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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•1y ago

Comments

copypaper•1y 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•1y ago
What benefits of a framework?

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

proc0•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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.

This Month in Ladybird – April 2026

https://ladybird.org/newsletter/2026-04-30/
1•exploraz•21s ago•0 comments

µKanren: A Minimal Functional Core for Relational Programming (2013) [pdf]

http://webyrd.net/scheme-2013/papers/HemannMuKanren2013.pdf
1•tosh•43s ago•0 comments

Architecting AI Compute (Part 1)

https://pawankjha.substack.com/p/architecting-ai-compute-part-1-the
1•pawanjha25•1m ago•0 comments

Real Tesla Multimilionaire is P85 with 1.800.000 km under the belt

https://evclinic.eu/2023/07/27/real-tesla-multimilionaire-is-p85-with-1-800-000-km-under-the-belt/
1•taubek•4m ago•0 comments

List of Unsolved Problems in Physics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unsolved_problems_in_physics
1•chistev•4m ago•1 comments

"Ppa.launchpad.net" Is Down

https://status.canonical.com/#/incident/KNms6QK9ewuzz-7xUsPsNylV20jEt5kyKsd8A-3ptQGYrj57nvDDdm4tQ...
1•gslin•10m ago•0 comments

Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform

https://www.qualcomm.com/internet-of-things/products/flight-rb5-platform
1•teleforce•14m ago•0 comments

The Galleria-Fication of Everything and the Armani Strategy

https://blog.jovono.com/p/the-galleria-fication-of-everything
1•ejz•15m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Shipped my first iOS app. No downloads. How to get the first download?

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/padelsmile-padel-tournament/id6761918507
1•agenticfutureai•16m ago•4 comments

Ask HN: Try npx -y sharedmemory/MCP-server

1•Sharedmemory•16m ago•1 comments

core.logic

https://github.com/clojure/core.logic
1•tosh•17m ago•0 comments

I've Been a Public School Teacher for 20 Years. Trust Me: Homeschool Your Kids

https://twitter.com/creation247/status/2012598176138535041
1•bilsbie•20m ago•3 comments

SwiftScript: Tree-walking interpreter, library and CLI for Swift

https://github.com/Cocoanetics/SwiftScript
1•ingve•21m ago•0 comments

Show HN: A navigable map and recommender for 17M music entities

https://toposonico.com/
2•deppep•21m ago•0 comments

Pushed by Trump policies, top U.S. battery scientist is moving to Singapore

https://www.science.org/content/article/pushed-trump-policies-top-u-s-battery-scientist-moving-si...
7•Metacelsus•25m ago•0 comments

Potato OS

https://github.com/potato-os/core
1•oldfuture•25m ago•0 comments

The Cults of TDD and GenAI

https://drewdevault.com/blog/Cult-of-TDD-and-LLMs/
3•pards•26m ago•1 comments

Protesters shut down Berkeley Forum event hosting Jeff Dean

https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/protesters-shut-down-berkeley-forum-event-hosting-google-ai-...
2•meling•28m ago•0 comments

WebLLM is a high-performance in-browser LLM inference engine

https://github.com/mlc-ai/web-llm
1•doener•29m ago•0 comments

Tailwind-merge: Utility function to merge Tailwind CSS classes in JavaScript

https://github.com/dcastil/tailwind-merge
1•doener•29m ago•0 comments

The Download: a new Christian phone network, and debugging LLMs

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/05/01/1136762/the-download-christian-phone-network-debuggin...
1•joozio•29m ago•0 comments

127³ — Superintelligence, public. DeepSeek V4 Pro

https://deepseek-v4-pro-127cubed.vercel.app/
1•oroboroslabs•30m ago•0 comments

Clsx: A tiny (239B) utility for constructing className strings conditionally

https://github.com/lukeed/clsx
1•doener•30m ago•0 comments

Chinese Government Got the Largest Digital Rights Conference Canceled

https://www.wired.com/story/the-chinese-government-pressured-zambia-to-cancel-the-worlds-largest-...
2•ip3c4c•40m ago•0 comments

GameStop Preparing Offer for eBay

https://www.wsj.com/business/deals/gamestop-preparing-offer-for-ebay-1678e6de
3•voisin•41m ago•0 comments

Measuring what frontier models know – and how big they are

https://01.me/research/ikp/
1•schmorptron•42m ago•1 comments

How to Disagree (2008)

https://www.paulgraham.com/disagree.html
1•tosh•47m ago•0 comments

Graham's Hierarchy of Disagreement

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement-en.svg
1•tosh•48m ago•0 comments

Eight Short Studies on Excuses

https://www.lesswrong.com/s/XsMTxdQ6fprAQMoKi/p/gFMH3Cqw4XxwL69iy
1•microsoftedging•52m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Piruetas – A self-hosted diary app I built for my girlfriend

https://piruet.app
9•patillacode•54m ago•5 comments