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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

I keep hoping things will settle a bit more so that I can someday pick one

You are in the wrong industry, to think this will happen any time soon.

Change has been fast in computing, for decades. Stand still, and you are overrun and eventually your knowledge moves towards irrelevance.

Doctors need to keep up to date with new medical information, new drugs, new warnings about drugs, new techniques.

Lawyers need to read caselaw, keep up to date on new legislation.

Both are arduous tasks for those professions.

Yet there is more to keep up to date in computing, in a year, than any doctor or lawyer must keep pace with in their lifetime.

So either dive in and learn, learn, learn! Learn for the joy of it, for the fun!

Because there is nothing to wait for.

Because change will never stop here.

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This is a common rebuttal against any dissent against the insane flux of the front end space and I genuinely don’t believe that anyone with significant experience in software actually believes it.

The front end space is really quite unique in its fragmentation and pace of change. Things are…maybe starting to cool down a touch, but not really. We can talk til the cows come home about how this or that have caused things to be how they are, but simply chalking this up to “things change fast in tech” - beyond just being a thought-terminating ‘shrug your shoulders’ platitude that I’d probably hear from a non-tech family member over Christmas lunch - is really missing most of what’s going on here.

Front end doesn't change that much from an implementation and coding perspective.

To that I mean, if you could code 5 years ago, and deploy a front end of any sort 5 years ago, you won't have many issues today.

People still use redis/memcached, mysql, php, apache2, with laravel for example.

And solutions such as docker, with unvetted builds snagged from random people, are no different, functionally, than a VM or even a bare metal cluster.

I will agree that the absurd node ecosystem, with its unsecure, unauditable packages, composer and its insane web of just stupid dependancies are ridiculous.

But that's not rapid change of method or coding language, just because behind the scenes it's all just language such as php.

So sure, the cruft is just that, but the meat is what drives change, and a lot of it.

Frontend changes seem to be the changes for the sake of the changes.

Last time there was a meaningful major improvement is when React devs came up with practical implementation of view=f(model) idea.

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