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0 pointspc864y ago0 comments

Serious question - if it was so much better then, why are approximately zero new companies building a Laravel/Rails/whatever app and using jQuery for the front end? If it's that much of an advantage I would expect at least someone who is trying that (because surely some are) to succeed with their lean, mean tech stack. Why wouldn't you have just written the project in that standard MVC stack instead of a modern one?

You won't get any objection from me on the debugging point, it's much harder, especially when you're crossing environment - e.g. running the front end locally but maybe hitting a remote dev or QA backend. I will point out though that there are logging tools that support the pretty standard practice of having correlation/transaction/trace IDs on your requests, such that you put in a GUID from an error and it shows you the entire request and anything that request spawned.

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6 comments · 3 top-level

jokethrowaway4y ago· 2 in thread

Indie makers famously do just that. Pieter Levels is making millions with PHP and jQuery.

I consult primarily in node and react with all sorts of transpilers mess and shitty packers. The stuff of nightmares - we waste so much time making things work - but simplifying the stack will never get traction among the not-anymore-technical principal engineers or even amongst the other developers who need a fancy cv for their next gig.

My side businesses use python, django, jQuery, old node.js without modules, rust, svelte.

Engineers hired in big companies want to work on shiny technologies and build their cv.

ushakov4y ago

> Pieter Levels is making millions with PHP and jQuery

no, the reason Pieter Levels makes millions is not PHP and jQuery, but because he's also a brilliant sales/marketing/business person

NateEag4y ago

OP didn't say PHP and jQuery were why Pieter Levels is making millions - just that they're tools he's using to do it.

Ergo, they are at least fit for that purpose. They aren't bad enough to prevent him from making millions.

dham4y ago· 1 in thread

Yea people absolutely still build companies with these tools. If you just want to start a Saas company as a side project you would do yourself a disservice if you didn't use something like Rails, Django or Laravel.

The problem is in larger companies, developers stopped caring about just solving the business problems and moved on to solving non existent technical issues to build resumes to go the next job to get more salary. They go to company to company like a parasitic infection leaving them to rot by introducing Kubernetes React, Go microservices with Rust cli tools.

Also it might be an issue of not being fulfilled in life outside of work.

zeroc84y ago

APIs plus frontend can be simple too and I find SPAs better from a UX perspective.

The real biggie when switching to microservices is that you suddenly have to reinvent all the goodies a relational database gives you for free.

yoyonamite4y ago

The majority are simply going to follow popular opinion regardless of the merits, and developer efficiency is often not that important. I also think the efficiency gains are bigger for smaller and inexperienced teams.

Also, people are getting used to app-like experiences and designers are designing for it. Building an app-like experience is more natural as a Single Page Application, which basically means taking on the modern frontend stack. There are places that push against this, but to do so requires buy-in to the engineering side over product and design. Even then, the engineering side has to be knowledgeable enough to not follow popular opinion and come to the determination that Laravel/Rails/Django is actually the right tool, which isn't always the case.

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