> When Facebook introduced React, that act transformed the font-end space into a hype-driven, cult-of-personality disaster zone where folks could profit from creating the right image and narrative
The author must have barely been paying attention to JS scene pre-React. The churn of tooling from 2010-2015 was far worse than anything since. A large part of this was due to the shortcomings of pre-ES2015 JavaScript itself.
ES5 JS had no module system. It had no package manager. Even if you used server-side rendered PHP, Ruby, Java, or C# (the default in those days), JavaScript ended up becoming a massive part of any code base. What started as a few JQuery selectors adding dynamic/interactive behavior to forms would quickly evolve into an unmanaged mess of tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of code. I worked for an enterprise shop that pitched itself as a C# .NET stack, but when you analyzed the ten year old code base, we had more lines of JS than C#.
When every page imported its own version of JQuery or some plug-in, even updating a package across your code base would turn into a hot mess (and might unpredictably break things, as each page independently managed its own dependencies, often imported from some CDN somewhere).
The desire to build a SPA was rooted in the fact that none of these server-side languages had a good native way of managing JS. It was always treated as some afterthought that was injected into some god awful HTML template somewhere.
The JS ecosystem had to create these tools, and there were lots of attempts at wrangling various parts of the architecture from Backbone, Ember, Grunt, Gulp, Bower, Knockout, Flight, Eve, Angular, Dojo, Closure, Ext JS, Moo Tools, etc (and more that I've forgotten) all pre-dating React.
Oh. He is well aware. He created a JS framework called Aurelia. It is actually very good and was doing 'just write js' long before svelte came along. It is not that popular and hence lack the ecosystem.
I vaguely remember Aurelia. Didn't catch the author's name when I first read it. I used Durandal back in the day (which was a sort of Angular-like framework built on KnockoutJS), which he also created, before deprecating for Aurelia. So the author was one of the primary contributors to early 2010s JS framework churn and bemoans React "winning", I guess. Either way, after writing JSX components, I'm never going back to a proprietary HTML template syntax.
The author must have barely been paying attention to JS scene pre-React. The churn of tooling from 2010-2015 was far worse than anything since. A large part of this was due to the shortcomings of pre-ES2015 JavaScript itself.
ES5 JS had no module system. It had no package manager. Even if you used server-side rendered PHP, Ruby, Java, or C# (the default in those days), JavaScript ended up becoming a massive part of any code base. What started as a few JQuery selectors adding dynamic/interactive behavior to forms would quickly evolve into an unmanaged mess of tens to hundreds of thousands of lines of code. I worked for an enterprise shop that pitched itself as a C# .NET stack, but when you analyzed the ten year old code base, we had more lines of JS than C#.
When every page imported its own version of JQuery or some plug-in, even updating a package across your code base would turn into a hot mess (and might unpredictably break things, as each page independently managed its own dependencies, often imported from some CDN somewhere).
The desire to build a SPA was rooted in the fact that none of these server-side languages had a good native way of managing JS. It was always treated as some afterthought that was injected into some god awful HTML template somewhere.
The JS ecosystem had to create these tools, and there were lots of attempts at wrangling various parts of the architecture from Backbone, Ember, Grunt, Gulp, Bower, Knockout, Flight, Eve, Angular, Dojo, Closure, Ext JS, Moo Tools, etc (and more that I've forgotten) all pre-dating React.