when it was the new thing).

Vue is just a huge convenience over raw JavaScript for large, complex view. Sure, I don't get to do direct DOM manipulation, but when I write C code I also don't get to pick which variable goes in which CPU register. I accept giving up control that ASM would give me, for all the improvements that C brings on top of it, even if C just compiles to ASM and is an abstraction on top of it.

[stana]

Writing programs in C has simplified developer experience over Assembly. Issue with JS frameworks is that many find them complex, i.e. complexity has not been abstracted away (which should be goal of abstractions). Maybe DOM manipulation has, but many new complex ideas had to be introduced to achieve it.

[dsego]

But isn't that the right thing to do? Recognize the problems and introduce concepts to tackle them. C introduced pointers as a concept, one more thing to learn and reason about but frees you from using addresses directly. Relational models was discovered as a formal way of understanding and reasoning about data structures. Frontend components introduce a composable architecture with lifecycle hooks, reactivity etc. Those concepts were already there (e.g. with ad-hoc html templates, event listeners, clean up code) but now they are actually formalized and made explicit and developers actively think about them when doing frontend. So the abstraction is there, but I feel for some reason non-UI people assume UI is easy to code, but they never thought about the actual concepts involved. Even without frameworks, you need to consider composability, modularity, events, life cycle, state management, async behavior, etc. I'd rather have those built in and considered as part of the programming model, than to avoid it.

[JBits]

Is it mainly the reactivity part of Vue that you benefit from, or are there other aspects which are important?