Comment by RobertRoberts | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RobertRoberts | Hacker News Reader

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I've been doing webdev since 1999. I've seen all manner of stupid hacks, dumb "best practices" that have come and gone, ridiculous frameworks that became _useless_ because browsers just integrated the features. Flash home screens, table layouts, IE only coding up the wazoo.

So, when someone says they have a JS framework that replaces the core of the browser's display, the DOM, my response to that is sigh, this again.

Shadow DOM is around the corner, what then?

The reason this stuff gets popular is not because it's a good idea, it's because big companies have tons of cash and man power and can't wait for browsers to get updated. Well, a lot of us code monkey vets are done chasing "shiny crappolla", and we can wait a bit until the dust settles.

How many JS frameworks are there now? I saw all of them come, where is ember, knockout, etc...? Vue just popped up, and I can't even recall the other 5 I tried out at the same time. Which will succeed? When you have to put real money into a project and the framework matters to your clients budget, and your profitability, you can't make a risky bet and expect your client to pay for it later if you are wrong.

I am all for the long term now. Show me how a 1 year old framework is a good investment, I am willing to learn something. (keep in mind React is only about 4.5 years old, Angular is only 15 months old (AngularJS is 7 just years old and already being phased out!))

> Shadow DOM is around the corner, what then?

Nothing changes. DOM remains a slow monstrosity impossible to code for. For goodness sakes, reading certain properties in a DOM tree causes a full page reflow [1]

To beat virtual DOM frameworks you have to write extremely specific vanilla JS+DOM code that basically ends up doing the same thing: re-using DOM nodes, event delegation etc. See [2]

Shadow DOM was never meant to be an answer to that. Honestly, I have no idea what it was supposed to be an answer to.

[1] https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a

[2] https://medium.com/@localvoid/how-to-win-in-web-framework-be...

You should learn React and build a simple project with it to understand its real value, which is component-based architecture.

React will likely be around longer than/as long as any framework, but whatever replaces it will use a lot of the same concepts.

How does that help 1000 visitors to a blog read the blog easier? Not every site is an app, and the apps we do build we already have invested in VanillaJS framework. Do you think React will outlast the VanillaJS framework? (http://vanilla-js.com/)

(edit: this is partly a joke comment, fyi)

I understand the joke but JS isn't a framework, it's a language.

"No framework" generally means "poorly-written custom framework". Do you have any code samples to share from your vanilla JS apps?

>"No framework" generally means "poorly-written custom framework"

This thinking is part of the problem: the idea that not-using a framework almost necessarily means you're writing garbage.

>Do you have any code samples to share from your vanilla JS apps?

I can show you bad code from popular frameworks too--in particular, hacks to get around the "magic" that frameworks offer.

And, invariably, we move on from the framework because now there's "something better". And, we say "that's just progress". No one wants to admit that the last framework was just bad.

It's a trend that's been going on for decades in programming, and not just with JS frameworks. Stick around long enough and you'll see exactly how predictable it is.

"No framework" generally means "poorly-written custom framework".

That is not generally true at all. It might be true if you've got a very inexperienced and unskilled team of developers who don't know how to build a non-trivial application without the structure that a framework brings. However, there must be millions of developers in the world who do have sufficient skill and experience to do that, and these days plenty of those people work in web development. I imagine they can still remember how to do things like basic software design and using libraries, which have been working since long before any of these modern frameworks existed.

I'm afraid you're being terribly optimistic. I'm not totally sure how many millions of people, in absolute numbers, are even competent developers. Out of those, some are web developers, and some subset of those are doing things without frameworks. That leaves a lot of yahoos.

Well, yes, there are plenty of incompetent developers too, as there always have been since development broke out of its earliest new-and-specialised-job days.

Even so, the idea that not using a framework automatically means you'll produce some poor imitation instead is laughable. The history of software development is replete with examples of people succeeding without those frameworks. We've built countless UIs that way that were much bigger and more complicated than anyone has ever built with Angular or whatever this week's flavour of JS framework is.

Maybe there are only thousands of developers working in the web industry who could do it rather than millions. I'm not sure that undermines my real point, since you'd only need a handful of decent devs to make and maintain almost any web front-end I've ever seen.

I suspect the true problem is that for various reasons we lose a lot of that experience and skill from the industry far earlier than we should, and then yet another young generation of developers who haven't studied history are doomed to repeat it, badly.

I agree - have yet to see the benefit of using a framework that aren't at least 2 years. Never do client work using newly released frameworks (if that isn't specified as a must by the client). The result will come back to bite you sooner or later.

I like the idea of universal code, maybe Sapper will be the solution that comes out winning. I'll let the community be the judges and hop on the train a year later if that's the case.

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