I recently read a rant [0] on frontend development, and it brought me back to a series of thoughts I had been having about a certain nostalgia some people have for development before the age of Node.js and comprehensive frontend frameworks. I agree with the general sentiment that things have become too bloated and that we often reach for tools that are too bloated for most use cases. Obviously the nearly 2mb of JS that loads when I visit The Sun's website is excessive for a tabloid paper whose main content is just text.
If the nostalgia was just for more disciplined and somewhat limited web development that was more commonplace in the past, I wouldn't have any issue with it. That's not the case, though. I see people praising jQuery, calling React and assorted frameworks a unilaterally bad thing, insisting that package managers are evil, and most puzzling to me, hating on TypeScript.
I'm guessing most of these people want to believe in the indieweb ideal of small websites that don't have significant interactivity needs, and they see web applications as totally distinct from websites. I also see a general theme of hate for frameworks, but only in the frontend; rarely do I see criticism of backend development and a lot of the horrors of PHP 5 and JSP from days long passed.
I've been doing web development since 2014, and while that's only about 10 years ago, I've seen a lot of improvements in overall tooling and developer experience. React-style components were a great thing for me, and it reduced frontend complexity for me and reduced bugs for my users. Most importantly, TypeScript has made refactors almost as safe as in languages like Java, which was previously an incredibly difficult and error-prone task, often involving a lot of grepping, guesswork, and manual testing.
I really see this blind acceptance of the old and rejection of the new as nostalgia-tinted glasses, and furthermore as an act of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are plenty of things you can take advantage of in modern webdev that will improve your and your users' experience without going overboard on bloat.
If the nostalgia was just for more disciplined and somewhat limited web development that was more commonplace in the past, I wouldn't have any issue with it. That's not the case, though. I see people praising jQuery, calling React and assorted frameworks a unilaterally bad thing, insisting that package managers are evil, and most puzzling to me, hating on TypeScript.
I'm guessing most of these people want to believe in the indieweb ideal of small websites that don't have significant interactivity needs, and they see web applications as totally distinct from websites. I also see a general theme of hate for frameworks, but only in the frontend; rarely do I see criticism of backend development and a lot of the horrors of PHP 5 and JSP from days long passed.
I've been doing web development since 2014, and while that's only about 10 years ago, I've seen a lot of improvements in overall tooling and developer experience. React-style components were a great thing for me, and it reduced frontend complexity for me and reduced bugs for my users. Most importantly, TypeScript has made refactors almost as safe as in languages like Java, which was previously an incredibly difficult and error-prone task, often involving a lot of grepping, guesswork, and manual testing.
I really see this blind acceptance of the old and rejection of the new as nostalgia-tinted glasses, and furthermore as an act of throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are plenty of things you can take advantage of in modern webdev that will improve your and your users' experience without going overboard on bloat.
[0] https://blog.frankmtaylor.com/2024/06/20/a-rant-about-front-end-development/