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0 pointsmarcus_holmes8y ago0 comments

Agree. This is Maker's Triangle stuff (Good, Cheap or Fast, pick two). Everyone is picking Cheap and Fast, and not only Cheap, but Free, so the amount of Good left in this stuff is non-existent.

If there's no Good chosen, then it all gets crufty and full of tech debt. So someone else thinks they can do better, and starts developing a replacement. In order to get traction, though, they need to make it Free and develop it Fast, so after a while they start taking a few short-cuts, and round we go again.

I have faith that it'll settle down eventually, but until then...

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matt40778y ago

I'm unsure if this Maker's Triangle thing applies to OSS. But if it does, it's my impression that it's usually the "Fast" that is abandoned, not the "Good".

But how does that apply to Chrome, or React? Is there any indication that Chrome carries more technical debt than, say IE7? Similarly, in what way does Facebook need people to adopt React, and would that matter enough to accept such compromises? Is there any indication that their code quality is inferior to <pick whatever commercial js library you want>?

And if this is the complaint about churn, that, at this time would be older than our js stack if it were true: React came out in 2013, it's four years old. Before that, most people probably used JQuery, which came out in 2006, i. e. 11 years ago. Is learning a new library every five years too much, considering this is one of the most dynamically evolving ecosystems of technology?

Silhouette8y ago

To continue the analogy, the JavaScript community doesn't believe in technical debt. It just declares itself bankrupt every few weeks and moves on, leaving anyone who was relying on earlier arrangements to cover the costs.

To extend it further, this is why you should be very careful who you give credit to in the JavaScript ecosystem. If you're trying to build anything robust and potentially long-lived, relying on anything but the largest and most established dependencies is usually unwise, and even then relying on any any aspect that isn't in mainstream use is a risk.

tracker18y ago

As someone who's been building against browser/web tech for over two decades now... that React is emphatically no less than "Good"... The diagnostic messages alone are leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I've used. Angular just breaks in weird ways with no warnings, sometimes non-sense error messages, other platforms likewise... React regularly warns on usage that might break something in the next release, and more than a clue how to fix it. Nothing else I've used comes close to that. Not that it was your implication.

Now, I'll admit, I've dev'd against React and deployed with preact-compat as a build sub for size... but a couple times back to React for broader support, and it really didn't save on speed anyway.

React is hands down the first web tech I've used (out of dozens of platforms and toolkits over the years) that just made sense. Not everything I agree with, and would love some adjustments. All the same, more often than not, it does what I expect, and I definitely can't say that of most of the rest.

As to jQuery, I think it's a great idea, was and still is in a lot of ways. I do wish they'd just drop their XHR, and Promise implementation at this point... but the selection library + eventing is cool and easier to grasp to this day, despite going without it for about 2 years now. There are cases where it was just nice, and still is.

I'm actually fine with JSX, imho it's better having some XML in my JS than it ever was having weird DSL in templates in JS.

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