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A Rant about Front-end Development (blog.frankmtaylor.com)
submitted 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) by fasterandworse@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

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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[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 4 days ago

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 3 days ago

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.

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

as a developer my favourite thing about react componentisation is how it makes me and my team more readily replaceable

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 3 days ago

fuck, this quip’s better than my seeing-red rant

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 9 points 3 days ago

I love when someone argues against something that is arguing against everything they use in their argument

[-] self@awful.systems 12 points 3 days ago

I checked and they do the “well maybe it’s ok in your personal projects” bit a lot, which is very funny because the code for my personal projects usually isn’t garbage

[-] V0ldek@awful.systems 11 points 3 days ago

That's such a weird notion. My personal projects are the cutest, most groomed pieces of code I write, cause I do it out of my own volition. The code at work? Just any shite that passes the review so that I don't have to look at that codebase or think about it lest eldritch worms consume my sanity.

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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
54 points (100.0% liked)

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