[duluca]

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. I think the right move will become avoiding these large and complicated frameworks unless they’re truly called for.

[dimal]

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.

[prewett]

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.

[EspressoGPT]

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.

[austin-cheney]

That, while well intentioned, is probably wishful thinking. Large frameworks do not exist to provide technology capabilities or features. They exist to supplement skill deficits in people, primarily around architecture and composition, and any such features are built upon the stylistic premise they provide.

[awesomeMilou]

> They exist to supplement skill deficits in people, primarily around architecture and composition

That's just another hot take which makes no sense if you think about it. Being able to fit complex features into already existing abstractions is an even more sought after skill with frameworks than without. Frameworks exist to standardize architecture, not to mitigate skill issues.

[albrewer]

> They exist to supplement skill deficits in people

This take really does not take into account the huge value added of 1) not having to roll your own SPA code and 2) the availability of a large workforce that is all familiar with a common design paradigm.

[flying-pig]

https://vanjs.org is another example in that direction. It illustrates that it's even possible to have a full-fledged solution of composing complex reactive DOM tree with just plain JavaScript functions.

[solarkraft]

This is already ongoing in the area of build tools. There's a big competition on efficiency right now, with the fairly light-weight Vite already being the de-facto standard for new projects.

[gardenhedge]

That is trying to replace a framework but doesn't seem to do routing or data storage?

[geysersam]

Arrow.js looks very interesting. Definitely going to try it out.