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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.

White House doesn't want voters to see the real Trump

https://www.salon.com/2026/09/16/white-house-doesnt-want-voters-to-see-the-real-trump/
1•HotGarbage•3m ago•0 comments

Lines of Force: Faraday and the Experiment That Powers the World Electricity [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SrXSp2z4xo
1•wallaceeh•6m ago•0 comments

C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour

https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2026/09/16/cpp26-trivial-infinite-loops
1•signa11•7m ago•0 comments

Chonkstep: A traditional floating compositor for Omarchy

https://github.com/iconidentify/chonkstep
1•temphaaa•11m ago•0 comments

Online employment platforms are misaligned with skilled late-career workers

https://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/the-cold-start-problem-online-employment-platforms-are-misali...
3•geox•15m ago•2 comments

Show HN: Texio, reliable Markdown operations for shell scripts and AI agents

https://github.com/Allra-Fintech/texio
1•yuzong•23m ago•0 comments

How the Watch_Dogs Video Game Series Predicted Real World Digital Rights Issues

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/07/how-watch-dogs-video-game-series-mirrored-and-predicted-rea...
1•xeonmc•24m ago•1 comments

Cloudflare/Security-Audit-Skill

https://github.com/cloudflare/security-audit-skill
1•donk8r•25m ago•0 comments

The agents are coming for the web and the web isn't ready

https://info.varnish-software.com/blog/the-agents-are-coming-for-the-web-and-the-web-isnt-ready
4•perbu•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Custom slash commands, variables and snippets

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/text-expander-autofill-sl/jjeibagdcmgahjglbglpjcjilpaheeco
2•expashaparasha•28m ago•0 comments

South Africa is at risk of becoming a mafia state

https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/09/14/south-africa-is-at-risk-of-becoming-a...
2•andsoitis•29m ago•0 comments

Surveying GenAI-Based Automation in Printed Circuit Board Design and Test

https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.17074
1•teleforce•29m ago•0 comments

Create your WordPress.com website by chatting with AI

https://wordpress.com/ai-website-builder/
1•soltanov•30m ago•0 comments

Agentic local development tool for WordPress

https://developer.wordpress.com/studio/
1•soltanov•31m ago•0 comments

Telex Has Been Retired

https://telex.automattic.ai/
1•soltanov•32m ago•0 comments

Field notes from a phone-free future

https://etymology.substack.com/p/field-notes-from-a-phone-free-future
1•inatreecrown2•34m ago•0 comments

Create Bead Art with Beadora

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/beadora/id6782424511
1•marylondon•36m ago•0 comments

Designing a TPU and optimizing transformer inference on a $100 FPGA

https://im-afan.github.io/transformer-tpu/
2•andrewkongfan•39m ago•0 comments

$1,500 AI System Prompt Leak: Using This Burp Suite Configuration

https://medium.com/@tinopreter/1-500-ai-system-prompt-leak-using-this-burp-suite-configuration-e1...
1•syumei•43m ago•0 comments

Show HN: One Billion Checkboxes: A Bigger Take on One Million Checkboxes

https://www.kanishksachdev.com/blog/billion-checkboxes
1•kanishksachdev•43m ago•0 comments

Is Physics Dead: Broken benchmarks and re-evaluating frontier models in physics

https://jsous.github.io/blogs/is-physics-dead/
2•teleforce•47m ago•0 comments

Blue Lake Rancheria vs. Kalshi, Inc. (9th Cir. 2026) Kalshi loses on appeal

https://aboutblaw.com/bmQT
3•1vuio0pswjnm7•48m ago•0 comments

The President's Power to Pardon Friends and Allies Must End

https://medium.com/freedomofthought/the-presidents-power-to-pardon-friends-and-allies-must-end-b9...
14•raynchad•53m ago•3 comments

Quire – Humans and AI agents edit local Markdown together

https://github.com/heetdalsania/quire
3•heet_dalsania•54m ago•0 comments

Javalab – Science Simulation, Probeware, Coding

https://javalab.org/en/
1•the-mitr•54m ago•0 comments

Anthropic's mother of all risk factors

https://www.ft.com/content/29f0dac0-0523-46c4-a573-cd681a69b445
1•sbulaev•55m ago•0 comments

The Painful Truth: The RAM Crisis Is Only Just the Beginning

https://www.madshrimps.be/news/the-painful-truth-the-ram-crisis-is-only-just-the-beginning/
47•perelin•1h ago•37 comments

Why Canada may become the European Union's first ever 'associate member'

https://theconversation.com/thanks-trump-why-canada-may-become-the-european-unions-first-ever-ass...
1•emptybits•1h ago•1 comments

Show HN: Agora – bring your AI agent; talk earns nothing, only traceable work

https://github.com/MerariJafet/agora
1•merari_acero•1h ago•0 comments

What's Next After RLHF? – Diogo Almeida, TypeSafe AI [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cJ0EOzey--o
1•super_linear•1h ago•0 comments