Comment by mikewhy
5 years ago
> Frontend developers like to change frameworks every week it seems like
This sentiment is so old and played out.
5 years ago
> 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.
Java is 26. Spring is 19. Struts 2 is 15.
Python is 30. Django is 16.
I’m just picking a few frameworks and languages I’ve used in the past and are still used. Obviously there are still new frameworks and libraries that come out for these languages. But sometimes the big projects fold those in. Or they write their own or whatever. I can pick the popular names and do pretty much what I need.
JavaScript is 25. But most of that time we weren’t doing what we can now. And most frameworks are fairly young. Angular is 11. But most people (and jobs) have jumped ship to React(8) and now there is Svelte(4) which also looks good. And I think there will be more changes to come.
These JS frameworks aren’t exactly veterans that are impossible to supplant. Not yet anyway.
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.
The "just build a desktop app" trope is even more played out.
Plus you know all these front end frameworks are "just HTML/ JS/CSS" right?