The rebelling against JavaScript frameworks continues. In the latest Lex Fridman interview, AI app developer Pieter Levels explained that he builds all his apps with vanilla HTML, PHP, a bit of JavaScript via jQuery, and SQLite. No fancy JavaScript frameworks, no modern programming languages, no Wasm.
“I’m seeing a revival now,” said Levels, regarding PHP. “People are getting sick of frameworks. All the JavaScript frameworks are so… what do you call it, like [un]wieldy. It takes so much work to just maintain this code, and then it updates to a new version, you need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.”
More than a decade in. I started with WordPress and PHP+jQuery. Then moved through the entire JS Framework suite of angular, react, Vue, svelte… I’m not as exhausted as the author. But I’m pretty tired. All the JS projects require frequent maintenance. Where the PHP project gathering dust on PHP 5.6, it only took me a few days to bring it up to PHP 8.2 and update all the libraries. It would be 10x as long were it a JA Framework.
I blame bootcamps who adopted React and only taught that. Watching devs hate on JS because they decided to do web development in React. Not to mention the many many convoluted patterns in React over the past 8 years makes it incredibly challenging to update projects.