Ask HN: Why did Front end development explode in complexity?

1

Winamp Skin Museum

#PC #Web App #Music 55 social mentions

My theory and personal opinion. In the past, we didn't have complex UIs, we did, but we dealt with them differently. For example, in the era of forms and limited Ajax, keeping the DOM synced with the state took a lot of work. The complexity we see today results from different ideas of how to deal with that _synchronicity_. Keep in mind that there's no way to do it natively; the only way to do it is to manually keep the state in sync. The complexity we see today results from the abstractions people have created to accomplish that, e.g., jQuery, Sammy, Backbone, Knockout, Angular, Ember, React, Vue, Svelte, etc. Enterprise and FAANG required optimizations for different reasons, scale, collaboration, distribution, etc. Programmers wanted to use paradigms to represent things and apply optimizations on the web, and JavaScript wasn't enough. So, they created CoffeeScript, Flow, TypeScript, ReasonML, etc. These tools became popular in the FAANG, wrote posts about them, then people of all industries adopted them. To use all these cool tools, people created bundlers—each with its configurations, patterns, and philosophies—gulp, Rollup, Webpack, etc. At this point, the web skyrocketed in complexity from the days of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript when one of the complex tasks was to make rounded corners with images and cool layouts with tables. Of course, you can still build complex UI without these tools and use JavaScript alone, but you will end up abstracting your patterns and paradigms into reusable bits. Additionally, some developers attempt to use as little JavaScript as possible; one great example of a complex UI trying that is https://sourcehut.org.

#Code Collaboration #Git #VCS 55 social mentions