Comment by whstl
12 hours ago
React is very similar to PHP in this regard. PHP has (had?) several major design flaws, and yet it became the default for people with less experience.
I don't think that React is as problematic as PHP ever was, and also frameworks like Laravel have improved the PHP experience tremendously, so there is now a way for less experienced people to use it.
IMO: the problem here is pretending that everyone has an innate right to use React right when it's clearly a library that works better when people have a bit more experience than the average web dev.
We as an industry tell people "don't do your own crypto, it's hard to get it right". We don't blame crypto for being hard, or demand new frameworks. Same for things like assembly, C++, Rust, formal proofs, writing an OS, operating BGP infrastructure, etc.
But with React it has to be "kid gloves on", otherwise it's shit?
This is perhaps a bigger problem in our industry: lack of experience is not seem as an individual problem, and we blame-shift, blame marketing, blame Facebook, Dan Abramov, trends...
Perhaps we should be saying "React is not for beginners", same as "don't do crypto".
Web dev is special. The industry has spent the last 20 years sacrificing almost everything to make building web sites more beginner friendly. There is an expectation that the "full-stack" (everything between node and react) should be effortless, that is absent from other fields. "one click to deploy" in not a thing in crypto, in embedded or in kernel dev, for instance; whereas it's expected that a junior web dev is productive from day one. That's just normal industrialization, specializing jobs and then making them simpler, starting where the numbers are larger.
Ironically, piling up simplistic technologies have created quite complex houses of cards in places. HTTP itself being the most obvious example of a tech meant to be simple and quick to grasp that morphed into a super complex, ineficient and insecure gremlin of which nobody who is not a specialist (or an AI) has a full picture anymore.
Nobody I ever worked with ever said anything even remotely close to that first paragraph.
"Full stack should be effortless"? What? This is definitely not coming from anyone other than two groups: random HN people with an axe to grind, or people trying to diminish the value of the profession.
Hiring for web is difficult, salaries are historically good, people complain about complexities, including yourself: "quite complex", "super complex", "nobody has a full picture".
Nevertheless: React proves that it's not effortless. There are complexities in there and kicking and screaming saying "it was supposed to be easy!!!" won't change the situation.
"It should be simple" yeah Crypto should be simple as well, so there are no bugs. But it's not.
Maybe learn to value other people's jobs.
> Nobody I ever worked with ever said anything even remotely close to that first paragraph.
No, they’re correct. Many people in the web dev community spent a couple of decades there obsessed with being beginner friendly. For example, “Anyone can learn to code”. We pushed back against anything perceived as gate keeping. There was general assembly and other coding bootcamps, to teach beginners web dev. And a million beginner videos. Web dev events at the time were full of beginners. I remember a show of hands once at SydJS. 70% of people in the room had been programming for a year or less. I stopped going, because speakers started catering to the audience.
Other areas of programming aren’t like this. Nobody runs 12 week coding bootcamps to teach complete beginners to build operating systems. It’s accepted you shouldn’t roll your own crypto. And we tell beginners to use Postgres, not roll their own database.
I’m not saying it’s a good or a bad thing. But it was definitely a thing.
>not a thing in crypto
People are deploying meme coins to blockchains with a single X post to a bot. The pump.fun era made it really easy for anyone to launch a meme coin.
> We don't blame crypto for being hard, or demand new frameworks
This is not true. There are innumerable cryptography libraries whose primary reason for existence was to replace or offer an alternative to a library with the same affordances but with primitives that were too easy to use incorrectly. “Maybe we should redesign this knife so it’s hard to slice a finger off” is not unique to web dev
I'm clearly not talking about libraries, but rather about the assertion "don't do your own crypto".
If you want frontend to be effortless, there's already Wix and Webflow.