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>> Why would anyone keep creating cool new frameworks?

That’s a weird question because the answer is so obvious. There’s massive innovation in front end development because billlions of users are using ever more sophisticated applications created by millions of programmers backed by virtually infinite money. Of course people keep looking for and finding better ways to do things. Do you think that process has come to an end?

You must be trolling.




See, all the innovations are about code management and tracking. There has been nothing new for users for many years. In 2004 Gmail made AJAX popular and updating pages without reloading was a big deal. Later we had rounded corners, video without the Adobe Flash player, then came the websites that fit the screen size(the responsive web stuff) and later, we got some WebSocket stuff making possible real-time communications even snappier than AJAX.

That said, this is 15 years of time and the innovations came as browsers got better, IE died off but all these JS frameworks were always about making the codebase nicer.

Is there anything new for the users here? If not, why keep spawning new frameworks? Do these frameworks make anything better for the developers? In my experience, the JS world is a giant mess mostly because of the excess of frameworks that do the same things essentially.

That's why I felt burned out of web dev. I found out that all these frameworks that are supposed to make something easier to do are only making problems infinitely complex.

There's nothing new that you couldn't have done with 10 years old frameworks but now you need specialized knowledge on tons of tools.


The reason there are so many frameworks for UI out there is probably due to the same response you are having.

People doing a lot of web development wanted to make their lives easier but found the way other frameworks are doing it to be really convoluted. So they created their own framework which makes perfect sense to them.

As a developer getting into this, just pick any well-maintained framework and you should be able to get your job done.


> There’s massive innovation in front end development because billions of users are using ever more sophisticated applications created by millions of programmers backed by virtually infinite money.

There's no real innovation on the web. As another commenter pointed out, all the "innovation" is around tools. And even those innovations are meh at best.

Web has been busy reinventing things that desktop programming has had probably for decades, and what mobile development has had for years. And that's when we consider tools only.

On the app/client side the situation is even more bleak and dire. We get a 100th store implementation. A 1000th drag and drop implementation. A 10000th file upload manager. A 100000th state manager. A...

The "ever more sophisticated" applications can barely scratch the surface of native apps. And the actual more sophisticated apps like Figma are busy re-inventing and re-building the past 20 years of desktop UIs from scratch [1].

It's not innovation. It's a hamster wheel race.

[1] https://www.figma.com/blog/building-a-professional-design-to...

--- quote ---

Pulling this off was really hard; we’ve basically ended up building a browser inside a browser.

The reason this is hard is because the web wasn’t designed as a general-purpose computing platform.

--- end quote ---


I thought it was a fair question.

For people not expert or completely current in web development - especially in the context of a field not unknown for jumping on every shiny new magic bullet - it's quite reasonable to ask what major problems are arising that need a new framework learning every week.


> it's quite reasonable to ask what major problems are arising that need a new framework learning every week

The answer is simple: someone read a new chapter in the Gang of Four's book.




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