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Comment by dmje | Hacker News Reader

When people get cross, it's most likely because it's the same old hype cycle in action that has been cycling for the past 40 years:

1. New Thing gets traction, 2. New Thing gets hailed as Next New Thing, 3. Everyone jumps on board and New Thing is The Only Thing you should be using, 4. New Thing Fatigue sets in as various things about New Thing aren't so great after all, 5. Everyone moves on to Next New Thing because maybe that really is the Next New Thing.

Rinse and repeat.

For those who have been in the game for as long as me (I'm not a proper dev but 30 years "doing web stuff" makes me an interested onlooker), it's a fairly tedious cycle to watch come and go over many iterations. It's one of the reasons I try and stick with boring old PHP + HTML + CSS + a sprinkling of JS for the stuff I do.

YMMV but the point is, it's everso tedious and unsettling to those involved trying to figure out what the next thing to focus on should be.

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I agree, I've basically gone the same path as you, just ended up with a different stack to solidify behind, but same idea.

> YMMV but the point is, it's everso tedious and unsettling to those involved trying to figure out what the next thing to focus on should be.

I think it would all be fine, if people could just accept they're are part of this turning wheel, but instead they'll kick and shout that "No, but it's different this time, this time we really found the silver bullet" while you continue to look at them changing from HypedThing to HypedThing, repeating the marketing pitch while running into new walls.

I'll get jumped but whatever: Currently this is happening with for example TypeScript, where some people are so into it, they don't see it as just another "Compile to JS" language that will eventually be replaced by something else once the hype wheel starts turning yet again.

> they don't see it as just another "Compile to JS" language that will eventually be replaced by something else once the hype wheel starts turning yet again.

In case of TypeScript, they might be right - given its peculiar positioning and staying power, as well as indirect effects from resurgence of popularity around type systems (Rust, type annotations being leveraged in LLMs, etc.), it wouldn't surprise me if at some point, browsers (read: Google) decided to start supporting it as first-class language. A decade down the line, it might be that JavaScript will end up being compiled down to TypeScript instead of the other way around.

> it wouldn't surprise me if at some point, browsers (read: Google) decided to start supporting it as first-class language. A decade down the line, it might be that JavaScript will end up being compiled down to TypeScript instead of the other way around.

If WASM still exists in some flavor at that point, but TypeScript ends up being the target for JS instead somehow, we can assume we probably have other, way worse issues in the world to deal with, because something clearly went wrong.

I think it’s more likely that TypeScript’s features will just be subsumed into Ecma262 with some adjustments to support backward compatibility. IMHO part of TypeScript’s staying power has been that the changes it makes are more conceptually radical compared to the useful but relatively lightweight sugar of Coffeescript for example.

Most frameworks are still there (requiring everyone be fluent in all of them) just because no meteorite killed that specific dinosaur.

Every framework starts from scratch pretending all done before belongs to the trash can, much like that multi-year discussion re: Raku being better than Perl just because has "say" instead of "print". The net outcome of that? the complete irrelevance of both.

Dear nerd-framework author, can you all invest 5 minutes in a cross compiler/converter, strive for compatibility and not reinventing the wheel when native JS performs the very same thing?

I think that most simple and even some complex business use cases are already covered by solutions like WordPress, Shopify, Salesforce, etc. If one feels satisfied with “PHP + HTML + CSS + a sprinkling of JS”, maybe they don’t need any PHP or JS at all.

I'm so very deeply uninterested in the hype train. I'll keep using C, C++, and C# until the wheels fall off.

I do not care at. All about how shiny and whizzbang your new toy is, mine works fine, it solves my problems, and requires no improvements for my use requirements. I'm not investing a sizable fraction of my limited life to rewrite in the hip new framework du jour. I'll keep the code that works and the tools that aren't broken.

I also deeply do not want to be associated with the cargo cult ya-yas that think they're so clever and smart for suggesting rust. Thoroughly disgusting behavior. I don't want to use a language where I get that kind of response to simple questions.

C is fine. It will keep working for a very, very long time.

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