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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.

Solving Impossible Problems for Fun and Profit [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UTgrWmOk4q8
1•senderista•1m ago•0 comments

In open-weight AI, America is the one playing catch-up

https://village.dev/blog/in-open-weight-ai-america-is-the-one-playing-catch-up/
1•kevin_hu•3m ago•0 comments

What Is Agent Experience (Ax)?

https://developer.microsoft.com/blog/what-is-agent-experience-ax/
2•waldekm•3m ago•0 comments

Tim O'Reilly – The New Knowledge Artifacts of the AI Economy

https://oreillyradar.substack.com/p/the-new-knowledge-artifacts-of-the
1•rmason•4m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Sprites. A Calm, streak free habit tracker

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.retcurve.sprites&hl=en_US
1•woogal•5m ago•0 comments

Turn a photo of a pile of Lego blocks to a build with Claude

https://misterblocks.com/
1•alexander-g•8m ago•0 comments

Geohashing.site's Better Banhammer

https://danq.me/2026/11/10/geohashing-sites-better-banhammer/
1•speckx•10m ago•0 comments

Neurons as an Interpretable Basis

https://www.goodfire.com/research/neurons-as-an-interpretable-basis#background-the-structure-of-a...
2•lucrbvi•13m ago•0 comments

Technical Debt Can Derail Coding Agents Through "Agent Distraction"

https://www.infoq.com/news/2026/11/google-agent-distraction/
1•andrewstetsenko•13m ago•0 comments

Strike for a Different Spain

https://jacobin.com/2026/11/spain-housing-protests-cjs-sanchez
1•xg15•14m ago•0 comments

Debunking Litellm Rust Benchmarking

https://www.getmaxim.ai/bifrost/blog/debunking-litellm-rust-benchmarking-part-1
1•aanthonymax•14m ago•0 comments

Alpine Linux and OpenSSH patch flaw that's as bad as it can get

https://www.zdnet.com/tech/alpine-linux-openssh-patch-flaw/
2•ohjeez•14m ago•1 comments

Social Policy Builds Financial Markets

https://economicsociology.org/2026/08/28/how-social-policy-builds-financial-markets/
1•kome•16m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Cloakroom – Keeps secrets away from agents

https://github.com/shanjeevrajendran/cloakroom
1•shanjv05•16m ago•0 comments

Dungeon Crawler's Lookbook: Visualize character progression, built on dbt Charts

https://crawl-atlas.anders.omg.lol/
2•data_ders•17m ago•1 comments

I built a local FIRE planner that doesn't need access to your accounts

https://yoquity.com/
1•antonlabs•18m ago•0 comments

MIT Scientist: "Your Brain Evolved to Ignore Aliens – They're Everywhere " [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqaHVSlVeU
1•ptrhvns•18m ago•1 comments

Building a thread UI on hard mode – Zed

https://delta.dev/blog/building-a-thread-ui-on-hard-mode
1•intstarstar•18m ago•0 comments

FiberFS 1.0 Is Released

https://fiberfs.io/blog/fiberfs_1.0_is_released
2•nyc_pizzadev•18m ago•0 comments

Science Has Shown That Your Cat Meows to Demand That You Fix Their World

https://www.sciencealert.com/science-has-finally-shown-that-your-cat-meows-to-demand-that-you-fix...
1•PaulHoule•19m ago•0 comments

Only 4 of 11 hyped resale items beat the S&P 500 after selling fees

https://www.aiplannermail.com/resale-vs-stocks/
1•malek_oweis•19m ago•0 comments

New Connections-Like Puzzle from the 45x45 Connections Guy

https://thomaswc.com/make_groups.html
1•thomaswc•23m ago•1 comments

TakeMyPFP

https://takemypfp.fun
1•spaceman_2020•23m ago•0 comments

A Hacker Targeted High-Stakes Poker Players w/ malware That Exposed Their Cards

https://www.wired.com/story/a-hacker-targeted-high-stakes-poker-players-with-malware-that-exposed...
1•indigodaddy•24m ago•0 comments

Open Graph Images with Astro and Typst

https://eaj.no/posts/open-graph-images-with-typst/
1•birdculture•24m ago•0 comments

Moving Back to Sourcehut

https://www.cedricbonhomme.org/2026/11/08/keeping-the-word-i/
3•speckx•25m ago•1 comments

Online News Association cancels annual conference in "strategic shift"

https://www.journalists.org/news/a-strategic-shift-for-ona
1•ilamont•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: why use many tools when one do trick

https://docktopus.app/#features
1•evill33t•27m ago•1 comments

Beams

https://goteleport.com/blog/teleport-beams-secure-ai-agents-production/
1•old-gregg•27m ago•0 comments

Statement from the Independent Members of the Nvidia Board

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/statement-from-the-independent-members-of-the-nvidia-board
5•qainsights•30m ago•0 comments