[bmgxyz]

When I started my last job, I thought I was going to be writing a lot of Python and C. It turned out that the position had a lot more React and TypeScript than I expected, and at first I was annoyed and afraid. I wasn't a frontend developer---or worse, a designer---but I didn't have much of a choice, so I dug in and learned the stack.

At first I resisted every change. What good is VS Code when I have Vim? Why would I learn TypeScript when vanilla JS has "worked" for me for so long? What's a Webpack config?

Once I began using the tools that my coworkers recommended, I started treading water and even swimming with purpose in the ocean of Web UI technology. I still have a lot to learn, but I probably would have kept on avoiding this area if my situation hadn't forced me into it. Letting my guard down and following the trends in my group helped a lot in this case.

The best lessons I learned during that period are that learning can't kill me and using good tools doesn't make you a bad engineer.

[j-pb]

I'm glad that you had such a positive experience! After years of web development I'm just burnt out by the tooling.

Layers upon layers, just make debugging so unnecessarily hard. The tooling is brittle and buggy.

I've seen typescript compiler bugs, webpack segfaults, and whatnot. I've started to ban typescript and jsx from all future projects, and it's better, but still a nightmare.

[jspash]

I’m on the fence but painfully with both feet on the ground. However it wouldn’t take stiff wind to knock me back on to the plain ol JS side.

I’m currently “rewriting” a vue.js app for the sole reason that we’ve just lost a senior dev who was the only one who could stomach the thing. We’ve taken on two juniors in his place and there is absolutely no way they would be able to dig into this thing.

The process has been quite enjoyable and we’re just about at feature parity at 1/10 LOC. And the juniors are quite keen at picking up typescript and lots of other useful things along the way.

Had they just been dumped into the vue pool, things would have turned out much differently.

I await the day a few months from now when they “discover” this new thing called vue and want to rewrite the entire thing!

[Xevi]

As a mainly frontend developer, I agree. I've spent more time configuring tooling, than writing code, in this new project I'm starting. I don't want to write plain JS, but the top used frameworks have strayed so far from basic JS that it's getting a bit ridiculous.

Svelte appears to get rid of some of the boilerplate and verbosity stuff you find in other frameworks, though it's still a pretty magic framework. Looking forward to trying out SvelteKit.

[mikesabbagh]

The thing is, complexity cant be destroyed. You can just move it from one framework to another

[oraphalous]

Interesting that you're reacting against the Typescript trend...

I'm personally starting to wonder if/when the backlash against Typescript will gain steam.