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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

The appeal of JavaScript when it was invented was its immediacy. No longer did you have to go through an edit-compile-debug loop, as with Java, or even an edit-upload-debug loop as with a Perl script, to see the changes you made to your web-based application. You could just mash reload on your browser and Bob's your uncle!

The JavaScript community, in all its wisdom, reinvented edit-compile-debug loops for its immediate, dynamic language and I'm still assmad about it. So assmad that I, too, forgo all that shit when working on personal projects.

(The enterprise fucking loves React and Vue. Can't avoid it at work.)

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A thing that I liked when I started out was the fact that you could actually read all of the JavaScript on web pages. You found something interesting? Just fetch the source or open your dev tools (firebug!) and look at the code.

There's probably merit in minification and compressing code though. But for the types of projects OP is talking about it's going to be single digit KB of JS anyways.

> The appeal of JavaScript when it was invented was its immediacy.

You can still do that. Nothing has changed. It's probably gotten even easier. Have fun implementing a complex UI without some sort of component Framework though.

You can easily build complex UIs without a framework. Chrome DevTools, Chrome OS, Photoshop, Firefox and other very complex apps have been built with web components.

Web Components aren’t an alternative to React so much as a complementary technology. Yes, you can build UIs without a reactive framework but it will involve compromises in expressivity, code organization, and whatever the Greenspun equivalent is for React.

Web components do not imply a lack of reactivity. JavaScript accessors, observed attributes, and a declarative template library give you as much reactivity as React. Photoshop and Chrome are built with reactive web components.

Firefox was built with web components? Whaaaat?

The precursor to Web Components was XBL (NB: only ever implemented in Gecko), which was used extensively in the Firefox UI. (The Firefox product consists of literally hundreds of thousands of lines of JS powering the app UI—and many of its background components.) Gecko was doing Electron-style apps before Electron (or Chrome and JITted JS engines) ever existed.

There are component frameworks that don't require a build step.

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