Web frameworks are churn-y because they are incredibly leaky abstractions covering really awkward impedance mismatches. This means that they are never quite satisfactory - and that just to use one, you need to be capable of building a new one yourself.

Think of a typical web app. Your data exists:

1. As rows in a database, accessed via SQL

2. As model objects on the server, accessed via method calls and attributes

3. As JSON, accessed via many HTTP endpoints with a limited set of verbs (GET/PUT/POST/DELETE)

4. As Javascript objects, accessed via (a different set of) method calls and attributes

5. As HTML tags, accessed via the DOM API

6. As pixels, styled by CSS.

--

Each time you translate from one layer to the next, there's a nasty impedance mismatch. This, in turn, attracts "magic": ORMs (DB<->Object); Angular Resources (REST<->JS Object); templating engines (JS Object<->DOM); etc. Each of these translation layers shares two characteristics:

(A) It is "magic": It abuses the semantics of one layer (eg DB model objects) in an attempt to interface with another (eg SQL).

(B) It's a terribly leaky abstraction.

This means that (a) every translation layer is prone to unintuitive failures, and (b) every advanced user of it needs to know enough to build one themselves. So when the impedance mismatch bites you on the ass, some fraction of users are going to flip the table, swear they could do better, and write their own. Which, of course, can't solve the underlying mismatch, and therefore won't be satisfactory...and so the cycle continues.

Of these nasty transitions, 4/5 are associated with the front end, so the front end gets the rap.

(I gave a lightning talk at PyCon two weeks ago, about exactly this - stacking this up against the "Zen of Python" and talking about some of the ways we avoid this in Anvil: https://anvil.works/blog/pycon18-making-the-web-more-pythoni...)

This is a really well-written and well-thought out piece. The author touches on a number of points but never gets polemical. This piece resonated with me particularly well:

> Be wary of self-promotion

> Over the last few years I’ve seen much more aggressive self-marketing in the JavaScript world, possibly due to the rise of paid online training materials and the employment/consulting advantage of being a Github ‘celebrity’. I’ve no problem with people being incentivised for good content, but increasingly I feel I see dishonest tactics: self-citation; invented, proprietary terminology (so searching takes you back to the author’s materials), and name-squatting (e.g. ‘Standard.js’)

This is becoming a big problem in JS world, particularly over the last 3 to 4 years. Like the author, I have no problem with people taking credit and being respected, but we as a community are becoming much too centered around people/personality than technology. I've been guilty of this in the past too (love you Pete Hunt ;-) but it's not healthy IMHO.

Calling out Vue.js as a possible solution is hilarious. Selling a trending technology as a silver bullet is exactly the problem he complains about in the article.

Comparing the development methodology of Facebook - the company behind React - and this mindset is illuminating. Facebook famously rewrote PHP and added extensions like XHP rather than start their codebase from scratch. React follows a similar philosphy. It can be incrementally introduced into a codebase without radical rewrites.

These lessons are largely ignored in the open source community, where everyone will gladly tell you how your tech is all wrong. This is actually really easy to avoid. Just focus on solving the problems you have and only adopt technology that is relevant to you.

At some point, when modules get "micro" enough, the effort of managing them and learning their usage outweighs the effort of implementing the thing yourself. Most JavaScript projects seem to walk that line quite closely.

I'm a React developer at work, but I recently gave Vue a try at home. This is one of the things that most stood out to me about it. React makes a selling point out of the fact that it's "just rendering". It doesn't try to do everything for you, it tries to do one thing really well. That sounds great, but it leaves out a factor. Having your primary framework be "simple" and "lean" doesn't translate to your project being simple and lean, because your project still needs all that other stuff. You just now have to get it from somewhere else, which often adds more complexity than it's worth.

When I downloaded Vue all I had to do was add a script tag to my HTML document and start writing a modern reactive UI. No other modules or frameworks. No build system. No special JS-targeted languages. Vue does everything you need, and it does it all pretty well, and sometimes that's more valuable.

Sorry but I find font-end development pretty stable.

Having to learn a new library every 3-4 years (because of a new job, generally) is it really a big deal?

In my career I also had to learn Java, PHP, C#, Node.js, bash, batch, Python… Build apps with Spring, CakePHP, Symfony 1 & 2, ASP.NET MVC 3 & 4… Query database with Hibernate, Entity Framework, Linq SQL… Handle dependencies with Maven, Nugget… Store data in Postgres, MySQL, SQL Server, Mongo, Redis, Redshift… Host on OVH, Digital Ocean, Heroku, AWS… Learn REST and GraphQL, SVN and Git, Linux and Windows Server, Vagrant and Docker… And according to HN, what's really hype right now is Rust, Go, FoundationDB, Kubernetes, and so on…

Any idea why back-end development is so unstable? :)

> 2.5 years for the youngest isn’t that old in the scheme of things - it’s less than half the support lifespan of your typical desktop OS, for example - but it’s still a ways off our caricature.

Let's compare it with some server-side technologies:

Python/Django: 2005

Python/Flask: 2010

Nginx: 2004

Perl/Catalyst: 2006

Maybe I'm biased towards older software, but the difference to the popular frontend stuff is striking.

The only thing in the frontend with a comparable history (that I can think of) is jQuery -- and I still use it today, but it seems many developers frown upon it these days. And it's a library, not a framework.

I'd actually say that its less about instability and more about rapid experimentation. There's two main catalysts - the youth of single page web apps and the openness of the modern web.

The complexity of your everyday website is increasing as they move from static sites to web apps. The pressure to be as responsive and fluid as a mobile app is high, and that requires solutions for data management and synchronicity. There is no standardized way to solve these yet.

When you tie this increasing complexity with the free-form structure of the web (there is no recommended way to build a web app unlike mobile apps or to a lesser extent desktop apps), and then add the growth of JavaScript from a toy language to a full-blown complex ecosystem, you get even fewer established practices.

This is not to say that there will never be best practices but rather that what you're seeing is a language scaling with its needs without having a central dictatorial entity at its helm. You're seeing unprecedented growth and that can easily be confused with chaos and instability.

It's also very unstable and young because requirements keep moving, and developers keep figuring out more 'auto-magic' and simply better ways of implementing UIs.

UI used to be simple, a page, a few links, click through to other pages. Then we needed templated pages, because we had a lot of pages.

Then full blown 'applications' were ported to the web, and life was a nightmare of double-headed dragons and dark holes with pikes. Jquery provided some help here but it was more in terms of nuts and bolts, than as an architecture.

Then came all the MVC libs which really helped enforcing a structure for large apps.

Then came Angular and all of its madness, but a positive step ahead, giving us usable SPA.

React brought some sanity back and now Vue (in my opinion, don't shoot) brings the sanest/cleanest way forward.

My guess is what we do on the web will change once again, in a few years, and we will throw all that out and start again with new framework. Whether it will be in AR or still on the web, there are still many problems to solve.

E.g. the whole 'responsive' thing.

It's because of all the icky data-sync for the client/service round trips. An async, slow, failure-prone concern wired throughout the entire codebase. I/O hurts everyone in subtly different ways and it's hard to solve so you see a lot of churn.

service/database has this problem too (the ORM flamewars of the 00s) but to a much less degree because it is in a happier place on the latency chart: https://gist.github.com/jboner/2841832

This part puzzles me:

> "Put yourself in the shoes of a junior-to-mid-level JavaScript developer, writing a new application for the first time.

> "It starts innocently enough. You have a completely clean slate and want to keep things simple. You are a devout Agilist and YAGNI is your watchword. So you begin with a ‘simple, barbones framework’. That sounds good, doesn’t it? (Even if it did not, that’s often the only choice you’ve got).

> "Being barebones it does little, so the task falls on your shoulders to choose some helper libraries. If you are doing frontend work, it might be helpers for Redux for forms and API requests. If backend, it might be middlewares for Express."

Why is the default answer to the problem of "it does little" to "choose some helper libraries"? Shouldn't it be: "I'll write some code to make it do more"?

Why does this first-time app developer need Redux? Why would she need a helper for Redux to do API requests? These days you can just call fetch() — it really doesn't get any easier.

All the APIs that one gets in the browser or in Node.js are already very high-level and easily understandable by entry-level developers. If anything, piling more leaky abstractions on top will just make things more complex. How did it happen that junior JavaScript developers feel so insecure about using the standard stuff?

Maybe it's because more senior developers have spent two decades crapping on the standard stuff. Therefore, as a self-appointed spokesperson for the veterans, I hereby grant all junior JavaScript developers full permission to just go ahead and program whatever they want without having to look for a single library or creaky build tool — and they shouldn't feel bad about it in the least.

> Imagine being a junior developer

The junior developer has it easy. Imagine being the tech lead for a startup that has to pick the framework that'll be used to build an application that needs to e maintained and that they'll need to hire developers for to maintain.

I was this person, I made a choice and now every single person is casting doubt on it. The choice wouldn't have even mattered, It's near impossible to find experienced front-end developers of any kind right now and everybody will always ask "why not [this framework I'm familiar with]?"

Asking this question without looking at the underlying platform is ignoring a huge source of insight into the problem and its solutions.

Growing up from a document viewer to an app platform in the particular way it did left the web as the most important and ubiquitous GUI app deployment and runtime platform, but without a dev-accessible native GUI component system. No other major modern UI platform was _ever_ in this state.

This left all the work of creating the most basic widget system to userland, while at the same time the platform's features available to that userland were relatively paltry to begin with. As those features of JavaScript and DOM grew, frameworks were released frequently because newer ones were designed to take advantage of newer features. This lead to a huge amount of fragmentation.

Which brings us to now. Outside of threading, the runtime features are much more suitable to an app platform now, and finally the web has a native UI component system in Web Components. I think there's one or two more big shifts ahead of us toward Web Components and better utilizing Workers, and then things will settle down because we'll finally all be using the same platform features. Even if we still have opinionated and helpful layers on top, the foundation will be more stable and standardized.

I was exhausted by front end development, so I thought I'd try something new. I ended up first looking into AI, and then into Blockchain.

Long story short, I have run back to the relatively calm and serene world of the front end, with my tail between my legs.

The front end may be moving quickly, but in the grand scheme of larger technological change, it's far more stable than we give it credit for.

> What is to be done? ... Consider non-microlib architectures

What about what happened with Angular (1), the 3rd library on your list? That whole framework was deprecated in favor of Angular (2). Additionally, the list of front-end libraries given doesn't really reflect the landscape front-end devs have traversed.

Years ago, I remember working on an app that heavily relied on YUI around the time that library was shutdown. I also heard stories about how ExtJS 4 wasn't backwards compatible. I'm not sure I buy into the author's thesis about the reason for front-end fatigue.

I think the quality standard is different.

Front end has to "look good" and be "good enough to use". Little finnicky errors are often tolerated as a user can be expected to work around a certain issues. Since issues can be quickly spotted code hygiene and rigorous software quality practices aren't as important. Also, performance and resource utilisation aren't as important, to a degree anyway.

Back-end, unsupervised, or high-performance code on the other hand is largely invisible to the end user. It has to run for long times without error and if something goes wrong can be tricky to get at, diagnose, and repair.

These requirements demand a higher level of code-hygene. Coding standards, logging, documentation, automated testing etc. etc. which makes developing this kind of code much more expensive than you would expect for something that you ultimately "can't see" (unless something goes wrong).

I've seen organisations struggle with this dichotomy where they're trying to do both without appreciating these distinctions. Product managers getting annoyed that it takes so long to get GUI changes in, while engineers getting annoyed that their (necessary) tech process overhead often gets shorted because "it doesn't add value".

You can get away with taking short-cuts on the front-end, that you can't get away with elsewhere but ultimately this leads to a messy, unwieldy codebase with mountains of tech-debt and once you get to a certain point it makes sense to just throw it out and start it again.

Though "starting again" is considered to be something you should never do [0] with front-end stuff it's a little easier to get away with because, like I say it's all visual, and a good bit easier to test and play with and tease out the subtleties.

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

I work with elm now for frontend. It has often been criticized for being too conservative and slow paced in its development. But the result is that code is easier to maintain, libraries have a great quality and most of the time there is only one, obvious, way of doing something.

Having worked as a frontend dev for a while, my observation is this - because the UI is closer to the user, and closer to the product side (for consumer-facing apps), it has faster iteration cycles, doubling or tripling the rate of technology decisions that are made.

You'd never rewrite an API twice in a year, but maybe you'd rebuild your site or interface that often, if you're responding to users.

With increased demand for tools comes more supply - more libraries and frameworks with more stars and follows.

The reason we don't see this in the mobile world is because it's a much more closed ecosystem - there's no open spec for mobile like there is for browsers.

Yes, no one takes the time to research. Most popular does not equate to good.

I took the time to do the research back in 2013 and found that Ember basically solves all the problems OP talks about. Tom Dale, one of the creators of Ember, blogged over a year ago [1] about how Ember has been around since the days of Backbone. As the years rolled on, other frameworks became obsolete, but Ember evolved (with sane upgrade paths) and is still relevant.

1: https://tomdale.net/2017/04/making-the-jump/

There is an interesting take on this by a Reddit user named 'jerf' over on the Reddit discussion:

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/8n00k2/why_is_...

I think this is the same as the HN user 'jerf', but am not certain.

well, ever since the proliferation of mobile touch devices (it's been less than a decade) there's been this somewhat perverse history of "mobile-first" really meaning "native-first." tons of mobile websites are still essentially ads for their counterparts in app stores. this is for lots of reasons (mostly to do with financial incentives for both app makers and app stores), but ultimately the web still isn't as good as native. the chaos of the front-end world is a reflection of web developers trying to solve that, rather than those working on operating systems, web browsers, standards, etc.

the other reason is that vue hasn't be around very long ;)

It's unstable because there are millions of developers working with front end technologies and that community is rapidly finding better ways of doing things.

And when better ways are found, because development is so time consuming and difficult, people move to embrace those new and better ways.

I'm glad of the rapid change because there is alot more improvement needed at the front end.

Consider for example the vast amount of crushingly complex configuration that is required for many front end development tasks - this is yet to be addressed, although giant leaps have been made - such as create-react-app - thank god.

JavaScript has to become "zero configuration" to the greatest extent practical, and JavaScript programmer should dump configuration heavy tools as soon as they possibly can for zero configuration tools.

I know that the star is a de-facto way to calculate the popularity of particular repo. But, let me put aside this calculation for a moment, then I myself have stats around 250 repos and more than 40% of it, I have starred just because to refer it sometime later, not because I like it or love it, just for future ref., when I have to work on something that might need help or ref. from that particular repo.

So, if there is something that have a way bookmarks the repo then chances are hight these repos have lesser stars. Also, there is popular trend nowadays I see that 100 other developers have starred one repo for some particular reason that chances are hight that other 5 developers might star it because they just follow the developer, who have starred.

FWIW, the GitHub age isn't entirely accurate because both React and Vue had major rewrites and the current default branch doesn't hold the entire development history. Vue's first public release was Feb of 2014 and React is just celebrating its 5th birthday.

I do wonder how much of the instability relates to the strong opinions that the JS community often has (I'm guilty of this too). Any broad stereotype is going to be wrong a lot, but it does feel like JS devs on average are a lot more opinionated about the way things ought to be. They are also more disgusted and unhappy working in codebases that don't conform to their standards.

I truly don't mean this as a bad thing, in fact I put myself in this category. Obviously it can be a bad thing if it causes you to be unable to work with others, but it can also make for elegant, consistent, and hackable codebases that boost productivity and minimize bugs.

Programming industry is the only one more fashion-driven than the fashion industry. This is a known issue going back to the dawn time.

The big secret is that for most of us this is "works as intended". We like to program. Imagine being a mountain climber who loves climbing and gets paid (well!) to climb mountains. With real mountains, eventually you get to the top and you have to stop. With programming, the act of climbing the mountain creates more mountain above you. As long as you can find people to pay for it, you can keep climbing.

If you like programming please shoosh so the marks don't get wise.

If you just want to get shit done use Elm-lang and get on with your life.

I always find it curious that almost no one is talking about not using a framework to begin with. I have been writing complex UI with vanilla js for some time now, never had any issues or took longer than I expected to get a job done.

The real complaint right now should be Babel v7 -- or more specifically, the community around it. Babel v7 has been in development for quite a while. It's still changing and isn't even a RC yet.

I understand the need to test new compiler builds, but production isn't the place to do that (especially not until a RC is released). A beta designation is meaningless if its used as though it were just a normal production release.

Using a beta compiler in production tools, libraries, etc shows EXTREME inexperience. I have a number of dependencies that I cannot update because the new versions rely on various v7 builds (ranging from ancient alphas to bleeding edge betas).

I suspect the issue is that most JS dev teams are small with projects small enough that edge cases are uncommon and easier to find and fix.

Stackoverflow dev survey shows that the average US dev is 28.7 (down from 31.6 in 2015) with an average of 10 years of experience despite 58% having less than 5 years of experience.

That means that on average, you have a very young team. Further, the vast majority of teams most likely do not have ANYONE with more than 5 years behind them. It's not surprising that such things aren't recognized for the disaster-in-the-making that they are.

Web technologies have settled down and stabilized dramatically over the past 3 years. I suspect that as more web devs gain more experience, we'll see this continue as rashness is replaced with a more conservative approach.

To me this attributes more towards general evolution of the browsers which naturally leads to more complex requirements for the modern web-app. I remember that in 2010, when we started re-writing our desktop apps during our transition to web, the initial requirements were such that it was still possible (although very hacky) to use the latest version of ASP.NET. Then 6 months later we received a new set of requirements which rendered this _latest_ stack useless. We literally had people sleeping under the desks pulling all-nighters trying to transfer a session state between browser and server without dropping an egg. That's was around time when backbone.js came out.

If we compare the things that browsers can do _now_ with what was possible 5y or 10y ago, no wonder why we have so many new frameworks. Browsers are trying to catch up with (or even replace) an OS as a main container for running an application and because it's hard to release all features _at once_ without agreeing on standards, we have a situation when people have to choose a new library each time a new major API/feature is available. And this what I see is the main reason why `front-end development is so unstable`

WebAsm is coming which will again lead to yet another huge re-write.

Three reasons I think:

(1) The closer you get to the front end (especially GUIs), the further you get from algorithms and other mathematical certainties and the closer you get to something that's more a matter of design and fashion. People get tired of GUIs looking and feeling a certain way and they change, and that often requires a code re-work because changes in GUI look and feel can break previous abstractions.

(2) Form factors and display technologies change. Mobile completely annihilated 30 years of GUI work for example. To a lesser extent high-DPI screens have done a number on some older GUI systems. The stuff under the hood changes too but more slowly and in less fundamental ways e.g. an SSD is mostly a "disk" from an abstraction point of view even though the tech is wildly different. Command lines are fundamentally unchanged since the 1970s. VT emulations have become more advanced but the basic paradigm is incredibly stable.

(3) GUIs look deceptively easy but in reality they're incredibly hard. A modern GUI layer is at the same level of complexity as a modern game engine like Unreal. The list of edge cases and layouts and modes and languages and interaction metaphors and input devices and so on and so on you have to support is very long. Software engineers routinely underestimate this difficulty and try to re-invent GUIs and GUI abstractions in a quest to be clean and small and simple. They're then forced to shoehorn everything a modern GUI requires into these clean and simple abstractions, breaking them and turning them into overloaded monstrosities. Simple clean systems get ugly when you try to extend them too far. A more elegant design could be achieved by starting with the premise that the problem is big and hairy and developing heavier and more flexible abstractions accordingly.

There are a set of converging interests causing pain in the ecosystem. First a company promoting a project, then people hoping to provide services, consulting or training, and third people hoping to get a job or padding their current resumes.

None of these people have a particular interest in the technology or its merit, its anything they can make money or benefit from and then forums like HN and others are used to aggressively push out these technologies.

By the time people start catching on about flaws, over-engineering or needless complexity the latter 2 groups have already moved on to something new. Rinse and repeat and HN is very much a part of this.

There is very little tolerance for skepticism and proper scrutiny of anything 'new' and in the hype train. These are usually dismissed with ad hominems about 'grey beards' or people 'scared' of change. Since everything is so 'new and cutting edge' there is no respect for any authority or experience and scrutiny becomes impossible. And since self interest is involved the arguments become needlessly charged.

I think this is a piece by someone who has not really been in front end web development as a career (or does not specialize in it) for very many years. The author's thesis is that 'poor choice architecture' is what drives churn in front end. I disagree. The churn in JS tech has reduced over the past few years.

Some of the churn was in part due to limitations of the web platform. ES5 was limited in features. The web has evolved a lot, and now we don't need to depend on every framework re-inventing things like modules.

React has been around for 5 years now, and it's still the dominant choice for front end architecture. This is not by accident. React solves some of the biggest challenges in front end development with a clean, minimalistic component API, a virtual DOM abstraction to minimize re-renders, JSX (still superior to underpowered template languages), and one-way data flow (which makes refactoring and state management easier). Also functional component model has implications that it can render to any target.

React is not just a web development innovation, it's a UI innovation. There has never been a desktop UI framework with this much flexibility and power. You can target web, native mobile, native desktop, create custom canvas-rendering if you like, render to touch bar, VR, etc...no limits.

The author sort of implies that a one-size-fits-all framework or some standard way of doing things across all projects would lead to less frustration and less churn in the JS community.

We've seen many attempts at this (Ember, Angular, etc). The thing is, not all projects have the same needs. The web is a big place. There are simple web pages with mostly text content (and little need for JS) all the way to rich apps with interactive video, real time chat, dynamic graphs and complex customized data feeds for each user. There is no one-size-fits-all comprehensive framework that will ever meet those demands. For the easy projects, they're overkill and for the complex, long-lived projects, you're likely to beat your head against the limitations of the framework.

The innovation that has come in state management, style management, and component-based design in the past few years is unrivaled by any other UI community. I think the article is a surface level grasp at the situation. It implies that the JS community is spinning its wheels instead of producing solid long-lasting paradigms for application development. I disagree.

> Before we get carried away, it’s worth validating whether the meme really has basis in reality. Do front end technologies actually change that quickly?

> In the sense of major view technologies, probably not. Consider this list of the highest ‘starred’ JavaScript front-end technologies on Github:

Seriously? So you're basing front end technology changes based on stars on Github?

Also I think it's wrong to say that front end technologies have "changed." It's just people have discovered better or just different ways of building things and that should be okay.

I agree with the portion how it can be overwhelming to a junior developer, but it is also easier in some ways. In truth, if you are a junior developer (or hell any developer really), your focus should be less on choosing the right technology and more on understanding what technologies fit what needs.

"Unstable", "Issue", "Problem". The opposite of the front-end world is not something to desire. Change means people are fixing problems and giving away their solutions for free. To desire less change means wishing fewer people gave away their work.

The article is right about the frontend side, but I think it doesn't look to good on the backend either. The actual code side (frameworks, libraries and languages) is relatively stable, but mostly because most of the complexity nowadays goes away from monoliths and into services, of which many are off the shelf, and plagued with the same issues as all the trendy javascript frameworks. Nosql-database du jour that solves some problems allegedly very efficiently, messaging systems, thousand ways to script infrastructure and virtualization.. the hype is not in the code and libraries, it's in the infrastructure components, but that doesn't make it any better.

I do find a bit of the argument hyperbolic... My preference today is Koa + about 3-5 modules (including 1-2 custom) on the backend and React, Redux, Redux-thunks, redux-first-router and fetch (in most browsers) on the front end. For UI, will generally suggest bootstrap or material-ui (the library). create-react-app does take a lot of the guesswork out of the front-end.

In the end, front/back-end tech grows at an incredible pace. Look at go, rust, .Net Core and a half dozen other options that sprung up in the past 6-8 years and all the frameworks around them. It isn't new. Last generation(s) it was Python, Ruby, C#, Java and on, and on... this isn't new.

I believe classifying libs/frameworks by number of stars is not enough ; "when" these frameworks got stars, or how many stars they got in the past 6 month, is probably important. Not sure jQuery or angular 1 got many stars lately...

This problem is way deeper than web front ends. There were/are dozens of frameworks for Windows and Unix front ends too, before browsers were invented. Every year or two some new tool became popular which made all the previous ones obsolete.

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Is there a difference between "Medium" and "Self Promotion"?

I give the author credit for thoughtfully trying, but not much of this seems to actually explain why it is Javascript that has this problem, more than Python or Ruby or Java or C#. The reason for Javascript's excessive churn must, I think, be related to its most typical use case as a browser client-side language, and in particular to its use in single-page apps. The rest of it are all good points, but I'm not sure they explain why Python, etc. don't have this problem (as bad, anyway).

So here’s the thing... browsers are generally excellent at maintaining backwards compatibility (see “SmooshGate” for christsake). Old frontend frameworks still work just fine, therefore when you complain about frontend development be “unstable” you’re complaining about other people creating or adopting new frameworks/tools. If these things really aren’t worth learning you are free to continue using the old ones.

OP mentions using a framework.

Alternatively to Next there is Reframe (https://github.com/reframejs/reframe)

My main problems with Next is that it is

- not ejectable (and locks you in),

- not a universal framework (you cannot create an app that has a static `/about` page but a dynamic `/search` page. With Next your app is either all static or all dynamic.)

(I'm Reframe's author.)

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This offers a good explanation for why the most popular options are generally the ones that developers choose, but not why the thing that is currently popular shifts as fast as it does.

Why did React take the limelight while Angular fell out of favor? What caused that shift in what is popular?

Front-end is the ultimate incarnation of Bazaar model.

Because web browsers are so different, there are millions of ways of getting around it and most devs would rather make their own solutions

> Put yourself in the shoes of a junior-to-mid-level JavaScript developer, writing a new application for the first time.

> But how could you do better, Junior Developer? Who was there to guide you? The Senior Developers, too, are learning as they go. We’re caught in this avalanche too, just trying to keep up to date and remain employable.

No, this is exactly the problem: junior developers making major architecture decisions unassisted. The "senior" developer who is "caught in the avalanche" isn't senior by any reasonable definition of the word.

Development in general, and, it seems, front end web development in particular, is both easy and hard. Somewhere between batteries-included frameworks, blogs, YouTube channels and MOOCs, it's very easy to get from zero to something good looking and more or less functional pretty quickly. But this can easily hide the complexity that pretty quickly creeps in, and reasoning about complexity is one of the crucial things that a senior developer brings to the table.

The short answer is: Because they abandoned XML on the web.

I think the instability is a byproduct of what it is.

Today we have https://caniuse.com but this sort of tool in one form or another has existed for a long time - I think that mobile, and native mobile have only compounded the problem.

Frameworks, and ecosystems (Node, and what it spawned) are practically a requirement to get things done. But abstracting issues away from front end developers, hiding them behind hacks and fixes only serves to make things worse, and harder.

The foundation of the front end isn't just broken, it is a fuckstorm... and we keep piling more stuff on top of that foundation trying to make it make sense, make it rational. With each layer we add creating new sets of issues that only get worse over time. Then someone "smart" enough to build something a bit better does just that, and we get this: https://xkcd.com/927/

The reality is that the fish stinks from the head and in this case, blame google, apple, MS, and Firefox - https://medium.com/@dmitriid/ok-w3c-and-whatwg-dont-die-but-...

Javascript isn't much better https://ariya.io/2014/05/the-curious-case-of-javascript-nan ---

(Note the above links are just my favorite "examples" of these issues not even a good indicator of the real problems therein, everyone has their own grievances)

And this IS the heart of the issue. Any one sane, any one with a high level of skill isn't going to want to work in an environment where they aren't in control where someone can yank the carpet out from under them at any given moment. No one is going to stay long when new browsers and missing packages create more work, or work that has to be re-done to deal with some edge case or issue that literally came out of nowhere. Front end people see those of us working on server side code where we have a HIGH degree of control (orders of magnitude) and realize how bad it is for themselves. Simply put any one who is good invests the time and energy to get OUT of that line of work. Tallent will quickly migrate away from the broken foundation of the front end. This only serves to exacerbate the situation, as a new "smart" person onboards thinking "I can do this better" and being right to some degree.

because browsers changes a lot.

for the same reason of the eternal september

>Why is Front-End Development So Unstable?

Because on average, the skill level in the whole webdev community is low. Below that of "a dev with average schooling, and average industry experience"

Webdev has close to no barriers for entry, and is under the strongest influence from the fact that the evaluation of deliverables is not done by another tech professional out of all software development jobs

The combo above makes things that are unheard of in other software development niches possible, like meeting borderline or de-facto frauds running webdev businesses selling "ultrasophisticated" corporate websites on Wordpress to F500 types for few $k USD per hour of dev time, or well entrenched in-house "developers" in tech giants who made it to six digits on technobabling to non-tech managers and copy and paste.

All of this is evidently projecting onto to the tech solutions used in the trade, and the popular image of the webdev development process. And over the time, popular stereotypes are becoming self fulfilling prophesies: Angular - was an okish framework at near 1.0, but marketing messaging made it look like an "enterprise stuff," and their devs eventually turned it into it - purposelessly overengineered monster filled with SOAisms; jQuery - got bad fame for unusable, animation rich websites made by least talented part of the dev community, and this infamity has both sealed its further development, and was responsible for attracting even more unskilled devs into making websites with crawling slow animation;

And like this for few pages, as well as for the notion of webdev world being "unstable." Many people here who are not novices to webdev can probably call few sites that had a "single piece of JS code continuously maintained over 10 years" or more. I myself knew people who were making yandex.ru homepage in nineties, they say that a very sophisticated ajax autocomplete code there was developed and maintained continuously since 2004

This is pretty funny. Frontend isn't "unstable". We have made it unstable with "modern" frameworks and libraries. The web is one of the most stable things ever built. There are sites from the early 90s still chugging along. That's more than you can say for most "front ends".

The better question is why did we fuck everything up so badly and call it "modern" as if the other methods of doing frontend development are prehistoric caveman shit. That's the fucking joke.

The typical explanation (a la r/programming) seems to be something or other about webdevs being naturally impatient, faddish and incompetent

Okay, let's look at the facts, I'm open to any explanation but this is the most convincing one.

2.5 years for the youngest isn’t that old in the scheme of things

2.5 years is NOTHING. N O T H I N G. C++98 clocks in at 20 years now and it's one of the most stable drivers of software. HTML is 25 years old and basic websites from back in the day still work. You are churning through frameworks an order of magnitude too fast!

2.5 years for the youngest isn’t that old in the scheme of things [...] but it’s still a ways off our caricature.

This sentence alone is a caricature and the fact you cannot see that makes the caricature even worse.

The advantage of this architecture is that you can easily adapt as new practices emerge, which makes sense at a time of rapid innovation (like the past few years). The disadvantage is that it increases your surface area for breaking changes and demands a great deal (often too much) vetting and selection of said microlibs.

Completely true. Library choice is hard. That's why you make extra sure you avoid as many dependencies as possible and pick reliable and industry-proven libraries with the largest possible projected lifetime. In particular, you go look if there is still active maintenance and development.

And this is the thrust of my argument: what’s wrong with JavaScript isn’t the language [1], the web, or any technology in particular, but a poor ‘choice architecture’ that makes developers slaves to fads and trends.

Again, I agree here.

Modern JavaScript’s greatest asset - and liability - is NPM. It provides an enormous wealth of modules, catering to just about any specific purpose one can conceive, but very difficult to filter and curate. Which ones are really being supported? Which ones are actually functionally correct? Which ones aren’t really just vectors for evil malware? The only heuristic a JavaScript developer can really use is popularity - number of downloads and Github stars - which exacerbates faddishness.

Are you serious??! "The only heuristic a JavaScript developer can really use is popularity?" What happened to library evaluation? What happened to, you know, actually reading and reviewing the code you pull into your project? What happened to the actual craft of programming? What are programmers, dumb plumbers who put together a Frankenstein monster of microlibs, or innovative craftsmen who construct reliable, fast and elegant solutions with as few moving parts as possible? Is this the quality of work you are content with? Have you no pride?

There are other ways to validate a library, of course: you can read through Github issues and search for StackOverflow questions. You can do some testing or even examine the sourcecode for yourself (in most cases). But this takes time, which isn’t really warranted when choosing e.g. a date parsing doodad.

Oh yeah, those other ways to evaluate a library, what a waste of time. Don't bother about actually looking into it, just look how many "likes" it has. This is what's wrong with front end devs, they want to move too fast while lacking absolutely fundamental programming knowledge.

I will concede that this is something of a cultural weakness of JavaScript developers. As an interviewer I often like to ask candidates how they choose technologies, and it depresses me somewhat that popularity is the almost always the only marker they know.

That is sad. These people are not fit for a software development role and should not be hired.

Software engineering is at least partly a research job and we need to train junior programmers research skills. But even if we did, the odds would still be stacked against them.

The odds are stacked against ignorant people who don't want to put in the hours that are actually necessary to (learn to) vet libraries. Just let your senior devs choose libraries then, or at least review dependencies the juniors pull in?

So you do a Google search, which reveals a Medium post that heartily recommends X.js. It later transpires the post was written by X’s author, though she never announces that particular conflict of interest (she does, however, provide a GitTip jar). Not that you could tell - all Medium articles look the same, so you can never rely on a ‘brand’ to identify reputable material.

Back in the day, people used to understand what they do. Now they just google and copy-paste something. If you look at one medium article and decide to add a dependency, you cannot be helped anymore.

This time you find a link on Twitter - with over a hundred hearts!

I wanna puke.

You see, Y.js was “object oriented”. You thought this was a good thing, vaguely recalling something from first year ComSci about Smalltalk and message passing. But apparently it is Very Bad.

A programmer who does not know what object oriented means, and programs JavaScript, a language where you handle objects day in day out, should be fired.

It gets worse. The post claims that even mentioning OOP in a JavaScript interview will render you utterly unemployable! You are seriously disoriented now. Thankfully help is at hand - in the form of his $50 dollar JavaScript webdev course. You take a note of the link, thinking how lucky you are to have found it, and give another clap in gratitude. (Nineteen thousand and one).

Nineteen thousand and one ignorant morons who should not be professional programmers.

But how could you do better, Junior Developer? Who was there to guide you? The Senior Developers, too, are learning as they go.

Ok you have a problem there if you don't have senior developers who can provide guidance. That's the whole reason you have mentors. There's no point in paying more for a senior dev if they lack the knowledge and leadership skills. That's the whole reason why they cost more!

So. You take the path of least resistance: you choose the Github project with the most votes, the most stars. And that is why JavaScript dev is driven by fads and hype.

No, to conclude, people who are gullible, incompetent, ignorant and frankly, stupid are what's wrong with JavaScript dev. If you want to see hardcore devs who actually have skills, go look at operating systems programmers. All the problems you named literally just don't exist there. Front-end attracts untalented and inexperienced programmers because you immediately see colourful pictures when you preview a couple of lines of front-end code.

It's only unstable if you drink the JavaScript cool-aid, and change frameworks frequently.

I've been using Knockout 3.* for the past five years, no issue here.

Edit: Looks like some Angular and React devs have started downvoting :)

React is only 3 years old?!?!

It's because we keep trying to use something designed for displaying hypertext documents as platform for interactive applications. It's dumb and successful.