Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dzonga | Hacker News Reader

this is the self-destructive behaviour that's prevalent in the JS ecosystem.

say a newbie wants to develop a website or web app and they run into this. The amount of tools listed is overwhelming, even for me who's been doing JS for over 7 years.

and the sad thing is JS can be pretty productive, without the merchants of complexity shilling their tools.

Express.js v5 just got released. Thanks doug & other maintainers. Yet the API has been stable for over 10 years. Vue.js even with the new composition Api - the api has been stable for a long time. & other useful node libraries like 'pg' etc.

The only recent useful thing is tailwind.

Next.js / Nest.js etc are all complex tools that are completely unnecessary and shilled by dev-tools companies

Even for tailwind, I've only ever found it really helpful in react projects. Styling in react has always been a pain, and the recent(ish) solution of CSS-on-JS is a horrible solution in my opinion.

Tailwind was designed specifically to solve styling in react so this does make sense, but as soon as you enter the space of wanting more simple tech that has been stable for years you're throwing out react and might as well throw out tailwind as well, it just isn't needed when CSS is back on the table.

Edit: I should have also included here that there is also absolutely nothing wrong with using Tailwind if that's where you are most productive. We're long passed the days of tailwind shipping unused piles of utility classes, shipping is plenty important if that's where your productivity is.

I get the frustration but that frustration itself can discourage newbies that look up to more senior peers. I am not saying that learning all these tools is necessary to be a productive developer, but at the same time we should also not easily be discouraged by their mere existence and reject any acquisition of new skills because there is just so much noise to filter through.

One can learn about (or ignore) them one after another, relaxed and with an open mind.

Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible for a newbie to build a blog like Josh’s.

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