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Comment by kizer | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why but front-end terminology always makes me cringe. I know it's useful jargon. I don't know why I have a visceral distaste for them. Maybe because it feels like taking a small, simple thing and making it seem like it's something more.

But you're right. I haven't done much front-end at large scales. Only at one employer for a short while.

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> Maybe because it feels like taking a small, simple thing and making it seem like it's something more.

Perhaps it makes more sense to treat frontend engineering as thick client desktop development of yore. Websites are no longer small, simple things, they are now the primary apps that many people use (through the broswer and especially through Electron), so there needs to be sufficient tooling around managing that complexity.

You’re right. That makes sense. I’ve been out of web dev for about 4 years so I’m just reactionary now I guess.

You're experiencing the cognitive dissonance from trying to understand unnecessary complexity.

As I mentioned, complexity abounds everywhere. It is hard to say what is unnecessary and what is not.

I get where you're coming from and while I still fucking loathe the term "isomorphic" in my web development, I feel that an application of basic engineering practices go a long way in development of even modestly-complex websites.

I used to get worked up about front end devs calling themselves "engineers" but after 12 years in the trade, I think my dream team of web devs consists of more industrial engineers than CS grads.

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