He makes an interesting point that we are coding programs that run more slowly now than they did 10 years ago. Javascript has only gotten faster over the last decade, computer have faster CPUs and more RAM. The problem is the frameworks and the programs have gotten slower.

What did we gain exactly? Reddit is better at displaying videos and images now. But it's slower despite faster hardware.

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Escapado 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I hate the state of affairs. That said my guess is what we „gained“ is tons of telemetry, tracking and the likes, engineers not needing to think about performance to get a feature out, which absolutely lowers the bar to entry, high level abstractions and ux and visual bells and whistles of varying importance and quality (infinite scrolling, streaming updates, image blend modes, blur effects, scroll timeline animations etc). People creating Pokémon had to think about every bit in their texture atlas and carefully manage the hardware memory manually. Web devs now try not to forget to clean up event listeners in a useEffect that triggers on mouse move to generate data for an interaction heatmap for the marketing department while 25mb of 3rd party scripts make sure every data broker and their mother is well informed about your digital whereabouts.

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fullstackchris 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Then go ahead and write vanilla JS and raw HTML! No one is asking you to use any of these bad "state of affairs". If you do build a 100+ page SaaS app without any framework, let me know, I'd love to see how it works.

	▲	Escapado 40 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		My clients are. I do web dev for a living and I use these frameworks day in and day out. It’s not even that I dislike the dev ex on most of them and I’ve seen a lot of good code and bad code and I don’t even wanna blame anyone in particular for the situation we are in. I think my comment was more of a dig at the world we live in than anything else.

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fullstackchris 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The frameworks have NOT gotten slower! God I hate Hackernews sometimes... whats really going on is actually that not a single dev reads the release notes / improvements / learns how to actually use the framework. If anything, the latest React release was almost purely a performance improvement release (and has been for a while) ...most people need to fully understand a tool they use before complaining about it.

Everyone always wants a frontend framework that "just works" - sounds a lot like a free lunch to me! You have to manage the state and updates of your application at some point - the underlying software cant just "guess" what you want. But I'm always like a broken record when these react hate / <insert frontend framework here> hate threads show up - most of the confusion is derived from lack of basic concepts of what problems these frameworks solve in the first place.

	▲	Jensson an hour ago \| parent [-]
		> whats really going on is actually that not a single dev reads the release notes / improvements / learns how to actually use the framework. If everyone fails to read framework release notes then the problem is frameworks. If you change so quickly and often that almost no developer bothers to keep up to date then you are the problem, not the developer.