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Stack Overflow Stats Reveal 'the Brutal Lifecycle of JavaScript Frameworks' (stackoverflow.blog)
A developer on the Internal Tools team at Stack Overflow reveals some new statistics from their 'Trends' tool:
JavaScript UI frameworks and libraries work in cycles. Every six months or so, a new one pops up, claiming that it has revolutionized UI development. Thousands of developers adopt it into their new projects, blog posts are written, Stack Overflow questions are asked and answered, and then a newer (and even more revolutionary) framework pops up to usurp the throne...
There appears to be a quick ascent, as the framework gains popularity and then a slightly less quick but steady decline as developers adopt newer technologies. These lifecycles only last a couple of years. Starting around 2011, there seems to be major adoption of a couple of competing frameworks: Backbone, Knockout, and Ember. Questions about these tags appear to grow until around 2013 and have been in steady decline since, at about the same time as AngularJS started growing. The latest startup is the Vue.js framework, which has shown quick adoption, as it is one of the fastest growing tags on Stack Overflow. Only time can tell how long this growth will last.
"Let's be honest," the post concludes. "The size of a developer community certainly counts; it contributes to a thriving open source environment, and makes it easier to find help on Stack Overflow."
There appears to be a quick ascent, as the framework gains popularity and then a slightly less quick but steady decline as developers adopt newer technologies. These lifecycles only last a couple of years. Starting around 2011, there seems to be major adoption of a couple of competing frameworks: Backbone, Knockout, and Ember. Questions about these tags appear to grow until around 2013 and have been in steady decline since, at about the same time as AngularJS started growing. The latest startup is the Vue.js framework, which has shown quick adoption, as it is one of the fastest growing tags on Stack Overflow. Only time can tell how long this growth will last.
"Let's be honest," the post concludes. "The size of a developer community certainly counts; it contributes to a thriving open source environment, and makes it easier to find help on Stack Overflow."
You throw it away and start over. There are a million JavaScript monkeys out there that are willing to do it. It keeps them busy.
There is so much wrong about Javascript revealed here that I think we have to question its use going forwards.
The language itself is a great start to programming websites but the need for frameworks, which become "flavours of the month" that makes support so much more difficult as time goes on and the framework goes out of favour resulting in companies scrambling to find people with the skills to maintain them (sort of a short term Cobol analog). This gets worse when you realize that most web page developers don't know how to code and are using published features of the frameworks or example snippets on things like Stack Overflow.
What about security of the various frameworks and ensuring they don't do anything nefarious. I guess the extreme examples would be collecting customer data and running cryptocurrency miners on end-users webpages - but I'm sure there are a lot of more minor security issues that can be hidden in these frameworks.
Finally, I have to wonder about the maintainability of all these frameworks. On one hand, I guess frameworks with issues get identified by the community quickly and are abandoned (but, going back to the previous point, companies have to spend more money because their developers aren't competent to move the page to different frameworks).
I'm not sure I see a solution for these problems. Maybe WebAssembly will be the ultimate solution (with tested and supported libraries that web developers can use and rely on) but I'm hoping that W3C and other groups are looking ahead to the next generation of web development tools.
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Exactly this. The problem with Angular and all the other libraries is that they're trying to solve the problems of 'simple' libraries like jQuery but then end up even more complex or break all sorts of convention and expectation trying very hard not to become jQuery, and then you get a new library trying to solve whatever problem is in that library.
What you need in a framework (regardless of language) is not complexity (trying to do "everything") but simplicity. If the framework is dictating how your application should work/flow/represent the data, you're going to run in a situation sooner or later where your framework doesn't quite fit your problem and then you'll spend an eternity trying to make it work and you'll end up writing most of your code in the native language anyway.
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All the effort people go through to design a site with shittons of flashy interactive bullshit, then I come along and strip every last bit of it out with adblock filters until the page is nothing but a 5 kb text file with just the info I actually came to see.