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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•11mo ago

Comments

copypaper•11mo ago
I would personally never touch a frontend not written with a framework. Sounds like a terrible developer experience--especially with a team. But from reading your article, it sounds like your issue is with React itself. I would recommend you try Svelte, it sounds like what you're looking for. It's as close to vanilla js as you can get with all the benefits of a framework.
LAC-Tech•11mo ago
What benefits of a framework?

I think that's why I wrote this - I almost completely fail to see them.

proc0•11mo ago
I think React caved in to wider adoption pressure to introduce abstractions that are intuitive on the surface level but are costly in terms of large scale complexity.

> It's "declarative" right up until you're debugging stateful hooks, or resorting to useRef, or trying to reason about when a "component" re-renders

Maybe they should have modularized the core library more and have these things be separate, because the core idea of a uniflow pattern with reactivity is good.

I think what happened, at least in frontend, is that the industry pushed away from having engineers do any design or architecting on the frontend. All of these high level patterns have been "outsourced" to frameworks, and the result usually is something that has trouble scaling and adjusting to whatever domain it's in.

LAC-Tech•11mo ago
Maybe they should have modularized the core library more and have these things be separate, because the core idea of a uniflow pattern with reactivity is good.

That's what SolidJS does. IE the signal implementation is completely stand alone. I feel like it's better at doing what react purports to do then react is.

* think what happened, at least in frontend, is that the industry pushed away from having engineers do any design or architecting on the frontend. All of these high level patterns have been "outsourced" to frameworks*

I don't think react patterns are particularly high level, or do they save you from architecture. Whether it's vanilla JS or react, you still have to design.

proc0•11mo ago
Oh I haven't looked at Solidjs yet, interesting will take a look. And yeah you may still need to design your application, but having hooks be something that is out-of-the-box pushes you into certain patterns and needs to be actively ignored to avoid its design influence. I've worked in large codebases where they make almost everything into hooks, and they start getting ridiculous, breaking composability but at the same time giving the illusion that you are making your code more modular.
GianFabien•11mo ago
I write web front-ends for industrial embedded systems. So my experience might differ from business WebApps.

In my experience it requires a longer learning curve for the various frameworks than to simply learn the relevant Web API. My learning is very much JIT and over time I have built up a robust class library that gets my stuff done. When I get stuck ChatGPT suggests fixes that sometimes work and spare me from losing more hair.

LAC-Tech•11mo ago
My experience too - part of what I found is how much about how react worked I'd forgotten. But the browser itself was easier to pick up.

Personal computing in the Anthropocene with eyes, minds and hearts wide open

https://smol.earth/manifesto.html
1•NoGravitas•36s ago•0 comments

Jeff Bezos Nears $10B Funding Round for Project Prometheus

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-04-21/jeff-bezos-nears-10-billion-funding-round-for-...
1•gmays•1m ago•0 comments

Sintopia

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2213700/Sintopia/
1•doener•2m ago•0 comments

Ars Technica newsroom AI policy

https://arstechnica.com/staff/2026/04/our-newsroom-ai-policy/
3•LorenDB•3m ago•0 comments

Hofmann Typeface (2023)

https://www.itsnicethat.com/articles/nguyen-gobber-hofmann-graphic-design-project-111223
1•NKosmatos•3m ago•0 comments

Olive CSS: Lisp powered vanilla CSS utility-Class A la Tailwind

https://codeberg.org/jjba23/olive-css
1•jjba23•5m ago•0 comments

Sacrifice your job for the glorious AI future

https://disconnect.blog/sacrifice-your-job-for-the-glorious-ai-future/
1•cdrnsf•5m ago•0 comments

Creativity Harness: Adobe will be fine

https://avkcode.github.io/blog/creative-widgets-should-produce-files.html
1•KyleVlaros•10m ago•0 comments

Microplastics in testicles may play a role in male infertility, study suggests

https://weillcornell.org/news/microplastics-in-testicles-may-play-a-role-in-male-infertility-stud...
1•vinni2•10m ago•0 comments

Show HN: OpenDeck – DIY MIDI Platform Based on Zephyr RTOS

https://github.com/shanteacontrols/OpenDeck
2•somemisopaste•10m ago•0 comments

Intel Ends Open Ecosystem Community/Evangelism

https://www.phoronix.com/news/Intel-Ends-OSS-Evangelism-Repos
1•doener•11m ago•0 comments

Insights into firewood use by early Middle Pleistocene hominins

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379126001824
1•wslh•13m ago•0 comments

Show HN: FourthSpace – Bridging Social Media with Your Social Life

https://www.fourthspace.vip
2•adra_1010•15m ago•0 comments

Tesla earnings updates: The stock is up after revenue and EPS beat Wall Street's

https://www.businessinsider.com/tesla-q1-earnings-updates-tsla-stock-robotaxis-elon-musk-2026-4
2•paulpauper•16m ago•0 comments

US saw record high of 5,668 books banned in libraries in 2025, says agency

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/22/us-libraries-banned-books
5•vinni2•18m ago•0 comments

Bad habits are destroying your charging cables

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260421-your-bad-habits-are-destroying-your-charging-cables
3•devonnull•19m ago•0 comments

OpenDHT – Distributed Hash Table Implementation

https://github.com/savoirfairelinux/opendht
1•smartmic•19m ago•0 comments

Elon Musk backs 'universal high income' to combat AI job losses

https://www.foxbusiness.com/fox-news-tech/elon-musk-backs-universal-high-income-combat-ai-job-losses
6•paulpauper•21m ago•1 comments

Progress Conference 2026

https://newsletter.rootsofprogress.org/p/announcing-progress-conference-2026
1•paulpauper•21m ago•0 comments

How I Use Unspent Tokens

https://artisincode.com/essays/how-i-use-unspent-tokens/
1•parentheses•21m ago•1 comments

Vercel breach maps almost to the framework I published in February

https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=6055034
1•Tejas_dmg•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cosmo – Desktop agent with generated UI

https://www.buildcosmo.com
1•row0•22m ago•0 comments

Show HN: I built a map of the GeminiNet

https://rbtms.github.io/gemini_map/
2•rbtms•24m ago•0 comments

Symbiont – Typestate-enforced policy gates for AI agents (Rust)

https://github.com/thirdkeyai/symbiont
1•smugglereal•25m ago•0 comments

Apple fixes bug that cops used to extract deleted chat messages from iPhones

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/22/apple-fixes-bug-that-cops-used-to-extract-deleted-chat-messages...
7•cdrnsf•28m ago•0 comments

OpenAI now lets teams make custom bots that can do work on their own

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/917065/openai-chatgpt-workspace-agents-custom...
3•omer_k•28m ago•0 comments

Public sector Matrix deployments in Europe

https://element.io/matrix-in-europe
2•Arathorn•30m ago•0 comments

The Story of Mel

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html
4•softwaredoug•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Contral AI IDE Vibe-Learn to Code

https://contral.ai
2•vednig•30m ago•0 comments

Show HN: FoodPips – I reverse-engineered a weight loss system and made it free

https://foodpips.com
3•sjdegraeve•31m ago•1 comments