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Comment by geon | Hacker News Reader

> Web development used to be nice.

Interesting how we can have so completely opposite experiences. I'm feeling like webdev is just finally geting a tiny bit sane. When I started doing it in '98 or so, it was horrible beyond description. Now, with ES6/7, Typescript, Less and Jade (and the Chrome dev tools), I can actually get some work done instead of fighting the browser at all time.

I would say LOL if only it wasn't so sad.

Edit:

> A SPA will lock you into a framework that has the shelf life of a hamster dump. When you think you need a SPA, just stop thinking.

Seriously? Backbone is super mature, but with a steady trickle of minor updates and fixes. And it isn't really a framework, just a small library.

There are plenty of great use cases for an SPA. A blog probably isn't one, but like with all technologies, part of your job is knowing when not to use it.

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It's not just that web development was pretty complicated and terrible back in the day, it's also that web development hits so many more targets and platforms than it did 10 years ago: not just multiple web browsers, but multiple breakpoints and behaviors of those browsers based on the physical constraints of the device.

We should expect a rise in complexity if our ability to reach users has increased accordingly.

Absolutely. He says things like

> Maybe 1 or 2 pages on your app will have really complex UI, but the other 95% of the app does not.

I guess I wish I had his problems. I work on an app where nearly every page has a complex UI, because it's a control panel for a domain with a lot of inherent complexity. Making manual DOM manipulation calls for every UI change would be a nightmare.

Exactly. For simple sites, I pretty much avoid all frameworks/libraries. However, I use babel/webpack though I really like webpack-dev-server and the full set of es6 features. I disagree with the React statement. I believe it's really simple on it's own. Flux/Redux add a lot of complexity, but confers significant gains. The new site I'm writing for work isn't just some stupid CRUD site - it's a complex UI used to monitor and manage industrial assets. Having the ability to organize long data flows and actions makes the code much easier to read and write, especially for other developers. If I had to manually manipulate the DOM (especially for making everything responsive) I'd go nuts. The thing about these tools are that once you learn them well, they save you a lot of time.

> There are plenty of great use cases for an SPA. A blog probably isn't one, but like with all technologies, part of your job is knowing when not to use it.

99% of the SPA's I've encountered in life had no business being SPAs.

The server side used to be sane. It was where your sanity was when the client side was ridiculous. Now it feels like server side is just a ridiculous as the client side used to be.

You can still build your server the same way. I fact, with SPA:s and REST, the server becomes way saner.

I guess that's true; I just finished building an SPA and the server code was saner -- but only because there was so much less of it. But overall the project is messier.

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