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0 pointsajross3mo ago0 comments

> you can just use the heavier one for everything

Because people don't like using heavyweight solutions needlessly. That's the logic that begat C++ and Ada and Multics and ASN.1 and CORBA. All of which were good solutions useful for "everything" in their domain. But people hate them, mostly.

Historically big "everything" solutuions end up losing in the market to lighter weight paradigms with more agility and flexibility. Almost every time. React[1] was such a solution once!

[1] Which really is a shorthand for "modern node-based web development with tens of thousands of npm dependencies and thirteen separately-documented API and deployment environemnts to learn".

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0x3f3mo ago

The thing is most of us have jobs where we can't unilaterally switch to the 'cooler' solution, and I value my own context-switching overhead much more than I value a slightly smaller bundle or dep tree. I'll much sooner optimize the former than the latter and so the general purpose solution that will solve both my own projects and the work ones typically wins.

yawaramin2mo ago

> The thing is most of us have jobs where we can't unilaterally switch to the 'cooler' solution, and I value my own context-switching overhead much more than I value a slightly smaller bundle or dep tree.

And this is how your company ultimately loses in the market. For every bloated incumbent you will get a snappy new competitor. Keep saying 'it's not worth it to try new stuff', right until you finally realize you never learned anything new and now your company made you redundant.

ajrossOP3mo ago

> most of us have jobs where we can't unilaterally switch to the 'cooler' solution

Which is exactly why the uncool solutions persist in the market. They're useful and practical! If they weren't they never would have been successful at all. I'm just saying that that this is fundamentally the logic of the frumpy old curmudgeon, and the kids will always have something better to offer along with their confusing new ideas.

And to be clear, I'm also just saying that as someone looking in from the outside (I do firmware!) the front end webdev developer onboarding story has long since jumped the complexity shark and things are quite frankly an impenetrable disaster ripe for disruption.

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