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A Rant about Front-end Development (blog.frankmtaylor.com)
submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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 1 week 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 1 week 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.

[-] self@awful.systems 12 points 1 week ago

thank fuck neither myself nor this instance have employees, turnover, or shitty little project managers that get heartburn when the stack’s HTML5, CSS, and a non-shitty templating language instead of HTML5, react/angular/svelte/whichever frontend framework the market decided is in demand this quarter, a CSS in JS library, an ORM, webpack, and whichever npm clone tweaks your nipples the most

and you’d better hope you chose “right” on all of those pieces of the stack, cause you’re infantilizing your devs so much you think it’s impossible for them to learn a new frontend framework, or how to do modularity or maintainability in a basic fucking backend templating language. do they also have to ask your permission to take a piss?

but why are you posting here? it’s almost Monday and you’ve got an hour-long, unproductive standup to preside over

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 9 points 1 week ago

praise the circumstances that enable the scourge of b2b saas products imposed on employees at the collaboration factory

[-] self@awful.systems 10 points 1 week ago

if we keep this up, the CEO might positively mention the name of our project briefly during an all-hands, then two weeks later vastly reduce our headcount because the good job we’ve done proves we don’t need to waste money on all these developers

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 8 points 1 week ago

I remember when we used to write our name in our css files because we wanted to, not because our ssh key enforced it for auditability

[-] fasterandworse@awful.systems 7 points 1 week ago

I know this sounds like old man shit, but I'll die on this hill. It's a significant fundamental attitude shift

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

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