A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective
There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.
Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.
Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.
The main reason companies use frontend frameworks is it’s easier to continue development through employee turnover. If your app was written in react or angular you just have to hire someone who knows how those work and they can get up to speed pretty quickly. Modularity also allows for code reuse. It increases maintainability. Labor isbtye major cost of software development, so making things easier and faster to develop and maintain is better from a business perspective than ensuring your app can run on a 15 year old iphone.
If you wanna go frameworkless, JS-less, or whatever on your personal projects then fine. If you insist on it in a professional team environment, you’re making everyone’s lives more difficult.
as a developer my favourite thing about react componentisation is how it makes me and my team more readily replaceable
I love when someone argues against something that is arguing against everything they use in their argument
thank fuck neither myself nor this instance have employees, turnover, or shitty little project managers that get heartburn when the stack’s HTML5, CSS, and a non-shitty templating language instead of HTML5, react/angular/svelte/whichever frontend framework the market decided is in demand this quarter, a CSS in JS library, an ORM, webpack, and whichever npm clone tweaks your nipples the most
and you’d better hope you chose “right” on all of those pieces of the stack, cause you’re infantilizing your devs so much you think it’s impossible for them to learn a new frontend framework, or how to do modularity or maintainability in a basic fucking backend templating language. do they also have to ask your permission to take a piss?
but why are you posting here? it’s almost Monday and you’ve got an hour-long, unproductive standup to preside over
praise the circumstances that enable the scourge of b2b saas products imposed on employees at the collaboration factory
if we keep this up, the CEO might positively mention the name of our project briefly during an all-hands, then two weeks later vastly reduce our headcount because the good job we’ve done proves we don’t need to waste money on all these developers
I’ve heard this exact same bullshit spun defending choosing golang too, and it’s just as bullshit there as it is here
and that’s not even touching on the aspect of this being based on the extremely toxic “oh yeah just burn them up and find the next one” mentality that has become far more prevalent in the world under the umbrella of zirp-funded bayfuckery gaining international traction
I beg you to go consider whether this is your actual position, or some shit you picked up from someone else. to consider what the effects of this stance are, not just today but in 5/10/15y+. it should be quite easy to see both how it helped us get into the collective pile of shit we now do have, as well as why it won’t ever be good
Modularity also allows for code reuse. It increases maintainability.
another thing to think about is how this was not invented by frontend frameworks. We did it fine pre-SPAs and pre-preprocessors. It was part of the architecture and strategy. The hard work that allowed us to essentially reskin entire, very complex, projects every couple of years
i’ll put myself out there - here’s a receipt from 06~07 https://web.archive.org/web/20070512035940cs_/http://www.toyota.com.au/toyota/main/css/elements.css
we were a team of 5 devs including me. We weren’t tribed off into separate areas of concern, we all knew the whole project back to front, and (maybe not the most clever move) managed without version control by always being aware which part we were working on. Cos, ya know, communication is easy when you are 5 people sitting in a group.
Don’t give me shit about the complexity of the UI in modern apps either. We were dealing with a huge collection of brochure style pages that had plenty of variations. We kept all that css under 500kb. We could achieve the bland flatness of modern uis under 100kb easily. No fucking doubt.
I’ve been forced to do react for years and I still don’t like or understand it. Most times plain JavaScript is easier and quicker to write and quite maintainable if people can resist the urge to take the piss with nested anonymous functions.
I honestly can’t get my head around the idea that people can hit the ground running with react, but can’t write unabstracted JavaScript. It’s like a MotoGP rider not being able to ride a push bike.
I have, in a previous age, unfortunately been the first one to suggest react at work. it’s declarative! the mental model makes sense! it’s kind of like functional programming! why, Facebook is surprisingly good at CS, maybe we should look at graphql too since that seems like such a good fit for react
this venerable house, opulent and imperial, is a festering abomination. as soon as you run into any performance issues or edge cases with react (or far more quickly with graphql, where the edge cases include shit like authentication and API versioning), you’re going to start burning out developers doing the most counterintuitive bullshit ever invented to torture a development team. and react is structured such that performance issues will accumulate in web apps; it’s just a matter of time (and not even that much time) before they do.
that’s why the advice now is to dodge performance issues with server-side rendering, almost like your site should have been fucking static html in the first place, except SSR won’t fire up without a gigantic bundle of JavaScript affixed to it, and in general it’s another source of bugs and weird performance regressions that you now have to debug in two places
and for what? react’s DX is better than HTML and CSS until you hit a wall, then it’s much worse. you can get a fairly react-like set of functionality out of plain HTML with Web Components… except Web Components requires fucking JavaScript for no reason but to not threaten existing frontend frameworks (see our sister community FreeAssembly soon for the gigantic rant and JavaScript library I’m writing about this shitty situation)
