👊 In Defense of the Front 👊

# [ $davids.sh ] · message #227

• @ [ $davids.sh ] · # 1291

  I think frontend is an awesome field, it's just personally very difficult for me due to its chaotic nature.

  And before I start explaining the individual points from the last post, I want to first list the undeniably cool consequences of frontend:

  . It's an amazing springboard for developers – a looooot of people started with frontend. Why? Because it's interactive, interesting, you can learn it on your own at home in a year and get a decent salary. What's there to even say: 10 years ago I myself started with frontend.

  . Thanks to the web, true cross-platform compatibility has emerged – billions of dollars, tens of thousands of hours, and 2 truckloads of developer nerves have been saved thanks to the fact that now more than half of desktop applications and 30% of mobile ones are browsers disguised as native apps. And before you start spewing: "but it eats all my RAM" – think about the fact that it's precisely because of this that (1) you get new and convenient functionality quickly and immediately on all platforms, (2) products now cost around $10 per month, whereas if they were made natively they would cost $30-50 to recoup the native developers.

  . The trend for component-based UI has been created – I once delved into iOS development and was simply shocked by how complex UI and logic work there... even html + jquery were much more pleasant due to their tree-like structure. And then React appeared, and then it became simply calling functions, and then hooks appeared... honestly, the very process of writing Function React Components + Hooks gives me mini-orgasms, it's indescribably beautiful from concept to implementation and at the same time works perfectly... And the component-based approach has finally started to seep into native development, which is entirely thanks to the web.

  Now for the points from the last post:

  . The browser is a necessary evil – an important feature of backend is that we don't render graphics. And that's incredibly difficult. If you take a spectrum, with backend on the left and Unreal Engine on the right, the browser would be somewhere in the middle. So, making it so that a person can learn to visualize something in a browser in a couple of months is an incredible achievement that gave the web "mass adoption."

  . UI libs + Compilers – in general, if you join a good team and use some technologies that have been established over the last 3-4 years, you can get used to everything and choose your own path, and then every 3-4 years replace something with something newer. Again, I hope the JS community cools down with releasing new features for frontend in about 5-10 years.

  . node_modules – this garbage is inexcusable, BUT it's not a frontend problem, but a JS problem itself (because on Node.js it's a bit better, but roughly the same), we can't escape it.

  To summarize – frontend, backend, native, ML, blockchain, computer vision, etc. is everyone's choice, each direction has a lot of garbage and a lot of pluses, the important thing is that you choose the garbage that you're okay with.