At least for me I find it very hard to believe your rosy story about Dojo. Are you telling me that 15 years ago you were using a framework that had out-of-the-box support for internationalization that is comparable to what we have today?
Actually he's right. I did work with Dojo many years ago. It was very complete, but I found it clunky and slow for my use case. I rewrote the entire app in ExtJS. At the time, this was the most polished toolkit around. If your project was not open source you had to pay for it, but it was worth it. It had every single thing you can think of and it was all working very well, i18n included. However, it was an all-in proposition, and felt like coding a Java Swing application in some way.
Having said that, I don't miss it and I very much like the way things are now.
Nobody needs to believe me. I've left a link. Anybody really interested is free to see for them self. The stuff is still out there. (Actually I've looked lately into their forum to see how this ancient stuff is doing after I've left it years ago, and you can read there for example form people that have a very hard time to find reasons to rewrite all their "legacy Dojo apps" as that stuff is still working more then fine for mission critical projects so management won't give any budget).
One of the reasons we chose Dojo back than was for example its first class internalization support. And yes, you have for example all widgets with right-to-left variant support OOTB… Or you had some DateTime class that had more or less all the features of Moment.js (years before Moment.js came into existence)… Ah, you had actually a "class" ("dojo declare" if I remember correctly)! :-) It had multiple inheritance (mixins) as this is quite useful for widgets and their common traits. It had observable data stores & pub / sub messaging. It fully supported screen readers OOTB (accessibility is quite important for example if you develop for state authorities; one more of the reasons we chose it back than).
As the "modern" stuff "started" (at the time Angular.js got quite popular) my first impression of that "modern" frameworks was that I'm literally back to stone age. At least it felt like that. You needed for "everything" some third party lib, nothing was integrated, features were missing everywhere.
Additionally working with something like Bower and Grunt was a big step backwards compared to the integrated build system of Dojo. It bundled, and even Closure compiled, all of your modules / widgets, building optimized "layers", with moderate configuration. It had the features you got back years later with Webpack. Actually I'm not sure Webpack isn't also an extended standalone version of Dojos build system as I was wondering when working for the first time with Webpack that the configuration file looks so familiar… (Like Require.js is for sure derived form Dojo's AMD loader).
And the main point is: Even Dojo was ahead of its time in JS land, it was "just" a shallow JS port of the style of application frameworks you had for desktop dev. Ever worked with Delphi, or so? Even though people made jokes about the term "RAD" back than this was indeed "rapid application development" compared to all that low level pixel-shoving you do today. The "components" you worked with back than where one level above something like React-Admin (which is for Web land already bombastic!).
The main point is, and I guess this is clear to most: The web wasn't build as an application platform. As such a platform it just sucks. That's a fact, imho. And I think everybody who did desktop development back than would agree.
I don't say the web is a bad thing as such. Also I fully understand the reasons why it's misused as an application platform (it has just some very convincing advantages). But that doesn't change imho anything about the fact that "the web" sucks as application development platform. It's obviously the wrong tool… (Even without any alternative at the moment). This issue won't go away with the next rehash of some lib / framework that "makes using the wrong tool a little bit more convenient". We need a new tool. One that it designed form the ground up to be again a proper application development framework. I want to see true productivity improvements compared to the time of "RAD"; not steps back on any axis, be it effort to develop something high level, be it performance, be it resource usage. Where is the Delphi / VB6 of the new century? Smart people here around. Someone will come up with something sooner or later, I'm quite sure! :-D
