We should probably settle. Other platforms afford a new UI framework maybe once a decade.
The Web Frontend, already running on top of an apparently inadequate framework called "HTML5", somehow needs to be reinvented every year and it's a huge cost factor.
No it's not, no one is rewritting their front ends every year to change frameworks. React was released 6 years ago, Angular fully released about 3 years ago. Just because some person decided to build something that solved their problem and may help others doesn't mean you need to adopt it and change everything. This argument that everyone needs to slow down because some people don't like hearing about change is ridiculous.
No other platform is as widespread and accessible as the web. There's more developers able to target sites that fit a massive range of uses, more than any other platform ever. So ofcourse there are going to be different needs for different use cases.
> No it's not, no one is rewritting their front ends every year to change frameworks.
Maybe not quite every year, but the dominant frameworks have changed a lot in the past decade and if you're still running some of the "next big things" of yesteryear the developer pressure to switch is strong. The churn is real.
> React was released 6 years ago, Angular fully released about 3 years ago.
In my opinion, React being quite stable over that timeframe is a big factor in it becoming the dominant player. Angular being scrapped and rewritten is exactly what I'm talking about, lots of development effort wasted there.
> This argument that everyone needs to slow down because some people don't like hearing about change is ridiculous.
If the kids want to keep playing with the latest toys, that's fine. Just don't expect the people paying the bills to buy into them.
You have misunderstood the point. I'm not saying "stop creating new frameworks". Create anything you want, I don't care.
When I am talking about "settling down", I'm talking about the people that implement real systems for businesses to use. Those people have to make decisions on the technology they're pushing.
If those people can't settle on a stack and keep changing their minds on how to implement a user interface, somebody has to pay for that. This is akin to a "little fire" in a very real sense - it's burning money that could be used otherwise.
So telling me that "I don't have to use it" is besides the point. I don't run the whole show by myself. Developers need to be reasonably comfortable with their stack. If you are using <outdated stack X> but the whole industry is shifting towards <shiny new stack Y>, people will just quit on you.
Businesses pay to solve business problems, not change frameworks. The majority of software dev requires long-term decision making, commitment and support. Developers who can't solve problems because they're too busy chasing the latest framework aren't going to be getting much work.
People will experiment, and it's good for the industry to have new innovation, but there's really not that much danger of constantly shifting tech stacks unless your team and leadership don't know what they're doing - and if that's the case, you have bigger problems then the tech stack.
> Developers who can't solve problems because they're too busy chasing the latest framework aren't going to be getting much work.
That's not really how hiring works. Nobody is going to put "I failed to get anything done because we re-wrote everything in Svelte" on their resume.
> People will experiment, and it's good for the industry to have new innovation, but there's really not that much danger of constantly shifting tech stacks unless your team and leadership don't know what they're doing - and if that's the case, you have bigger problems then the tech stack.
If you're switching a tech stack, by definition, you don't really know what you're doing. You're treading in unknown territory. You're spending real money for the promise of hopefully increasing productivity in the future. You are speculating.
I'm not saying this is a risk you should never take, there's a downside to never switching stacks too. The idea that you just need the right team and everything will be fine is a fantasy.
I'm saying that people dont constantly switch. It's not that common at all, despite what you might hear in online discussions. And it's usually because most of these projects have real timelines and deliverables, along with a team of people who aren't interested in rewriting everything either.
Of course there are a few teams (even in praised companies) that chase the fad, but they're the sames ones that do things like use CQRS and Kafka for a basic CRUD app.
You're saying people don't constantly switch, but even if they did, it wouldn't be much of a problem unless they don't know what they're doing.
Well, fair enough. I never claimed that businesses switch stacks "constantly" anyway. Still, at the industry level, there is constant flux - much more so than on other platforms. Unless you use one of the big players like React, chances are your framework of choice won't last and become legacy software quite soon.
The Web Frontend, already running on top of an apparently inadequate framework called "HTML5", somehow needs to be reinvented every year and it's a huge cost factor.