Javascript tooling is crazy. A couple years ago I tried to build an older Ionic app that nobody had touched for six months, and the build had just bitrotted. Something somewhere in the dependencies hadn't been screwed down tightly enough, and everything was broken.
I feel like the Yarn 2 package manager is a good move towards in making frontend development more stable (The "Plug'n'Play" feature allows you to store your dependencies in your repo as zip files, just in case), but a lot of libraries are still the wild west.
There are "boring" frameworks like Ember and Angular that move slowly and limit breakage, but they're pretty unpopular with many developers, despite being great for building products in an enterprise setting.
I disagree strongly about browsers; having an extremely stable platform that never breaks backwards compatibility is exactly what the web needs to be. Frontend development tooling would be so much better if it was more like browsers.
> having an extremely stable platform that never breaks backwards compatibility is exactly what the web needs to be. Frontend development tooling would be so much better if it was more like browsers.
This is precisely my fear [1]. I need something robust and will continue to work for a good foreseeable future.
Do you recommend Angular for frontend? I've just tried React and Svelte, but I am told to stay away from Angular as a giant beast.
The Angular team at Google can make whatever changes they want, but they are required to update 1,000+ internal Angular applications if they make a breaking change, so it's a relatively stable framework. There's a new major release every six months, and upgrading is usually fairly painless.
It's fantastic for large applications. I've used it in a large product with hundreds of pages and forms and dialogs, and it would have been a nightmare without the sort of structure that Angular provides. It reminds me of Rails a little bit, in that it's opinionated about how things should work and you might feel some friction if you try to do something unusual.
I've found Angular to be more effective than React at companies with a "developers are cogs" mentality. Angular has opinions about how things should be built and there is a lot of supporting material out there on how to do things the "Angular" way. It's much more heavy weight that React because it's a more comprehensive tool whereas React is just the rendering portion. If you're the type of developer who can push the boundaries of what's being done on the web, you'll be happier with React or other tools. If you want to just follow instructions and tutorials online for how to build a website use Angular or even a CMS.
I definitely second these comments. The app that I maintain at work started with Angular 5. We're now on Angular 11, but upgrades have never been an issue!
I also like how Angular can be quite easy to get started with when simply using two-way data binding without rxjs or some complicated state management library.
Not every company has access to devs who are proficient in reactive state management and functional programming. Angular work surprisingly well for the average developer.
> There are "boring" frameworks like Ember and Angular
I honestly don't agree for Ember at least. Enterprise development is prone to having apps untouched for years and once an Ember application gets that out of date, the route to getting it in date again is... difficult. Have seen with with applications on 1betaX versions, 1.13, 2.14 and no route forward without significant rework, which means they're largely incompatible with the ecosystem now.
> Something somewhere in the dependencies hadn't been screwed down tightly enough, and everything was broken.
The package-lock.json file and the `npm ci` command should take care of any issues like that nowadays. Yarn has also always had its lock file. I wonder what was the root cause here? Did your repo have some deps coming from some other registry than npmjs.com?
I feel like the Yarn 2 package manager is a good move towards in making frontend development more stable (The "Plug'n'Play" feature allows you to store your dependencies in your repo as zip files, just in case), but a lot of libraries are still the wild west.
There are "boring" frameworks like Ember and Angular that move slowly and limit breakage, but they're pretty unpopular with many developers, despite being great for building products in an enterprise setting.
I disagree strongly about browsers; having an extremely stable platform that never breaks backwards compatibility is exactly what the web needs to be. Frontend development tooling would be so much better if it was more like browsers.