Comment by spoils19
5 years ago
Frontend developers like to change frameworks every week it seems like, so it's in my best interest to learn every framework (or at least some abstracted part of it) in order to stay employable and up-to-date.
The problem is that each framework has their own abstraction and language that you have to learn. Compare it to "old-school" Java frameworks, where things were much simpler and you didn't have to worry about egregious layers of complexity to just render a DOM.
Grumble grumble
> Frontend developers like to change frameworks every week it seems like
This sentiment is so old and played out.
Is it false though? If it’s true, then maybe we need to look at why it’s true.
It’s not just front end developers though. I think other domains and their frameworks went through the same thing. This is just the time for front end.
Yes, it is false. Anyone in the space can tell you how stable things have been for years now.
Plus, there are a lot of people writing JS. It’s not a tiny community fracturing itself over different ways of doing things, and becoming destined for obscurity. It’s tens or hundreds of thousands of developers. In a community this big I’d say having a few choices is a sign of health.
Indeed, it’s false. React is 8 years old, and when React was first released jQuery was only 7 years old. I follow this stuff pretty closely and I can only think of maybe 10 JS UI frameworks that have attracted remotely significant use and active development at any point in the past 15 years.
1 reply →
It is false. Companies that adopt a certain framework tend to stick with it, and it's verifiable from seeing job offers.
Why is no complaining that there more than one way to build a php app? Perhaps because like JS it's a huge ecosystem with a giant user base and millions of use cases. Front end dev has lots of room to support the dozen or so mainstream frameworks we've used over the past decade-plus
Agree, and it’s nice to see this worn-out trope getting downvoted for once. Sneering at JS / Frontend developers is one of the more distasteful tendencies of HN.
Probably because it's an entire industry that is self-sustaining, without really a reason for it to exist. Most software can be built with regular HTML / JS / CSS without some convoluted framework. Even better, let's make a desktop application (when was the last time we had those?!), and we can get all kinds of performance and security gains without having to tack everything on to the web as a platform.
1 reply →
> Frontend developers like to change frameworks every week it seems like
Most of the popular frontend frameworks (Vue, React, Angular, Svelte) have been around for years at this point. It is like arguing Ruby on Rails vs Spring Boot.
> Frontend developers like to change frameworks every week
React is 8 years old
Vue is 8 years old
Svelte is the relative newcomer, at 4 years (and the major third version at ~2 years).
The idea of "frameworks are changing every week" hasn't been true in a very long time
'Frontend developers' like who exactly?
Anyone that's worked in a reasonably sized FE codebase can very clearly understand that changing your framework is essentially migrating a huge production DB but on steroids.
Where exactly have you seen a team of developers change their front end framework every week?
> Frontend developers like to change frameworks every week it seems like
React is now 8 years old… so is Vue. What are these new frontend frameworks you keep seeing?