> One thing seems increasingly clear to me: this way of building software is not sustainable. What can we do?
Waiting 530 days before upgrading and then only spending a day to upgrade what is effectively three major versions actually seems very reasonable to me.
Yeah, he says that a single day lost isn't really a big deal, although he knows it's going to happen again.
The point of the article is that (to take his example) in Java world, as you get used to the ecosystem, things get easier and easier. It becomes comfortable.
au contraire in the web/javascript world, things keep changing but they're still just as hard.
Except React has been getting simpler with each release. First there was React.createClass. Then came ES6 classes. Now components can just be pure functions.
Also, the author is using a Scala toolchain to build the JS frontend code. The standard toolchains (with the exception of Google Closure and Facebook's Flow) are all built around node.js.
There are even a number of code migrations available for React: https://github.com/reactjs/react-codemod -- but of course even those can't help you if you use non-standard tooling and let a web frontend codebase collect dust as browsers (and your dependencies) march forward.
Projects are never finished. If you cease working on a project, it just becomes unmaintained code.
EDIT: As someone seems to have flagged my account and I'm now apparently limited to two replies per hour or something ridiculous like that (yay for passive aggressive moderating tools?) my reply comes as an edit:
> That's a pretty shallow definition of easier.
It's a library that lets you describe DOM subtrees based on application state. How much simpler could it possibly be?
If you mean the toolchain, the keynote at React.js Conf made it clear that improving that part is a major goal for 2016 but none of that will help you if you want to solve everything with your existing Scala tools.
> Except React has been getting simpler with each release. First there was React.createClass. Then came ES6 classes. Now components can just be pure functions.
If your only method of improving something is to rewrite it or add another layer then something has gone horribly wrong and people have a right to complain about it. I sincerely hope that the improvment's are not a rewrite or an additional layer to an already dangerously complex system.
Waiting 530 days before upgrading and then only spending a day to upgrade what is effectively three major versions actually seems very reasonable to me.