
Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable? A Perspective - jbreckmckye
http://www.breck-mckye.com/blog/2018/05/why-is-front-end-development-so-unstable/
======
slededit
At the end of the day the front-end is heavily tied to the visual design of
the site. When the visual design changes drastically it makes sense to throw
out the tightly coupled logic with it, and so front-end work is more
ephemeral.

In this environment there is no incentive to make things last long term.
Frameworks can make breaking changes version to version, and websites may
change their technology completely in each iteration. It doesn't matter
because you will just throw it out in relatively short periods of time.

------
tomlagier
I'm very interested as to why this phenomenon - not having an authoritative
way to vet third party libraries - seems to be a uniquely frontend concern.
What have the dozens of other, battle-tested languages done to solve this? How
do I know that a Maven package or Rust crate is legitimate, useful, and sans-
malware?

It seems like this is a question fundamental to any programming ecosystem,
that _must_ have a reasonable solution which balances developer time assessing
a potential library with the utility of that library. I'm very interested in
some strategies the JS ecosystem could take to foster a culture or platform
with well-known, well-supported standard libraries.

------
bobfirestone
The one thing I would add is the JavaScript standard library is deserving of
some blame for the micro-library problem. Being bundled with the browser or
server side in node doubling the size of the standard library to avoid
situations like the left pad library being pulled from npm seems like a no
brainer type of decision. ES2017 adds the padEnd and padStart functions is a
step in the right direction. There is movement in the right direction but I
would like to see the JS standard library at a minimum match the ruby standard
library and eliminate a bunch of the micro dependencies that creep into
libraries.

------
daltonlp
"Backbone all day."

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13944631](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13944631)

Choose a stable foundation. Think about the tradeoffs, and accept them.

There is much beauty and satisfaction in using a framework that is
straightforward to understand, and does its designed job very well.

------
expertentipp
Self-promotion is a plague in this industry. First page of Google results
regarding any JS framework topic is some marketing folks aiming to be
hired/contractors, promoting outsourcing/nearshoring location, without any
meaningful content created. Then this laughable community celebrities and
"authorities". Crockford, Zakas, Souders, Resig - ever heard of them? In three
years nobody will even remember or care about that Angular-Google guy, or
React-Facebook guy, or ngrx-whatever guy... except those who end up
maintaining some legacy codebase and cursing the universe.

