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Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?

126 points by jjdeveloper 3y ago

Does this mean we are slowing down and things will mature? Hopefully.

slorber 3y ago
That's because React developers are not on hacker news anymore, they are all reading my newsletter thisweekinreact.com (wink wink)
the_only_law 3y ago
Yeah and it’s been like that for a while. I’ve been a bit confused by people here thinking that’s still a thing in recent months. Personally I stopped caring several years ago though, so maybe I just subconsciously filter it out
muzani 3y ago
There was a point where over half of them were React and everyone seems satisfied with that.
- jfengel 3y ago
  All of the JS framework posts I do see are about how they don't like React. There are two kinds of frameworks, the kind people don't complain about, and the kind they use. So it seems people mostly settled on React. They're grumpy about it but it does the job and there seems to be no alternative compelling enough to complain about.
  - EamonnMR 3y ago
    Compared to what we had before, react is pretty nice.
    - shove 3y ago
      So much this. Emphasis on that first clause, but 100%.
frfl 3y ago
HN posts follow tech hype. AI is hot right now. Another thing will come and take its place in due time.
- dylan604 3y ago
  AI generated crypto funded JS framework written in Rust
  - steve_adams_86 3y ago
    > JS framework written in Rust This isn't far from reality these days
    - dylan604 3y ago
      That's what makes jokes/conspiracies/lies/memes so compelling. Not that my comment was any of the above including compelling
      - dormento 3y ago
        Isn't it wonderful how we can just chain tech-mumbojumbo and it mostly sticks? Like if you posted about "Watermelonjs: a Mersenne-backed crypto-funded AI metaframework kitchen sink mocker template written in Umlaut" I'd wager a fair amount of people wouldn't even bat an eye.
  - ChatGTP 3y ago
    Take my money
  - imhoguy 3y ago
    Web distributed AI singularity implemented in Rust as JS/WASM/WebGPU app with crypto infrastructure to gamify crowd-sourced training and use - not too far really..
orf 3y ago
Nature is healing.
TruthWillHurt 3y ago
GPT knowledge cutoff is eons ago in js time. They all had to go back to React for it to write code for them :D
- emehex 3y ago
  I think about this a lot. About how ChatGPT is perhaps cementing a lot incumbent tech right now. I wonder if the existence of these tools might actually slow down advances in frameworks, packages, libraries, etc...
  - cirrus3 3y ago
    I don't think about it at all. ChatGPT isn't able to actually do anything I actually need to as a software developer. Code is the easy part, getting good requirements from stakeholders and implementing it as business logic that meets the goals of various other internal concerns is the hard part. ChatGPT doesn't know anything about that stuff. Sometimes I wonder if anyone clutching their pearls about LLM stuff being able to replace them has actually done any real valuable work as dev.
    - golergka 3y ago
      People keep saying that. However, in my personal experience, GPT-4 is great help at requirement gathering. I regularly give it sporadic meeting notes and text chats and get very well organized requirements back.
    - fragmede 3y ago
      https://chat.openai.com/share/927a1d81-4a23-4c2c-b97f-36447a1a6200 https://chat.openai.com/share/927a1d81-4a23-4c2c-b97f-36447a... It knows about that stuff just fine.
    - emehex 3y ago
      Whereas before I would Google something 20 times, and visit Stack Overflow 10 times per day while coding… Now I visit ChatGPT 28 times per day.
loveparade 3y ago
AI "frameworks" like langchain have overtaken the space JS frameworks took previously.
spraveenitpro 3y ago
[dead]
antegamisou 3y ago
Yes, now it's full of LLM grifter type of shit.
jrajav 3y ago
React is now the de facto choice and much less painful than past de facto choices, is my take on why. It has a mature and healthy ecosystem, and its relatively small surface makes it easy to learn and predictable, while declarative GUI in general is low on footguns compared to ye ol two-way data binding. Many of the competitors springing up define themselves in terms of React, either as an improvement or a foil. But if you're just trying to get things done, it's hard to go wrong with it - and in a practical sense, not a "nobody got fired" sense.
- simonsarris 3y ago
  haha, I basically feel this way about Svelte/Kit. It's not mature, but the surface is so small and learning curve so pleasant that it's our go to choice now for internal webapps. (We have no external webapps because my company, funny enough, builds a JavaScript framework!)
  - steve_taylor 3y ago
    > not mature Svelte was first released in 2016 and has become bigger than its original creator, Rich Harris. It has quite a thriving ecosystem and a big community. The tooling around it is more mature than React's has ever been. > surface is so small I actually find the opposite to be true. React still has a relatively small API surface area. One-way data flow makes it easier to understand. However, a smaller surface means arguably less expressivity, so I think Svelte's bigger learning curve is worth it. You can learn about 90% of React in a weekend and be productive. You can learn about 20% of Svelte in a weekend and also be somewhat productive, but you need to learn about 60-70% more to use Svelte as it's intended, rather than as a React alternative.
    - pcstl 3y ago
      How is Svelte intended to be used that is so hard to learn?
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
acjohnson55 3y ago
I see a lot less programming topics, in general.
- lloydatkinson 3y ago
  Me too, it’s pretty depressing.
  - sdfghswe 3y ago
    Blame @dong.
    - lloydatkinson 3y ago
      I can agree with that definitely
- aaron695 3y ago
  [dead]
- smrtinsert 3y ago
  Lots of political opinion posts. There seems to be an influx of non technical people posting culture war nonsense.
  - the_lonely_road 3y ago
    As the site grows the number of people interested in any specific tech gets smaller while the number of people interested in lifestyle posts (politics being a major category of those) grows. Ruby and or Rust specific posts get much less upvotes and lifestyle posts get much more upvotes and the frontpage with its limited real estate becomes less and less specific tech related. The problem will only continue to get worse as the population of users grows. AI is new and of interest to lots of people so its closer to a lifestyle post at this point than it is a pytorch post that most people would not even click on.
    - 3y ago
ramesh31 3y ago
React won. Angular is officially deprecated, and the others are distant also-rans at this point. React Native has also almost completely taken over iOS development. Thank god we can all just agree on a baseline to work from finally.
- Kerrick 3y ago
  Do you have a source on Angular Being deprecated? That’s big news that I’ve missed if true.
- bebop 3y ago
  A point of clarification: angularjs is officially deprecated. Angular is very much still being developed and used for new projects.
- duluca 3y ago
  “Angular is officially deprecated” Snark or lack of knowledge?
- Glooply 3y ago
  Angular is officially deprecated by Google? news to me. Wow.
  - jeremycarter 3y ago
    It's incorrect. OP has used wrong terminology and should have said angularjs.
- whynotmaybe 3y ago
  Which angular?
  - Alifatisk 3y ago
    There is Angularjs (deprecated) and Angular (alive)
- hactually 3y ago
bitwize 3y ago
I found a gut bacteria story here just the other day. Hackernews gonna hackernews. But yeah, JS frameworks seem to have run their course. The corporate world appears to have settled on React. The new thing is, look what I did by futzing with AI.
readyplayernull 3y ago
We need another Jobs to tell us React is shit and restart the cycle again.
- kgwxd 3y ago
  Will an AI Jobs do?
thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago
Someone should do a GPT analysis of HN submissions to find and catalogue the HN-Meta. The meta being, the general rise and fall of sentiments / curiosities. I've been on here for 15 years and definitely feel phases when it seems like a lull because I am personally not interested in the current hype. Side note: A few months ago, I swear I saw about 150 different databases I had never heard of on here.
- jrott 3y ago
  there are some weird phases that happen for sure. I've noticed the same thing with programming languages. There are periods where there is tons of stuff about functional programming and then it'll die down again for a while.
Uptrenda 3y ago
tbh i feel like many posts on HN shouldn't make it to the front-page. HN is filled with smart people with tech skills and I have a feeling many of them are gaming the algorithm for self-promotion. Even just getting your friends to upvote something is kind of disingenuous since it bias what should be more objective and we know that people do tend to follow others (social proof.) I don't have a solution. This is symptomatic of quite deep and complex issues. maybe someone will solve this one day.
- getmeinrn 3y ago
  >maybe someone will solve this It's solved by you going to the new page, reading every submission, and upvoting the interesting ones. Incentivize that.
- anonzzzies 3y ago
  This feeling why I stopped using my real name (on most sites, not only hear). Upvotes or downvotes don’t mean anything to me as I have nothing to sell to you, not even myself. It’s at least far more relaxed for myself to not have to worry about things that don’t mean anything anyway, like upvotes, downvotes or some flamewar someone wants to start about a tiny opinion of mine; I can just get up/downvoted and move on. Don’t have to be pc either because of fearing for my job if my boss reads something. People, definitely on reddit, are behaving very different as they see they talk to someone who has nothing to lose and where they cannot expect much in return; less warmongering, less dragging on about a subject I was done with 40 comments ago and only 1-2 downvotes max where people commenting a similar opinion under a known name or handle get 50. For me a solution to try is random usernames and changing those when you get doxxed. Nicknames or the same handles across sites won’t work.
duluca 3y ago
IMO a JavaScript revolution is quietly brewing. Today’s frameworks have gotten amazingly complicated and EcmaScript spec is gaining new capabilities at a rapid clip, so some of critical features for modern web dev is built in. This project is a great example of what’s coming https://www.arrow-js.com https://www.arrow-js.com. I think the right move will become avoiding these large and complicated frameworks unless they’re truly called for.
- dimal 3y ago
  I’m starting to feel the same way. React’s big selling point when it came out was that it was “easy to reason about”, and that was true at the time. With hooks, server components, and 10,000 different strategies for managing state and side effects, I can’t say React is easy to reason about anymore. We can do things now that were impossible back then, but now we need to do even more than that, and it feels like it’s time to take a step back and do something different. I don’t know what that is yet.
  - EspressoGPT 3y ago
    Yes. Frontend development has always has been a pendulum swinging between "heavy server, lightweight client" and "lightweight server, heavy client". React brought us to the heavy-client side of things and I think the pendulum is about to swing back.
  - prewett 3y ago
    Hooks are particularly bad to reason about. I can't figure out why hooks seems to be the official Way, it just leads to a bunch of spaghetti functions. The old object-oriented approach might feel old and creaky, but OOP was invented for user interface. Functional programming, not so much.
    - unconed 3y ago
      The why of hooks is actually easy to explain, it's just that nobody does it. A complex UI component will usually contain different aspects A, B and C. Each of these requires hooking into the component lifecycle in various ways. In a class/interface-based system, you have to sprinkle parts of A/B/C around in each of the lifecycle methods. The only way to abstract and contain this is to make `<A>` `<B>` `<C>` subcomponents, which comes at a significant cost. Hooks instead allow you to group the bindings to the component lifecycle by aspect instead. You end up making a `useA(…)` `useB(…)` and `useC(…)`, which can not only run directly inline, but can also pass values directly from one to the other, setting up a complex, unconditional reactive data flow in a handful lines of code. In my experience when hooks go wrong it's for a few reasons: - people don't understand how they should useMemo for derived state, and instead emulate the old way with useEffect/setState - react doesn't have an official hook for stateful derived props (i.e. useMemo which has access to the previous value), which leads to a hundred adhoc solutions in every code base - people order their components the wrong way, nesting a source of truth inside a component that needs to derive from it - sometimes, the side-effect free rendering model is a poor fit (e.g. mouse gestures, timers) because there is no guarantee every event is followed by a render... it's much easier to just use idempotent state changes on mutable refs here and tell the react core team to stuff it. By the way, OO pretty much always implies retained mode UI. What React does it bring the benefits of immediate mode UI to a mostly retained world, and this is where FP excels, because you can use optics/lenses/cursors and all that meta-data-manipulation goodness to deal with mutations.
fidotron 3y ago
Anecdotally the layoff wave appears to have hit design and front end more than other areas. Additionally it feels like the dev tools market, which fuelled a lot of new frameworks, is slowing down. For the next couple of years problems will not be technical but business and marketing. No programming framework is going to help.
kgwxd 3y ago
Been that way for a few years I feel. My entire life was cutting-edge JS for 5 years straight around the trends peak. Now it's been a long time since I've come across another developer with a strong opinion about what framework/package manager/compiler should be used. I think that was all mostly about the, very long overdue, burst of advancements in JS engines that IE was holding back for soooo long. Everyone wanted to make THE library that had the best, most efficient, DOM abstraction possible, while taking advantage of any new speed gains the competing engines would release every week. It was a pretty cool time looking back on it but, the competition in that space has stalled and what's left is good and boring enough to easily get by with on any basic project. It's still not great, but that's just how front-end dev work is.
Tommah 3y ago
For a while, it seemed that a new JS framework was coming out every day. There was even a "JavaScript framework of the day" blog, which unfortunately I can't find now. But things really slowed down several years back... I want to say 7 years ago or so. React really does seem to have won, as the other commenters have said. It seems to be the main software taught by coding bootcamps and the like. I suspect that the confusion caused by the Angular 1 -> Angular 2 transition helped React gain the upper hand. There were other JS frameworks floating around that had a considerable number of users (including Ember, Meteor, and Backbone, off the top of my head), but they were nowhere near as popular as React or Angular. (That's my impression, anyway.) Irrespective of the merits of React, it is sad to see the monoculture that has formed around it. I get the same kind of vibes as I did back when Java was everywhere, and comp sci graduates used to have the impression that Java = programming.
quickthrower2 3y ago
The hotter (as in more news worthy, not usage volume) thing in web is minimizing use of JS, using something like HTMX or Phoenix Liveview.
sharts 3y ago
Must be all the recent layoffs.
pie_flavor 3y ago
Every JS framework I have ever seen hit the front page of HN was well-justified in its use-case, and contributed something meaningful to the state of the art. There are a few now and there were a few then. There was never a plague, just people who really love bemoaning plagues from positions that would not have interacted with them anyway.
Waterluvian 3y ago
React is mature. The trick is to not get distracted by shiny things. I still think the whole thing is so overblown. There’s a lot of choice, great! That doesn’t mean you can’t pretend there isn’t.
eyelidlessness 3y ago
It’s interesting seeing so many comments about stabilization around React. It’s not wrong per se, but it’s also not reflective of what I see from the FE community elsewhere. I see a ton of interest in newer frameworks like Astro. Solid has been growing at a steady pace. Qwik is gaining steam. Even older frameworks like Angular and Preact are evolving, eg adopting more reactive features. Vue and Svelte are going strong, albeit probably not gaining much new traction. And people are creating new frameworks (whether for education/demonstration or to introduce new ideas) or building new paradigms on existing ones (even on React, be it Preact Signals or Blockdom). I think the reason these aren’t prominent on HN is because the community here is overwhelmingly skeptical of, if not hostile to, new developments and exploration in the FE/JS space… and because the FE/JS community knows that and is likewise reticent to subject itself to that. That said, it is true that React is a formidable incumbent, and that quite a lot of the space has coalesced around it. I don’t think that’s set in stone, I even think there’s at least some churn coming sooner rather than later. But I don’t expect that to make huge waves on HN unless and until it’s well underway.
- yxre 3y ago
  I think there are a lot of frameworks on the edge of viability, but the bar is a lot higher than it used to be for front end tooling. React(70%), Angular(25%), and a little bit of Vue.js(5%) is the market for front end positions with React owning the Lion's share. There are always new things being built, but being used is different. The React team has done a great job of being generic enough for a broad range of use cases. As new use-cases arise, someone can build a new framework to support it. SSR has gotten much more popular than the SPA style, and the core React team has moved to support it with server side components. If they can continue to follow the innovators, React will continue to dominate the front end landscape.
robbywashere_ 3y ago
So what I’m getting from reading so many comments here… Did react hooks just totally alienate nearly everyone?
- technion 3y ago
  I'm not a fan of hooks (and the endless blog posts and opinions that hooks somehow were the invention of functional coding), but react server components did a lot of people in. The default expectations being that react frontends have a node backed isn't how much people use react.
- DGCA 3y ago
  Not a single frontend dev I know in real life has had the same negative reaction about hooks that I often see on HN. I remember some people taking a little longer to adopt them either cause it wasn’t necessary or cause it didn’t click right away, but eventually everyone learned how to use em, and no one complains about them cause they’re just a tool you use if you use React (which is the framework of choice for most companies). Honestly, the reaction I often see from HN around most frontend topics usually doesn’t match what the frontend and full stack devs I interact with regularly are saying. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we all love React and want to switch state management libraries every week; it’s that React is fine, the ecosystem is fine, and we specifically don’t use every library that comes out week after week.
exabrial 3y ago
https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/ https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  What’s the latest framework?
hardware2win 3y ago
When it was?
ChatGTP 3y ago
It's pretty hard to see anything but AI related content, so yes.
nsonha 3y ago
Lots of template languages of the week though. As if software engineering didn't have recorded history.
c-hendricks 3y ago
JS developers: fairly progressive HN: fairly conservative JS developers: hey here's an update to a library that's been around for 8 years HN: Why are there new JS frameworks every day??? Also HN: Why aren't people posting about JavaScript here? Edit: I'd fix the formatting but it's not worth it, HN can't bother to interpret a line break, I can't be bothered to accomodate.
- dang 3y ago
  Hey - 3 of your last 4 comments have been unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or broke the HN guidelines. Can you please not do this? We're trying for something else here. I understand it can be annoying to see posts you disagree with and dislike. Many people jump from that to a general image of the community as hostile to their viewpoint* - but the truth is that there's a stream of things for everyone to dislike here. That follows from the community being so large and diverse. (There's a longer explanation about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 if anyone cares.) Fortunately most of your posts with this account have been fine, though I ran across some other recent ones that broke the site guidelines and were not ok: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283716 If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. * I've been trying to persuade users about this for years, though I'm not sure it's worked much: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
seydor 3y ago
AI kills frameworks
zachmjr 3y ago
Similar to Spring in Java, React became de-facto a standard having now a thriving ecosystem and an enormous community. This is actually probably the largest community if you compare it to any other framework or programming language out there.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
seydor 3y ago
I wonder what will be the next mindless thing related to AI on which programmers will be wasting their days reinventing the wheel every 3 months. Langchain and such?
bilsbie 3y ago
I met a guy who succeeded with just vanilla JS (or whatever they call it now) Even said there were almost no cross browser issues.

126 points by jjdeveloper 3y ago

Does this mean we are slowing down and things will mature? Hopefully.

That's because React developers are not on hacker news anymore, they are all reading my newsletter thisweekinreact.com (wink wink)

the_only_law 3y ago

Yeah and it’s been like that for a while. I’ve been a bit confused by people here thinking that’s still a thing in recent months. Personally I stopped caring several years ago though, so maybe I just subconsciously filter it out

muzani 3y ago

There was a point where over half of them were React and everyone seems satisfied with that.

jfengel 3y ago
All of the JS framework posts I do see are about how they don't like React. There are two kinds of frameworks, the kind people don't complain about, and the kind they use. So it seems people mostly settled on React. They're grumpy about it but it does the job and there seems to be no alternative compelling enough to complain about.
- EamonnMR 3y ago
  Compared to what we had before, react is pretty nice.
  - shove 3y ago
    So much this. Emphasis on that first clause, but 100%.

frfl 3y ago

HN posts follow tech hype. AI is hot right now. Another thing will come and take its place in due time.

dylan604 3y ago
AI generated crypto funded JS framework written in Rust
- steve_adams_86 3y ago
  > JS framework written in Rust This isn't far from reality these days
  - dylan604 3y ago
    That's what makes jokes/conspiracies/lies/memes so compelling. Not that my comment was any of the above including compelling
    - dormento 3y ago
      Isn't it wonderful how we can just chain tech-mumbojumbo and it mostly sticks? Like if you posted about "Watermelonjs: a Mersenne-backed crypto-funded AI metaframework kitchen sink mocker template written in Umlaut" I'd wager a fair amount of people wouldn't even bat an eye.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  Take my money
- imhoguy 3y ago
  Web distributed AI singularity implemented in Rust as JS/WASM/WebGPU app with crypto infrastructure to gamify crowd-sourced training and use - not too far really..

orf 3y ago

Nature is healing.

TruthWillHurt 3y ago

GPT knowledge cutoff is eons ago in js time. They all had to go back to React for it to write code for them :D

emehex 3y ago
I think about this a lot. About how ChatGPT is perhaps cementing a lot incumbent tech right now. I wonder if the existence of these tools might actually slow down advances in frameworks, packages, libraries, etc...
- cirrus3 3y ago
  I don't think about it at all. ChatGPT isn't able to actually do anything I actually need to as a software developer. Code is the easy part, getting good requirements from stakeholders and implementing it as business logic that meets the goals of various other internal concerns is the hard part. ChatGPT doesn't know anything about that stuff. Sometimes I wonder if anyone clutching their pearls about LLM stuff being able to replace them has actually done any real valuable work as dev.
  - golergka 3y ago
    People keep saying that. However, in my personal experience, GPT-4 is great help at requirement gathering. I regularly give it sporadic meeting notes and text chats and get very well organized requirements back.
  - fragmede 3y ago
    https://chat.openai.com/share/927a1d81-4a23-4c2c-b97f-36447a1a6200 https://chat.openai.com/share/927a1d81-4a23-4c2c-b97f-36447a... It knows about that stuff just fine.
  - emehex 3y ago
    Whereas before I would Google something 20 times, and visit Stack Overflow 10 times per day while coding… Now I visit ChatGPT 28 times per day.

loveparade 3y ago

AI "frameworks" like langchain have overtaken the space JS frameworks took previously.

spraveenitpro 3y ago

[dead]

antegamisou 3y ago

Yes, now it's full of LLM grifter type of shit.

jrajav 3y ago

React is now the de facto choice and much less painful than past de facto choices, is my take on why. It has a mature and healthy ecosystem, and its relatively small surface makes it easy to learn and predictable, while declarative GUI in general is low on footguns compared to ye ol two-way data binding. Many of the competitors springing up define themselves in terms of React, either as an improvement or a foil. But if you're just trying to get things done, it's hard to go wrong with it - and in a practical sense, not a "nobody got fired" sense.

simonsarris 3y ago
haha, I basically feel this way about Svelte/Kit. It's not mature, but the surface is so small and learning curve so pleasant that it's our go to choice now for internal webapps. (We have no external webapps because my company, funny enough, builds a JavaScript framework!)
- steve_taylor 3y ago
  > not mature Svelte was first released in 2016 and has become bigger than its original creator, Rich Harris. It has quite a thriving ecosystem and a big community. The tooling around it is more mature than React's has ever been. > surface is so small I actually find the opposite to be true. React still has a relatively small API surface area. One-way data flow makes it easier to understand. However, a smaller surface means arguably less expressivity, so I think Svelte's bigger learning curve is worth it. You can learn about 90% of React in a weekend and be productive. You can learn about 20% of Svelte in a weekend and also be somewhat productive, but you need to learn about 60-70% more to use Svelte as it's intended, rather than as a React alternative.
  - pcstl 3y ago
    How is Svelte intended to be used that is so hard to learn?
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

acjohnson55 3y ago

I see a lot less programming topics, in general.

lloydatkinson 3y ago
Me too, it’s pretty depressing.
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  Blame @dong.
  - lloydatkinson 3y ago
    I can agree with that definitely
aaron695 3y ago
[dead]
smrtinsert 3y ago
Lots of political opinion posts. There seems to be an influx of non technical people posting culture war nonsense.
- the_lonely_road 3y ago
  As the site grows the number of people interested in any specific tech gets smaller while the number of people interested in lifestyle posts (politics being a major category of those) grows. Ruby and or Rust specific posts get much less upvotes and lifestyle posts get much more upvotes and the frontpage with its limited real estate becomes less and less specific tech related. The problem will only continue to get worse as the population of users grows. AI is new and of interest to lots of people so its closer to a lifestyle post at this point than it is a pytorch post that most people would not even click on.
  - 3y ago

ramesh31 3y ago

React won. Angular is officially deprecated, and the others are distant also-rans at this point. React Native has also almost completely taken over iOS development. Thank god we can all just agree on a baseline to work from finally.

Kerrick 3y ago
Do you have a source on Angular Being deprecated? That’s big news that I’ve missed if true.
bebop 3y ago
A point of clarification: angularjs is officially deprecated. Angular is very much still being developed and used for new projects.
duluca 3y ago
“Angular is officially deprecated” Snark or lack of knowledge?
Glooply 3y ago
Angular is officially deprecated by Google? news to me. Wow.
- jeremycarter 3y ago
  It's incorrect. OP has used wrong terminology and should have said angularjs.
whynotmaybe 3y ago
Which angular?
- Alifatisk 3y ago
  There is Angularjs (deprecated) and Angular (alive)
hactually 3y ago

bitwize 3y ago

I found a gut bacteria story here just the other day. Hackernews gonna hackernews. But yeah, JS frameworks seem to have run their course. The corporate world appears to have settled on React. The new thing is, look what I did by futzing with AI.

readyplayernull 3y ago

We need another Jobs to tell us React is shit and restart the cycle again.

kgwxd 3y ago
Will an AI Jobs do?

thomasfromcdnjs 3y ago

Someone should do a GPT analysis of HN submissions to find and catalogue the HN-Meta. The meta being, the general rise and fall of sentiments / curiosities. I've been on here for 15 years and definitely feel phases when it seems like a lull because I am personally not interested in the current hype. Side note: A few months ago, I swear I saw about 150 different databases I had never heard of on here.

jrott 3y ago
there are some weird phases that happen for sure. I've noticed the same thing with programming languages. There are periods where there is tons of stuff about functional programming and then it'll die down again for a while.

Uptrenda 3y ago

tbh i feel like many posts on HN shouldn't make it to the front-page. HN is filled with smart people with tech skills and I have a feeling many of them are gaming the algorithm for self-promotion. Even just getting your friends to upvote something is kind of disingenuous since it bias what should be more objective and we know that people do tend to follow others (social proof.) I don't have a solution. This is symptomatic of quite deep and complex issues. maybe someone will solve this one day.

getmeinrn 3y ago
>maybe someone will solve this It's solved by you going to the new page, reading every submission, and upvoting the interesting ones. Incentivize that.
anonzzzies 3y ago
This feeling why I stopped using my real name (on most sites, not only hear). Upvotes or downvotes don’t mean anything to me as I have nothing to sell to you, not even myself. It’s at least far more relaxed for myself to not have to worry about things that don’t mean anything anyway, like upvotes, downvotes or some flamewar someone wants to start about a tiny opinion of mine; I can just get up/downvoted and move on. Don’t have to be pc either because of fearing for my job if my boss reads something. People, definitely on reddit, are behaving very different as they see they talk to someone who has nothing to lose and where they cannot expect much in return; less warmongering, less dragging on about a subject I was done with 40 comments ago and only 1-2 downvotes max where people commenting a similar opinion under a known name or handle get 50. For me a solution to try is random usernames and changing those when you get doxxed. Nicknames or the same handles across sites won’t work.

duluca 3y ago

IMO a JavaScript revolution is quietly brewing. Today’s frameworks have gotten amazingly complicated and EcmaScript spec is gaining new capabilities at a rapid clip, so some of critical features for modern web dev is built in. This project is a great example of what’s coming https://www.arrow-js.com https://www.arrow-js.com. I think the right move will become avoiding these large and complicated frameworks unless they’re truly called for.

dimal 3y ago
I’m starting to feel the same way. React’s big selling point when it came out was that it was “easy to reason about”, and that was true at the time. With hooks, server components, and 10,000 different strategies for managing state and side effects, I can’t say React is easy to reason about anymore. We can do things now that were impossible back then, but now we need to do even more than that, and it feels like it’s time to take a step back and do something different. I don’t know what that is yet.
- EspressoGPT 3y ago
  Yes. Frontend development has always has been a pendulum swinging between "heavy server, lightweight client" and "lightweight server, heavy client". React brought us to the heavy-client side of things and I think the pendulum is about to swing back.
- prewett 3y ago
  Hooks are particularly bad to reason about. I can't figure out why hooks seems to be the official Way, it just leads to a bunch of spaghetti functions. The old object-oriented approach might feel old and creaky, but OOP was invented for user interface. Functional programming, not so much.
  - unconed 3y ago
    The why of hooks is actually easy to explain, it's just that nobody does it. A complex UI component will usually contain different aspects A, B and C. Each of these requires hooking into the component lifecycle in various ways. In a class/interface-based system, you have to sprinkle parts of A/B/C around in each of the lifecycle methods. The only way to abstract and contain this is to make `<A>` `<B>` `<C>` subcomponents, which comes at a significant cost. Hooks instead allow you to group the bindings to the component lifecycle by aspect instead. You end up making a `useA(…)` `useB(…)` and `useC(…)`, which can not only run directly inline, but can also pass values directly from one to the other, setting up a complex, unconditional reactive data flow in a handful lines of code. In my experience when hooks go wrong it's for a few reasons: - people don't understand how they should useMemo for derived state, and instead emulate the old way with useEffect/setState - react doesn't have an official hook for stateful derived props (i.e. useMemo which has access to the previous value), which leads to a hundred adhoc solutions in every code base - people order their components the wrong way, nesting a source of truth inside a component that needs to derive from it - sometimes, the side-effect free rendering model is a poor fit (e.g. mouse gestures, timers) because there is no guarantee every event is followed by a render... it's much easier to just use idempotent state changes on mutable refs here and tell the react core team to stuff it. By the way, OO pretty much always implies retained mode UI. What React does it bring the benefits of immediate mode UI to a mostly retained world, and this is where FP excels, because you can use optics/lenses/cursors and all that meta-data-manipulation goodness to deal with mutations.

fidotron 3y ago

Anecdotally the layoff wave appears to have hit design and front end more than other areas. Additionally it feels like the dev tools market, which fuelled a lot of new frameworks, is slowing down. For the next couple of years problems will not be technical but business and marketing. No programming framework is going to help.

kgwxd 3y ago

Been that way for a few years I feel. My entire life was cutting-edge JS for 5 years straight around the trends peak. Now it's been a long time since I've come across another developer with a strong opinion about what framework/package manager/compiler should be used. I think that was all mostly about the, very long overdue, burst of advancements in JS engines that IE was holding back for soooo long. Everyone wanted to make THE library that had the best, most efficient, DOM abstraction possible, while taking advantage of any new speed gains the competing engines would release every week. It was a pretty cool time looking back on it but, the competition in that space has stalled and what's left is good and boring enough to easily get by with on any basic project. It's still not great, but that's just how front-end dev work is.

Tommah 3y ago

For a while, it seemed that a new JS framework was coming out every day. There was even a "JavaScript framework of the day" blog, which unfortunately I can't find now. But things really slowed down several years back... I want to say 7 years ago or so. React really does seem to have won, as the other commenters have said. It seems to be the main software taught by coding bootcamps and the like. I suspect that the confusion caused by the Angular 1 -> Angular 2 transition helped React gain the upper hand. There were other JS frameworks floating around that had a considerable number of users (including Ember, Meteor, and Backbone, off the top of my head), but they were nowhere near as popular as React or Angular. (That's my impression, anyway.) Irrespective of the merits of React, it is sad to see the monoculture that has formed around it. I get the same kind of vibes as I did back when Java was everywhere, and comp sci graduates used to have the impression that Java = programming.

quickthrower2 3y ago

The hotter (as in more news worthy, not usage volume) thing in web is minimizing use of JS, using something like HTMX or Phoenix Liveview.

sharts 3y ago

Must be all the recent layoffs.

pie_flavor 3y ago

Every JS framework I have ever seen hit the front page of HN was well-justified in its use-case, and contributed something meaningful to the state of the art. There are a few now and there were a few then. There was never a plague, just people who really love bemoaning plagues from positions that would not have interacted with them anyway.

Waterluvian 3y ago

React is mature. The trick is to not get distracted by shiny things. I still think the whole thing is so overblown. There’s a lot of choice, great! That doesn’t mean you can’t pretend there isn’t.

eyelidlessness 3y ago

It’s interesting seeing so many comments about stabilization around React. It’s not wrong per se, but it’s also not reflective of what I see from the FE community elsewhere. I see a ton of interest in newer frameworks like Astro. Solid has been growing at a steady pace. Qwik is gaining steam. Even older frameworks like Angular and Preact are evolving, eg adopting more reactive features. Vue and Svelte are going strong, albeit probably not gaining much new traction. And people are creating new frameworks (whether for education/demonstration or to introduce new ideas) or building new paradigms on existing ones (even on React, be it Preact Signals or Blockdom). I think the reason these aren’t prominent on HN is because the community here is overwhelmingly skeptical of, if not hostile to, new developments and exploration in the FE/JS space… and because the FE/JS community knows that and is likewise reticent to subject itself to that. That said, it is true that React is a formidable incumbent, and that quite a lot of the space has coalesced around it. I don’t think that’s set in stone, I even think there’s at least some churn coming sooner rather than later. But I don’t expect that to make huge waves on HN unless and until it’s well underway.

yxre 3y ago
I think there are a lot of frameworks on the edge of viability, but the bar is a lot higher than it used to be for front end tooling. React(70%), Angular(25%), and a little bit of Vue.js(5%) is the market for front end positions with React owning the Lion's share. There are always new things being built, but being used is different. The React team has done a great job of being generic enough for a broad range of use cases. As new use-cases arise, someone can build a new framework to support it. SSR has gotten much more popular than the SPA style, and the core React team has moved to support it with server side components. If they can continue to follow the innovators, React will continue to dominate the front end landscape.

robbywashere_ 3y ago

So what I’m getting from reading so many comments here… Did react hooks just totally alienate nearly everyone?

technion 3y ago
I'm not a fan of hooks (and the endless blog posts and opinions that hooks somehow were the invention of functional coding), but react server components did a lot of people in. The default expectations being that react frontends have a node backed isn't how much people use react.
DGCA 3y ago
Not a single frontend dev I know in real life has had the same negative reaction about hooks that I often see on HN. I remember some people taking a little longer to adopt them either cause it wasn’t necessary or cause it didn’t click right away, but eventually everyone learned how to use em, and no one complains about them cause they’re just a tool you use if you use React (which is the framework of choice for most companies). Honestly, the reaction I often see from HN around most frontend topics usually doesn’t match what the frontend and full stack devs I interact with regularly are saying. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we all love React and want to switch state management libraries every week; it’s that React is fine, the ecosystem is fine, and we specifically don’t use every library that comes out week after week.

exabrial 3y ago

https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/ https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/

Alifatisk 3y ago
What’s the latest framework?

hardware2win 3y ago

When it was?

ChatGTP 3y ago

It's pretty hard to see anything but AI related content, so yes.

nsonha 3y ago

Lots of template languages of the week though. As if software engineering didn't have recorded history.

c-hendricks 3y ago

JS developers: fairly progressive HN: fairly conservative JS developers: hey here's an update to a library that's been around for 8 years HN: Why are there new JS frameworks every day??? Also HN: Why aren't people posting about JavaScript here? Edit: I'd fix the formatting but it's not worth it, HN can't bother to interpret a line break, I can't be bothered to accomodate.

dang 3y ago
Hey - 3 of your last 4 comments have been unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or broke the HN guidelines. Can you please not do this? We're trying for something else here. I understand it can be annoying to see posts you disagree with and dislike. Many people jump from that to a general image of the community as hostile to their viewpoint* - but the truth is that there's a stream of things for everyone to dislike here. That follows from the community being so large and diverse. (There's a longer explanation about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 if anyone cares.) Fortunately most of your posts with this account have been fine, though I ran across some other recent ones that broke the site guidelines and were not ok: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364823 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283716 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283716 If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. * I've been trying to persuade users about this for years, though I'm not sure it's worked much: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=story&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

seydor 3y ago

AI kills frameworks

zachmjr 3y ago

Similar to Spring in Java, React became de-facto a standard having now a thriving ecosystem and an enormous community. This is actually probably the largest community if you compare it to any other framework or programming language out there.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

seydor 3y ago

I wonder what will be the next mindless thing related to AI on which programmers will be wasting their days reinventing the wheel every 3 months. Langchain and such?

bilsbie 3y ago

I met a guy who succeeded with just vanilla JS (or whatever they call it now) Even said there were almost no cross browser issues.