6mo ago

Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’

thenewstack.io Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’

When both Pieter Levels and Alex Russell convincingly argue against using complex JavaScript frameworks, maybe frontend devs should listen.

The rebelling against JavaScript frameworks continues. In the latest Lex Fridman interview, AI app developer Pieter Levels explained that he builds all his apps with vanilla HTML, PHP, a bit of JavaScript via jQuery, and SQLite. No fancy JavaScript frameworks, no modern programming languages, no Wasm.

“I’m seeing a revival now,” said Levels, regarding PHP. “People are getting sick of frameworks. All the JavaScript frameworks are so… what do you call it, like [un]wieldy. It takes so much work to just maintain this code, and then it updates to a new version, you need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.”

7 comments

I often don't like what the vanilla language absolutists claim on topics like this.
Sure, there are a ton of frameworks, and you could write all of that in vanilla JS if you wanted to. But the issue lies here. My job is to make a product, and by using an existing framework, I can save countless hours of work. People incomprehensibly smarter than me have made that process so much smoother.
No one is asking, let alone forcing you to use any framework out there.
But I also find it ironic, that an "AI" entrepreneur, and Lex Fridman of all people, are complaining about this

"if you have a project that works with straightforward code, don’t over engineer it by chasing what’s hot. Keep it simple and protect your momentum on the project at all costs."
This is the best advice from the article. Use the right tool for the job. You'll never catch me championing PHP or jquery (seriously, what use does jquery have in 2024??) , but vanilla js and html certainly have their place and purpose.
- Yeah, the jQuery part also surprised me. But I guess he's been using it for years and why bother switching when it would cost momentum?

More than a decade in. I started with WordPress and PHP+jQuery. Then moved through the entire JS Framework suite of angular, react, Vue, svelte... I'm not as exhausted as the author. But I'm pretty tired. All the JS projects require frequent maintenance. Where the PHP project gathering dust on PHP 5.6, it only took me a few days to bring it up to PHP 8.2 and update all the libraries. It would be 10x as long were it a JA Framework.
I blame bootcamps who adopted React and only taught that. Watching devs hate on JS because they decided to do web development in React. Not to mention the many many convoluted patterns in React over the past 8 years makes it incredibly challenging to update projects.

Idk where else to say this, so I'll just say it here. I hate React.js. At first I was intrigued by it, then confused, then amazed, and finally disgusted. After years worth of working on React projects, and using React sites, I've finally decided it's an affront to all good development standards. It violates so many best practices, and breaks a ton of built in browser functionality that you should get for free. So you have all these thousands of developers writing custom code for basic shit like browser history, state refresh, back buttons, etc., and half of them get it wrong. Now we have huge websites from companies worth hundreds of billions of dollars, and their sites are broken pieces of shit. So, again, I hate React.

Going from jquery to angular was a world of change. But it was relatively simple and fun to write SPAs. But then webpack and react came along... those two are among the most complex JS projects I know of.
Their internal code is nowhere near clean and the concepts neither. They generate immense webpages that are shiny and all but it's such a large mishmash and keeping track of state with the state manager is horrible.
Also debugging those two projects... Both have convinced me to step away from JS. It's just too much complexity.
Anti Commercial-AI license
- This is the best state management I've used, with any front end stack. If you decide to try react again, give it a shot https://github.com/pmndrs/zustand

7 comments