Frontend Frameworks Complexity

As a 15+ years webdev my recent projects in the front-end are almost pure "vanilla JS" (Just JS) + Html, and CSS with only Petite Vue / Alpine on top.I find the modern Vue, React etc. stacks absolutely insufferably complex and prone to breaking in 1000 places each time you upgrade some package, or change som random thing in the already stupidly complex "Tooling/Build" chains people are setting up by default.And it's because no one, not even experts in the

Clickbait title for the HN crowd, I sense that articles like these are analogous to the old which color to paint the bikeshed debate.Front-end libraries and frameworks should be trivial because front-end web development is largely trivial, it's the ecosystem around it that has bloated in complexity, including Vue.js and React.Take a standard API that is already simple enough to understand and use (DOM), and re-package it for people who wish to call themselves "software eng

The frontend world seems to be drowning in its own accidental complexity, with each new framework trying to solve the ecosystem's self-created problems.I've been developing complicated full stack apps for years with nearly-vanilla JS, CSS and HTML, plus a helping of basic software design skills, and I have no trouble managing complexity, delivering features fast, etc. I've never related to all these problems the frontend world endlessly frets about like state management, build

From personal experience I can tell you that using a modern framework can be really worth the added complexity even in simple applications.For one of my clients projects it started out in what seemed like a simple crud app and so I did the few reactive changes in pure java script. The thing is: requirements changed and now after a while I couldn't get around adding VueJS simply because the reactive changes kept piling up.Even though the HN sentiment seems to be that all "modern&q

Lots of reasons:1) No need for 3.7GB of node_modules to crank out a simple site2) Single solution, easier to bring on junior developers and reason about application logic3) Caching much easier, too many people think they need real-time push when NRT-polling + caching is far easier and more performantBroadly speaking it's often a case of YAGNI. The JS ecosystem really does still suck for its complexity, I remember that every time I ramp up a new developer onto a React project.

Hi fellow yelling old man,would it be OK for me to steal your analogy? It's great!In the team I'm currently leading, we have made the same observation, with stuff getting more complicated without anything substantial to show for it. In a way we're having a harder time getting out features than twenty years ago, but somehow that's "progress".As an experiment, I had one of my juniors rewrite a (admittedly small) frontend with Go templates and HTMX, and not on

Theres a few nice lightweight CSS/JS frameworks like mdl.io and bootstrap that are still relevant, react apps get lost in a mess of callback caches and useEffect, unclear side effects seem to happen on rendering in most large react apps.I developed some games like https://github.com/lee101/wordsmashing in a fairly simplistic jquery style i developed where i purposefully avoid using

> I have a few years of experience working mostly on the frontend with React and am getting more and more frustrated with all the added layers of complexity needed to work with most common frontend frameworks.It's complicated because you (or your team) are using very, very low level tools, which were made for large teams, working at large companies with complex architectures adapted to fit more people working on the problem, with large budgets where all of this can be afforded. In fac

Front-end is now a cesspool of numerous complex layers that try so hard to work with each other, all while only trying to deliver mostly the same kind of experience from 10 years ago or older.Many big companies and startups blindly jump into the React/Vue/Angular stack, along with other complexities like Vite, Webpack, SSR, Zzzzzzzz... etc, where things are tied so loosely with 100s of dependencies and with a fragile underlying platform such as NPM. The output produced is only very

It's not that complicated. There are only like 20+ popular javascript (or Typescript, CoffeeScript, Dart, ...) frontend frameworks to choose from (Vuejs, React, Angular, ...) and their popularity changes over time. Several so called "native" solutions if you also want fast Mobile apps and HTML is not looking good enough (NativeScript, ReactNative or even Flutter). And there are like 10+ languages to choose for the backend development. And don't forget proper state management