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Comment by scambier | Hacker News Reader

I never said that a tutorial was enough to master a framework, please.

The comment I was replying to was saying:

> there is so much js tooling and documentation and of such wide variety that a year or two would not be enough for even a light review

There's no need to learn the entire ever-evolving JS ecosystem. You pick a sane starting point (a framework tutorial) to get you up and running in a few days, and from there you learn what you _need_.

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The trouble for newcomers starts at _which_ framework to hang your hat on. Unless that decision has been made for you by your employer choosing between, Vue, React, Svelte, Alpine, Angular or some additional ankle biters is overwhelming. What's the selection criteria? What's the payoff vs complexity cost of each? What's the support level? Is it coming in vogue (Svelte) or out of fashion (Angular)? Does it mandate additional tools/transpilers/packagers etc and how many? How hard are they to learn? Do they play well with some other tooling that is being used (say Typescript)? Finally how does it all get packaged as an app/website to publish?

It's a complicated mess and even seasoned JS developers struggle to answer the above questions. Oftentimes the justification for choosing a framework is that they had read about it in a forum like HN and wanted to try it. Nothing wrong with that for someone who lives and breathes those things but most people want to just get a CRUD UI up, these things are a massive time sink for what they purport to offer.

If, like you say, these people aren't frontend specialists and don't pick frameworks on the basis of what appears on the front page of HN, why should they reach for a framework as their first port of call anyway? Many conversations on HN seem to turn into an argument between old-school developers, who declare that there's nothing better than good old jquery and Bootstrap, and more hip developers who immediately drag in React, Vue, or Svelte. The middle-ground option of starting with plain modern JS and plain modern CSS is offered relatively rarely. Which is strange — this should be the default for those who are disoriented by the plethora of options on the frontend.

Especially since you suggest that such developers just need to get a CRUD UI up and running. You don't need a js framework for that.

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