Vanilla JS is very powerful and has the features you need to build SPAs without a big framework. Proxies and mutation observers are great for maintaining state, Updating the DOM yourself is fine, view transitions are awesome, etc. The only thing that's hard is routing, but there are lots of small dedicated JS libraries to handle that. Here's one I made that gives you the Express API on the frontend: https://github.com/rooseveltframework/single-page-express
If you're using Proxies and mutation observers you've probably created your own micro-framework. I wrote something like petite-Vue / Alpine as an excersice and it's really not much to them.
What are you talking about with this talk of implosion? It sounds like boogieman nonsense from small children scared of the dark. I prefer to use vanilla JS when writing large SPAs and it works just fine.
There is a stereotype from the outside world that a great many programmers are autistic. The irrational fear of not using a framework for code in the browser is one of those cases that really screams the stereotype for all to see.
If you are using TypeScript there is inbuilt type checking for the DOM, because TypeScript ships with a very good data type library that describes the DOM in excellent detail.
> What are you talking about with this talk of implosion? It sounds like boogieman nonsense from small children scared of the dark. I prefer to use vanilla JS when writing large SPAs and it works just fine.
It’s absolutely not and it absolutely doesn’t. Inheriting a VanillaJS project is often a nightmare because it screams “inexperienced developer” not to use a framework, so the code quality and build processes are often extremely low quality and undocumented.
The complete irrational fear about writing original code is either autism or low intelligence. You wouldn’t be so reliant on a framework if writing in C, Rust, Zig, or most other languages. Developers are reliant on frameworks in JavaScript because they cannot program and the barrier of entry is low enough that anybody can do it.
You come across as an asshole for professing this opinion “everyone else is autistic or dumb”, and also wrong. I would never want to work with you on a team; you seem like the type to flaunt existing best practices at any opportunity.
First of all I said people who claim to be programmers and cannot write original code are either autistic or low intelligence. The emphasis there is on original code. Secondly, I know something about autism, because I have a child with autism.
Look at the comments in this thread. A guy asked a question about vanilla JavaScript, a completely valid question on a site about comments upon programming links, and yet notice all the comments that are instead not about that.
There are so many comments about writing React, which is not what this thread is about. There are so many comments from people talking about themselves instead of actually about programming, much less anything about vanilla JavaScript. There are also comments like yours that are instantly hostility towards anything about original code, a subject that you seem to find horrifying.
Yes, this is incredibly autistic. Some common traits of autism, among many more that each autistic person may or may not have:
* low social intelligence, which in this context displays when developers are only thinking about themselves, what's easiest for them, and cannot think about anything else such as users or business owners
* fragile ego, which in this context results in hostility at subjects that expose a developers shallow capabilities and results in false displays of high confidence to mask deeply felt insecurity
I got tired of working with immature people who, in a technical capacity, could only do a little more that copy/paste template code and were otherwise generally hostile because of high insecurity. I am now in a different line of work where I don't have babysit people.
Writing original code or writing applications without a giant framework isn't challenging, but the subject certainly feels like the world is caving in for a great many people who call themselves seniors or engineers.
Also personally I do not prefer to play podcasts with a podcast app. I just want it to download the files to a directory which I then sync with another audio player. Does your app make that workflow easy?
Other critiques aside, I wish there was more effort put into developing accessible CAPTCHAs that do not require JavaScript. Whatever its merits or flaws are, this CAPTCHA is yet another CAPTCHA that requires JS.
The TL;DR answer to this question is there is a lot of intellectual junk food out there and our monkey brains are pretty vulnerable to succumbing it just as we crave literal junk food and resisting those cravings is very difficult.
If only we had GLP-1 agonists for our minds too and not just our bodies.
In lieu of that, all we've got is the same as always: nurture your mind by cultivating a good media diet, a healthy skepticism that doesn't drift into reactionary contrarianism, and an openness to new information; especially new evidence that contradicts things you believe.
...Which is basically like trying to solve the obesity crisis by telling people to diet and exercise. It would be nice if we had a more effective tool or technique to help a larger percentage of people achieve it.
I think higher education could help with this if it was de-commercialized, which I guess is just another way of saying what you are saying.
I constantly think about The Republic and Glaucon demanding pastries, fine food, etc and Socrates telling him that he can invent such a society, but it will be a society with a fever. I think capitalism, which is distinct, I think, from free markets, produces a society with a fever and in the grip of that fever everything which can be exploited will be.
These aren’t “forests” like in other parts of the West so much as cliffs covered in dry, scrubby brush. I’m pessimistic that they could be systematically cleared or burned in a controlled way.
Burning in a dense residential area…no. Draconian clearing of all trees and brush except for selective fire-aware landscaping…yes, but you are paying significant money to make the residential area look uglier (in some eyes, it’s just a High Desert aesthetic for others), a hard sell.
Similar climates and geographies both either have the issue or manage it better.
Greece is a good example of also not managing this properly with its own regular massive fires, while national parks around Cape Town and other parts of South Africa do regular controlled burns in very rocky, hill-y terrain.
Driving in New York has been terrible for a century. The only way to make it better is to disincentivize people from doing it by making it more costly and making public transit better. Urban planners have known this is the case since at least the 40s.
Congestion pricing isn't some kind of new punishment. It's a bill, long overdue, finally getting paid (and only partially).
I'm not sure Robert Moses knew that. He wasn't an urban planner. He was an urban doer. He made it his life's mission to not learn the actual impact of his work on people's lives. I suspect he took that willful ignorance to his grave.
I didn't mean it in a way that absolves him of responsibility. I mean that he purposefully shut out any information that undermined his self-image as a "great man." That's a form of evil. It's worth differentiating that from other kinds of evil, as I believe it may be the most common.
A well-functioning organization would not devalue people who are more judicious about their use of time, preferring productivity over unnecessary socializing.
But while what you're describing does not describe a well-functioning organization, it's definitely true in practice. People who buck the silly social dynamics in office cultures will be perceived as less productive whether it's true or not and are frequently devalued.
A knee-jerk response to what I just wrote of course will be maybe those people just can't see the real value of all these allegedly silly office rituals, but before you jump to that conclusion, consider the possibility that it's at least equally likely that the people perpetrating the rituals are overvaluing them.
The point is all of these social dynamics and office rituals should be open to being reexamined every so often to see if they're truly adding the value people think they're adding so they don't devolve into rituals people do because they're rituals. Keep the good ones, ditch the useless ones, and be proactive about objectively evaluating which are which.
The organization doesn't devalue people. Other individuals feel put-off and alienated by people who act the way the author of the article describes. Like it or not personal relationships matter, reducing friction matters, and small talk and the apparently wasteful social rituals can add to team and organization cohesion. Lone wolves, high-performing or not, get perceived as not team players, not someone willing to help others even with small things, hostile to routine human interaction.
Some workplaces go too far in one direction or another. I would prefer working in a more casual and friendly environment even if that meant engaging in idle chit-chat and signing birthdays cards, rather than a workplace where everyone had to shut up and pretend to optimize their performance. In my long career I have always found jobs and freelance work through friends and former work colleagues, and a big part of that comes down to them perceiving me as someone they enjoyed working with and hanging out with, not just someone who optimized my productivity and told them to buzz off because I had to write more code.
> People who buck the silly social dynamics in office cultures will be perceived as less productive whether it's true or not and are frequently devalued.
Younger, I would have agreed with your sentiment. Now, I appreciate good coworkers. If I don't have a socialisation outlet during the day, it's just draining and I burn out faster. If you're a person that is just a grumpy Gus isolated in their cubicle, you can make your team less effective and undermine the team spirit.
This is where I feel like management fails. To build a team you need to really pick personalities that work well together and honing and tuning the group composition is something that managers can do. Put the introverts together. Put night owls together. Parents are more understanding of taking something to over to cover for someone because they need it sometimes too.
At a certain point it just doesn't make sense to over-optimize for being highly interruptible, when the sacrifice (productivity) isn't worth the gain (satisfy outdated notions of office etiquette designed by extroverts who want to vampire other people's attention unnecessarily).
