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dgerard@awful.systems

A Rant about Front-end Development (blog.frankmtaylor.com)

submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by fasterandworse@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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.

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[–] dgerard@awful.systems 4 points 5 months ago (33 children)

Lemmy, e.g. this here site, uses React too. Probably about as weirdly as they use Rust, even as the site appears to present an ok front end.

[–] self@awful.systems 3 points 5 months ago (31 children)

it’d be very nice to have a progressively enhanced static frontend instead since there’s really nothing about any of this that should require JavaScript (and something like unpoly would give us react SPA style functionality strictly as an enhancement on top of plain HTML)

this might be a cool project for someone to pick up once work on Philthy gets going; most of the alternative Lemmy frontends still have an unnecessary JS framework dependency, or are lacking features for essentially no reason

[–] shasta@lemm.ee -4 points 5 months ago (21 children)

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.

[–] zbyte64@awful.systems 7 points 5 months ago

Maintainability my ass. Most "reusable" components I inherit on a react project are worse than worthless, they're counterproductive.

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