He is handwringing about single-page applications. SPAs have been kicking around for, what, a decade? Let's be real--in this article the single-page application complaint is a proxy for "I don't like JavaScript" and he's entitled to that opinion but it is certainly not "experimental"; JavaScript is not going anywhere, it is well-understood both in browser and on the server, and the libraries and ecosystem are not going anywhere either--if Facebook died tomorrow there would still be React jobs in 2023.
There are parts of current software development that really, really suck. The author does not capture them; this is "new things are scary" complaining and very little more.
Only with big players: facebook, gmail, etc.
Small crew SPA usually suck big time precisely because there is not django/ror/etc equivalent for SPA. So people write it by hand. And they don't all have the talent pool and money the GAFAs have.
(And, speaking personally, my now-standard stack of TypeScript/Express/TypeORM/tsoa provides a level of architectural enforcement I've only really gotten previously on the JVM, but with significantly less mucking around with my runtime.)
A HN clone SPA though...
First, let's see if they can get code splitting right to not make it loads 3mo/page.
Then if they can choose a stack that doesn't kill navigation.
Also, let's see how long it takes both team to come up with the same result.
My money is on the static stack. Just the registration without a good framework is plenty of fun.
Not that you can't make a SPA with an old school framework. But for some reason, SPA lovers will often go full nodejs as well, which is basically 1000 of libs you have to hand picks and fuse together.
I work on more and more SPA every day. It's always the same deal: the cost is higher, and it needs smarter devs.
Bottom line: do one when it has a good added value for your users.
NoSQL databases have been around since the 60s [1], and the term was created in 1998. Two decades ago. Is the author of this manifesto saying that they'll only work with tech from the 50s? Or is the 80s good enough? The 90s clearly isn't.
In fact, Ajax has _also_ been around for two decades; 1998 was a big year for the web, apparently. The Outlook Web App (a major milestone in SPAs) was created in 2000, 18 years ago.
This "manifesto" is nothing more than "I choose to bury my head in the sand and use outdated tech and ignore the state of the art!"
I think workplaces really, really should be using newer/"sexier" programming languages and libraries, but not as a blanket approach. People should be allowed to experiment and try new things, especially for projects or parts of projects that are new and exciting. This shouldn't be in lieu of existing and well-known technology.
If they are trying to imply it by giving examples of technologies that are hardly new or experimental, then that's even more cause for being explicit.
Perhaps they could have picked more black-and-white examples like blockchain, so many dead javascript libraries, so many rebuilds of existing technologies. But I happen to agree with their examples largely.