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Comment by oldboyFX | Hacker News Reader

This guy is a WebComponents evangelist of some sort.

I don't understand why so many people sweat over libraries, frameworks, and which one is going to "win". Once you learn to program properly, choosing a framework becomes a non-issue.

The bigger problem right now is the tooling ecosystem (webpack, babel etc). It's too difficult to set up and customize, especially for beginners. The packages change too often and you run into bugs all the time. Sometimes I wish we had a dumb-ass GUI to set up all this stuff. Customizability comes with complexity I guess.

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I agree and I disagree.

From an individual developer standpoint, you should be able to transition between frameworks, libraries, and so on. You don't have to pick a single "winning" tech stack, although there are obviously transactional costs to becoming productive in a new tech stack.

From the point of view of a product or business, it is very expensive to switch between tech stacks. Most businesses can't afford to re-implement their product because there is a new 'hot framework'. I think there was an article on HN just within the last week about why Fortran is still a thing in some development circles.

So while I don't think it is necessary for there to be a single "winner", discerning which tech stacks have some long term stability and when the benefits of a transition outweigh the transactional costs of switching can be important.

> From the point of view of a product or business, it is very expensive to switch between tech stacks.

I totally agree with you. I was talking about the developers perspective.

When it comes to companies, not only is it difficult to transition from an unpopular tech stack, but it's also difficult to hire great developers because none of them want to work on such stack.

I can't agree more with you, I recently started a huge open source project and the choice of front-end framework was changed about halfway through. The issue was never learning and working with the front-end framework even with a change, it was always just getting webpack/gulp/vueify/sass/babel/whatever amalgamation of tools we were using to pre-compile and compress everything. Once that was all setup everything was smooth sailing even with no experience on the framework.

To this day we are still having some minor issues with our tooling/builds and some odd configuration that we don't know if it's our fault or just something everyone deals with. The framework itself works as intended and is a joy to work with.

Well that and don't get me started on Selenium testing...

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