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Comment by xnx | Hacker News Reader

"Modern" web development is so convoluted I'm happy to have a tool to help me sort through the BS and make something useful. In the near future (once the thrash of fad frameworks and almost-databases has passed) there may be a sane tech stack worth knowing.

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This exact comment (with subtle phrasing variations) shows up in every article that includes "web" in the title, but I feel like I'm living in an alternate universe from those who write comments like these. Either that or the comments got stuck in the tubes for a decade and are just now making it out.

My experience is that React is pretty much standard these days. People create new frameworks still because they're not fully satisfied with the standard, but the frontend churn is basically over for anyone who cares for it to be. The tooling is mature, IDE integration is solid, and the coding patterns are established.

For databases, Postgres. Just Postgres.

If you want to live in the churn you always can and I enjoy following the new frameworks to see what they're doing differently, but if you're writing this live in 2024 and not stuck in 2014 you can also just... not?

React and frameworks based on it being used mostly for websites, where none of that stuff is needed in the first place, is part of what is wrong with frontend development.

Then write your websites JavaScript-free or with minimal vanilla JS, no frameworks (much less framework churn) needed. That's been possible since the foundation of the web, and is nearly unchanged to this day for backwards compatibility reasons.

Yes, of course, you are right. And that is what I would do. And actually what I did do. Recently made a JS-free personal website, still fully responsive and has some foldable content and so on.

However, people at $job would not listen to me, when I said, that it could be done without jumping on the React hype train and went ahead with React and a framework based on React, to make a single page app, completely unnecessary and occupying multiple frontend devs fulltime with that, instead of simply using a traditional web framework with a templating engine and knowledge about HTML and CSS. So I am no longer in that role to make some as-little-as-possible-JS thing happen. I was a fullstack developer, but I don't want to deal with the madness, so I withdrew from the frontend part.

See, I don't have a problem with doing this. It is just that people think they need a "modern web framework" and single page apps and whatnot, when they actually don't and have very limited interactive widgets on their pages and have rather pages of informational nature. Then comes the router update taking 2 weeks, or a framework update taking 2-3 weeks, or new TS version being targeted... Frequent work, that wouldn't even exist with a simpler approach.

Having experienced react at a dayjob, it encourages a truly enormous unknowable dependency tree full of vulnerabilities, continuous churn as that tree is upgraded and many many anti-patterns like intermingling code and templates and spreading logic between front and back end. It's not simpler, it's more complex than the alternatives for the vast majority of websites in almost every way and the complexity is almost entirely incidental complexity related to the stack.

Perhaps people using it just think this is normal and required. So yes the one true modern web framework has been anointed, but it is better than what came before or just what everyone else is using?

Adding generative AI to the mix will just make it worse as the code generated will be an average of all the below average code out there and dthe group-think will be further encouraged.

You don't have to use 'Modern Frameworks' (aka an ahistorical mish-mash of Javascript frameworks) to do web development at all. I'm really puzzled as to why people refer to this as modern web development.

If you're looking for a sane tech stack there are plenty of languages to use which are not javascript and plenty of previous frameworks to look at.

Very little javascript is needed for a useful and fluid front-end experience and the back end can be whatever you like.

Well, I wish more developers had your insight and could make it heard at their jobs. Then the web would be in a better state than it is today.

Vast majority of the web's downfalls stem from advertising and tracking. Unless you're proposing a way to remove advertising, then the problems will remain no matter what tech the developers opted for.

You are conflating two entirely different issues. Both are true but neither at the expense of the other

They aren't entirely different issues at all and are quite tightly interwoven. It doesn't matter how many ms you shave off by using/not using react when your page loads a full screen video ad and has 50MB of trackers to aid in its quest to access personal info.

One is a tech problem, the other is a business problem.

There are no ads on my websites.

They are very literally different issues.

Absolutely true. All technologies that previously existed (e.g. PHP3 + MySQL) still exist. Unfortunately, if you're looking to make use of other people's libraries, it is very difficult to find them for "obsolete" stacks.

I disagree, there are plenty of libraries out there for most languages, and people should be more cautious if anything about importing code.

It’s only been thirty years, but keep waiting. I’m sure that solution is just around the corner for you.

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