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.”
Going from jquery to angular was a world of change. But it was relatively simple and fun to write SPAs. But then webpack and react came along… those two are among the most complex JS projects I know of.
Their internal code is nowhere near clean and the concepts neither. They generate immense webpages that are shiny and all but it’s such a large mishmash and keeping track of state with the state manager is horrible.
Also debugging those two projects… Both have convinced me to step away from JS. It’s just too much complexity.
Anti Commercial-AI license
This is the best state management I’ve used, with any front end stack. If you decide to try react again, give it a shot https://github.com/pmndrs/zustand