Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36780295

by jjdeveloper • 3 years ago

126 130 3 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Does this mean we are slowing down and things will mature? Hopefully.

orf• 3 years ago

Nature is healing.

the_only_law• 3 years ago

Yeah and it’s been like that for a while. I’ve been a bit confused by people here thinking that’s still a thing in recent months. Personally I stopped caring several years ago though, so maybe I just subconsciously filter it out

TruthWillHurt• 3 years ago

GPT knowledge cutoff is eons ago in js time.

They all had to go back to React for it to write code for them :D

emehex2• 3 years ago

I think about this a lot. About how ChatGPT is perhaps cementing a lot incumbent tech right now. I wonder if the existence of these tools might actually slow down advances in frameworks, packages, libraries, etc...

cirrus3• 3 years ago

I don't think about it at all. ChatGPT isn't able to actually do anything I actually need to as a software developer. Code is the easy part, getting good requirements from stakeholders and implementing it as business logic that meets the goals of various other internal concerns is the hard part. ChatGPT doesn't know anything about that stuff.

Sometimes I wonder if anyone clutching their pearls about LLM stuff being able to replace them has actually done any real valuable work as dev.

loveparade• 3 years ago

AI "frameworks" like langchain have overtaken the space JS frameworks took previously.

muzani• 3 years ago

There was a point where over half of them were React and everyone seems satisfied with that.

jfengel• 3 years ago

All of the JS framework posts I do see are about how they don't like React. There are two kinds of frameworks, the kind people don't complain about, and the kind they use.

So it seems people mostly settled on React. They're grumpy about it but it does the job and there seems to be no alternative compelling enough to complain about.

EamonnMR• 3 years ago

Compared to what we had before, react is pretty nice.

frfl• 3 years ago

HN posts follow tech hype. AI is hot right now. Another thing will come and take its place in due time.

dylan6042• 3 years ago

AI generated crypto funded JS framework written in Rust

steve_adams_862• 3 years ago

JS framework written in Rust

This isn't far from reality these days

ChatGTP2• 3 years ago

Take my money

imhoguy• 3 years ago

Web distributed AI singularity implemented in Rust as JS/WASM/WebGPU app with crypto infrastructure to gamify crowd-sourced training and use - not too far really..

jrajav• 3 years ago

React is now the de facto choice and much less painful than past de facto choices, is my take on why. It has a mature and healthy ecosystem, and its relatively small surface makes it easy to learn and predictable, while declarative GUI in general is low on footguns compared to ye ol two-way data binding.

Many of the competitors springing up define themselves in terms of React, either as an improvement or a foil. But if you're just trying to get things done, it's hard to go wrong with it - and in a practical sense, not a "nobody got fired" sense.

simonsarris2• 3 years ago

haha, I basically feel this way about Svelte/Kit. It's not mature, but the surface is so small and learning curve so pleasant that it's our go to choice now for internal webapps.

(We have no external webapps because my company, funny enough, builds a JavaScript framework!)

steve_taylor• 3 years ago

not mature

Svelte was first released in 2016 and has become bigger than its original creator, Rich Harris. It has quite a thriving ecosystem and a big community. The tooling around it is more mature than React's has ever been.

surface is so small

I actually find the opposite to be true. React still has a relatively small API surface area. One-way data flow makes it easier to understand. However, a smaller surface means arguably less expressivity, so I think Svelte's bigger learning curve is worth it. You can learn about 90% of React in a weekend and be productive. You can learn about 20% of Svelte in a weekend and also be somewhat productive, but you need to learn about 60-70% more to use Svelte as it's intended, rather than as a React alternative.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I'm not a web dev anymore, I stopped right around the time hooks became a thing in React, and while Svelte was an exciting technology no big players had adopted yet. In fact the last thing I did for my old job was a little make-work exploration to test whether Svelte was was ready for them to use in prime time. My conclusion was that it was remarkably slick and empowering, but was not ready yet due to the lack of ecosystem support. It's cool that Svelte and its community has continued to grow to the point where it is a legitimate contender. I'll be honest, I never liked React very much and would love to see it dethroned, even though I have almost no stake in that anymore!

mrieck• 3 years ago

Doesn't sound like a very promising company if your own developers rather use a different framework than dogfood their own. Isn't that kind of admitting defeat?

hellojason• 3 years ago

I believe WordPress choosing React as its frontend framework of choice further solidified this point.

square_usual2• 3 years ago

React doesn't have a "relatively small surface" any more, because even the React team doesn't recommend that you use "just" React. It's all frameworks on top of React like Next or Remix, and those are more complex, have many involved concepts and come with footguns. I have seen many, many sites switch to Next and completely bungle it, making the user experience worse than it was before the change.

(Of course, even React itself has gotten fairly complex with Hooks, Suspense and the dreaded Server Components.)

gejose• 3 years ago

I have seen many, many sites switch to Next and completely bungle it, making the user experience worse than it was before the change.

What are some specific sites you've seen that adopted react and ended up worse as a result of it?

doesn't have a "relatively small surface" any more, because even the React team doesn't recommend that you use "just" React

Isn't this evidence of it having a relatively small surface area that frameworks and other tools can build on top of, much like html, css etc?

goodoldneon2• 3 years ago

You can still use just React. No one is forcing you to use Next or Remix

austin-cheney4• 3 years ago

I remember hearing exactly the same words about jQuery a decade ago. This is bias stacked on comfort using a bandwagon mythology as a qualifier.

SkyPuncher• 3 years ago

Jquery worked for a world that was mostly html with some sticking a of JavaScript. In fact, it still does.

React is just a better approach to building all-encompassing SPAs.

TechBro86152• 3 years ago

Hold that thought. Many people are saying React has jumped the shark with the complexity of server components and tight coupling with favored frameworks like Next.js

I wouldn't be surprised to see some movement toward simpler but equally robust frameworks like Vue or Svelte.

theironhammer• 3 years ago

Or SolidJS which uses Signals.

oliwarner• 3 years ago

React is now the de facto choice

I contract for a few companies and everyone seems to have a different take on the industry standard.

React may well be biggest, but I don't think it's possible dominance is the reason there are fewer framework posts on HN recently.

antegamisou• 3 years ago

Yes, now it's full of LLM grifter type of shit.

acjohnson55• 3 years ago

I see a lot less programming topics, in general.

lloydatkinson2• 3 years ago

Me too, it’s pretty depressing.

sdfghswe• 3 years ago

Blame @dong.

smrtinsert• 3 years ago

Lots of political opinion posts. There seems to be an influx of non technical people posting culture war nonsense.

the_lonely_road• 3 years ago

As the site grows the number of people interested in any specific tech gets smaller while the number of people interested in lifestyle posts (politics being a major category of those) grows. Ruby and or Rust specific posts get much less upvotes and lifestyle posts get much more upvotes and the frontpage with its limited real estate becomes less and less specific tech related. The problem will only continue to get worse as the population of users grows.

AI is new and of interest to lots of people so its closer to a lifestyle post at this point than it is a pytorch post that most people would not even click on.

rchaud• 3 years ago

Sam Altman is testifying in Congress. Elon Musk is retweeting culture war BS all day. Tens of thousands of tech jobs are being slashed by CEOs as the cheap money tap gets turned off.

Why would things not be getting political?

ilikecakeandpie• 3 years ago

The people who left reddit due to the API pricing had to go somewhere I guess

meiraleal• 3 years ago

the programming moved to the forums discussing AI technically, here it is discussed mainly AI tools

ramesh312• 3 years ago

React won.

Angular is officially deprecated, and the others are distant also-rans at this point. React Native has also almost completely taken over iOS development. Thank god we can all just agree on a baseline to work from finally.

Kerrick• 3 years ago

Do you have a source on Angular Being deprecated? That’s big news that I’ve missed if true.

bebop• 3 years ago

A point of clarification: angularjs is officially deprecated. Angular is very much still being developed and used for new projects.

duluca2• 3 years ago

“Angular is officially deprecated”

Snark or lack of knowledge?

Glooply• 3 years ago

Angular is officially deprecated by Google? news to me. Wow.

jeremycarter• 3 years ago

It's incorrect. OP has used wrong terminology and should have said angularjs.

whynotmaybe• 3 years ago

Which angular?

Alifatisk3• 3 years ago

There is Angularjs (deprecated) and Angular (alive)

hactually• 3 years ago

Did react win? Or did it become the foundation for Next.js?

We're using Vue here and missed the memo about it being an also run :)

ramesh312• 3 years ago

We're using Vue here and missed the memo about it being an also run :)

I don't hate Vue and I wouldn't judge anyone for choosing it, but my question is... why? It just seems like that entire community is set on reinventing every React feature with a two year delay.

hoofhearted• 3 years ago

Google hasn’t updated the Angular 1 documentation since 2020.

bitwize• 3 years ago

I found a gut bacteria story here just the other day. Hackernews gonna hackernews.

But yeah, JS frameworks seem to have run their course. The corporate world appears to have settled on React. The new thing is, look what I did by futzing with AI.

readyplayernull• 3 years ago

We need another Jobs to tell us React is shit and restart the cycle again.

kgwxd2• 3 years ago

Will an AI Jobs do?

thomasfromcdnjs• 3 years ago

Someone should do a GPT analysis of HN submissions to find and catalogue the HN-Meta. The meta being, the general rise and fall of sentiments / curiosities.

I've been on here for 15 years and definitely feel phases when it seems like a lull because I am personally not interested in the current hype.

Side note: A few months ago, I swear I saw about 150 different databases I had never heard of on here.

jrott• 3 years ago

there are some weird phases that happen for sure. I've noticed the same thing with programming languages. There are periods where there is tons of stuff about functional programming and then it'll die down again for a while.

Uptrenda• 3 years ago

tbh i feel like many posts on HN shouldn't make it to the front-page. HN is filled with smart people with tech skills and I have a feeling many of them are gaming the algorithm for self-promotion. Even just getting your friends to upvote something is kind of disingenuous since it bias what should be more objective and we know that people do tend to follow others (social proof.) I don't have a solution. This is symptomatic of quite deep and complex issues. maybe someone will solve this one day.

getmeinrn• 3 years ago

maybe someone will solve this

It's solved by you going to the new page, reading every submission, and upvoting the interesting ones. Incentivize that.

anonzzzies• 3 years ago

This feeling why I stopped using my real name (on most sites, not only hear). Upvotes or downvotes don’t mean anything to me as I have nothing to sell to you, not even myself. It’s at least far more relaxed for myself to not have to worry about things that don’t mean anything anyway, like upvotes, downvotes or some flamewar someone wants to start about a tiny opinion of mine; I can just get up/downvoted and move on. Don’t have to be pc either because of fearing for my job if my boss reads something.

People, definitely on reddit, are behaving very different as they see they talk to someone who has nothing to lose and where they cannot expect much in return; less warmongering, less dragging on about a subject I was done with 40 comments ago and only 1-2 downvotes max where people commenting a similar opinion under a known name or handle get 50.

For me a solution to try is random usernames and changing those when you get doxxed. Nicknames or the same handles across sites won’t work.

duluca2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

EspressoGPT• 3 years ago

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.

prewett• 3 years ago

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.

solarkraft• 3 years ago

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.

austin-cheney4• 3 years ago

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.

awesomeMilou2• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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• 3 years ago

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.

geysersam• 3 years ago

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

gardenhedge• 3 years ago

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

fidotron• 3 years ago

Anecdotally the layoff wave appears to have hit design and front end more than other areas. Additionally it feels like the dev tools market, which fuelled a lot of new frameworks, is slowing down.

For the next couple of years problems will not be technical but business and marketing. No programming framework is going to help.

kgwxd2• 3 years ago

Been that way for a few years I feel. My entire life was cutting-edge JS for 5 years straight around the trends peak. Now it's been a long time since I've come across another developer with a strong opinion about what framework/package manager/compiler should be used.

I think that was all mostly about the, very long overdue, burst of advancements in JS engines that IE was holding back for soooo long. Everyone wanted to make THE library that had the best, most efficient, DOM abstraction possible, while taking advantage of any new speed gains the competing engines would release every week. It was a pretty cool time looking back on it but, the competition in that space has stalled and what's left is good and boring enough to easily get by with on any basic project. It's still not great, but that's just how front-end dev work is.

Tommah• 3 years ago

For a while, it seemed that a new JS framework was coming out every day. There was even a "JavaScript framework of the day" blog, which unfortunately I can't find now. But things really slowed down several years back... I want to say 7 years ago or so. React really does seem to have won, as the other commenters have said. It seems to be the main software taught by coding bootcamps and the like. I suspect that the confusion caused by the Angular 1 -> Angular 2 transition helped React gain the upper hand. There were other JS frameworks floating around that had a considerable number of users (including Ember, Meteor, and Backbone, off the top of my head), but they were nowhere near as popular as React or Angular. (That's my impression, anyway.)

Irrespective of the merits of React, it is sad to see the monoculture that has formed around it. I get the same kind of vibes as I did back when Java was everywhere, and comp sci graduates used to have the impression that Java = programming.

quickthrower2• 3 years ago

The hotter (as in more news worthy, not usage volume) thing in web is minimizing use of JS, using something like HTMX or Phoenix Liveview.

sharts• 3 years ago

Must be all the recent layoffs.

pie_flavor• 3 years ago

Every JS framework I have ever seen hit the front page of HN was well-justified in its use-case, and contributed something meaningful to the state of the art. There are a few now and there were a few then. There was never a plague, just people who really love bemoaning plagues from positions that would not have interacted with them anyway.

Waterluvian• 3 years ago

React is mature. The trick is to not get distracted by shiny things. I still think the whole thing is so overblown. There’s a lot of choice, great! That doesn’t mean you can’t pretend there isn’t.

eyelidlessness2• 3 years ago

It’s interesting seeing so many comments about stabilization around React. It’s not wrong per se, but it’s also not reflective of what I see from the FE community elsewhere. I see a ton of interest in newer frameworks like Astro. Solid has been growing at a steady pace. Qwik is gaining steam. Even older frameworks like Angular and Preact are evolving, eg adopting more reactive features. Vue and Svelte are going strong, albeit probably not gaining much new traction. And people are creating new frameworks (whether for education/demonstration or to introduce new ideas) or building new paradigms on existing ones (even on React, be it Preact Signals or Blockdom).

I think the reason these aren’t prominent on HN is because the community here is overwhelmingly skeptical of, if not hostile to, new developments and exploration in the FE/JS space… and because the FE/JS community knows that and is likewise reticent to subject itself to that.

That said, it is true that React is a formidable incumbent, and that quite a lot of the space has coalesced around it. I don’t think that’s set in stone, I even think there’s at least some churn coming sooner rather than later. But I don’t expect that to make huge waves on HN unless and until it’s well underway.

yxre• 3 years ago

I think there are a lot of frameworks on the edge of viability, but the bar is a lot higher than it used to be for front end tooling. React(70%), Angular(25%), and a little bit of Vue.js(5%) is the market for front end positions with React owning the Lion's share. There are always new things being built, but being used is different.

The React team has done a great job of being generic enough for a broad range of use cases. As new use-cases arise, someone can build a new framework to support it. SSR has gotten much more popular than the SPA style, and the core React team has moved to support it with server side components.

If they can continue to follow the innovators, React will continue to dominate the front end landscape.

robbywashere_• 3 years ago

So what I’m getting from reading so many comments here… Did react hooks just totally alienate nearly everyone?

technion• 3 years ago

I'm not a fan of hooks (and the endless blog posts and opinions that hooks somehow were the invention of functional coding), but react server components did a lot of people in. The default expectations being that react frontends have a node backed isn't how much people use react.

DGCA• 3 years ago

Not a single frontend dev I know in real life has had the same negative reaction about hooks that I often see on HN.

I remember some people taking a little longer to adopt them either cause it wasn’t necessary or cause it didn’t click right away, but eventually everyone learned how to use em, and no one complains about them cause they’re just a tool you use if you use React (which is the framework of choice for most companies).

Honestly, the reaction I often see from HN around most frontend topics usually doesn’t match what the frontend and full stack devs I interact with regularly are saying. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not like we all love React and want to switch state management libraries every week; it’s that React is fine, the ecosystem is fine, and we specifically don’t use every library that comes out week after week.

exabrial• 3 years ago

https://dayssincelastjavascriptframework.com/

Alifatisk3• 3 years ago

What’s the latest framework?

hardware2win• 3 years ago

When it was?

ChatGTP2• 3 years ago

It's pretty hard to see anything but AI related content, so yes.

nsonha• 3 years ago

Lots of template languages of the week though. As if software engineering didn't have recorded history.

c-hendricks• 3 years ago

JS developers: fairly progressive HN: fairly conservative

JS developers: hey here's an update to a library that's been around for 8 years HN: Why are there new JS frameworks every day???

Also HN: Why aren't people posting about JavaScript here?

Edit: I'd fix the formatting but it's not worth it, HN can't bother to interpret a line break, I can't be bothered to accomodate.

dang• 3 years ago

Hey - 3 of your last 4 comments have been unsubstantive and/or flamebait and/or broke the HN guidelines. Can you please not do this? We're trying for something else here.

I understand it can be annoying to see posts you disagree with and dislike. Many people jump from that to a general image of the community as hostile to their viewpoint* - but the truth is that there's a stream of things for everyone to dislike here. That follows from the community being so large and diverse. (There's a longer explanation about this at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098 if anyone cares.)

Fortunately most of your posts with this account have been fine, though I ran across some other recent ones that broke the site guidelines and were not ok:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364904

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36364823

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36283716

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

* I've been trying to persuade users about this for years, though I'm not sure it's worked much: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

seydor2• 3 years ago

AI kills frameworks

zachmjr• 3 years ago

Similar to Spring in Java, React became de-facto a standard having now a thriving ecosystem and an enormous community. This is actually probably the largest community if you compare it to any other framework or programming language out there.

seydor2• 3 years ago

I wonder what will be the next mindless thing related to AI on which programmers will be wasting their days reinventing the wheel every 3 months. Langchain and such?

bilsbie• 3 years ago

I met a guy who succeeded with just vanilla JS (or whatever they call it now)

Even said there were almost no cross browser issues.

slorber• 3 years ago

That's because React developers are not on hacker news anymore, they are all reading my newsletter thisweekinreact.com (wink wink)

Ask HN: Anyone else notice that HN isn’t full of JavaScript frameworks lately?

Related Stories