Comment by flashgordon
1 day ago
I think this sounds exciting. As a backend eng (who prefers Htmx) and someone who totally struggles with css, reading your intro made me walk away feeling dumber than before. Again not expecting an ego boost or anything. Something that felt counter intuitive:
1. Lack of drawings hurt - I had no idea what zaha or rams meant. You had bold text which I thought were links but alas they were just bold text.
2. I actually appreciate math and still wasnt sure how I could use math in the new proposed framework (id kill for a constraint system that was similar to what iOS had).
3. +1 on the crazy level of complexity in today's frameworks (which is why I hate using nextjs etc) but perhaps some code samples (even if proof of concept would have helped) would have been helpful.
It is 100% true that modern frontend javascript development is hard. You take your eye off the ball for 6 months, and you lose what's going on. I can understand why casual folks find it difficult to get started.
For instance, a year back everybody was using pnpm. But now you use pnpm thru corepack.
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I can understand why people yearn for simpler days, but the reality is frontend developement is super-duper nice, even with all the warts. Anyone who is romanticizing the "good old days of jQuery" is being non-serious or has not lived through the pains of that.
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You cant write a spotify.com or a amazon.com with jQuery and have 100s of engineers collaborate and maintain.
And neither can you with nuejs.
> You cant write a spotify.com or a amazon.com with jQuery and have 100s of engineers collaborate and maintain.
True but you can write a Spotify or Amazon that ten developers maintain.
We have a huge problems with cargo culting what big tech monopolists use when small teams have fundamentally different needs and would be more productive with smaller tools with less overhead. Though of course the fancy stuff looks better on a resume so can't really blame the devs.
True - As a FE noob I am definitely not asking for the olden days. I do lament often CSS just does not feel intuitive for me and it could be just being used to iOS layouts or more old school layouts (think Swing, Android etc). What made it worse for me was the 18 generations of css philosophies (use classes, use css files, inline, dont inline, and repeat). I wasnt sure if Nue was promising this - but if I can go to one way of doing CSS that lasts more than 2-3 years Id be happy :). Same with frameworks. I can pickup iOS development after not having done it for almost 10 years. I just dont have this confidence with webdev. Heck I moved out of Nextjs to htmx (though I liked the ergonomics in the former and this is not an endorsement of htmx) was because an app I had left in maintenance mode for 6 months started breaking builds out of no where when I had to add a small feature.
> You cant write a spotify.com or a amazon.com with jQuery and have 100s of engineers collaborate and maintain.
Honestly how many people are writing massive front-ends like these ?
I would argue the number of people using overkill framework for their needs is actually greatly increasing tech debt and slowing things down.
I guess it doesn't take much to entertain frontend devs, but I'd lose my shit if I had to relearn a new shape for the wheel every 6 months. A Sisyphean existence: one must imagine the webshit happy.
And consider that amazon.com was launched in '95, so yeah, you don't need the latest JS framework to build an empire.
The truth is that 90% of tech is about chasing trends that the people who succeeded have set. It's not because the core ideas have merit or are successful. It's because Facebook did it, so we have to do it too (even though we operate at 1/10000th of the scale). No further reasoning needed, everything else is driven by the hype.
Don't believe me? Just look at the state of LLMs. They're solutions looking for problems and the entire world is eager to waste billions in the process of figuring out that LLMs are not good at factual reasoning.
It's my understanding you can't do it with any one fe framework really as they work with mfes so it sort means yes you can with jquery
I can answer these questions very clearly once the design systems are released. Now they are just listed with plain text to give you an idea what's coming.
Hey sorry for the noob question. I wasnt actually sure what you meant by design systems - Is there actually a level of "understanding/expertise" one needs to have to just "get" it? For context even though I am not an FE eng, I have built apps and sites (using nextjs, tailwind, bootstrap, vanilla html, css, jquery, htmx - not all of them together). Again I am not an expert in CSS (i really suck at it) but il put together something that works.
So back to design systems, googling it I found - https://designsystemsrepo.com/design-systems-recent.
At a high level this looks like a set of templates and themes (but I think you were alluding to something more than just this?)