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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.

Wiki Builder: Skill to Build LLM Knowledge Bases

https://academy.dair.ai/blog/wiki-builder-claude-code-plugin
1•omarsar•31s ago•0 comments

Xero.DataComparer – High-performance generic list comparator for .NET

https://github.com/ybouha/Xero.DataComparer
1•ybouha•53s ago•0 comments

Research suggests that dinosaurs may have influenced how human beings age

https://phys.org/news/2023-11-longevity-bottleneck-hypothesis-dinosaurs-human.html
1•amichail•2m ago•0 comments

Stock Indexes Are Contorting Themselves to Include SpaceX and OpenAI

https://www.wsj.com/finance/stocks/stock-indexes-are-contorting-themselves-to-include-spacex-and-...
1•dbalatero•3m ago•0 comments

Testssl.sh: checks a server's service on any port for the support of TLS ciphers

https://github.com/testssl/testssl.sh
1•Bender•6m ago•0 comments

5 years of freelancing: same work, better pay, and a ceiling

https://dylancastillo.co/posts/5-years-freelancing-in-europe.html
3•dcastm•9m ago•0 comments

A handy bash function to convert a video to a GIF

https://gist.github.com/Olshansk/8046a7bfff7c82aca67d961d4d3d1d1a
1•Bender•11m ago•0 comments

Yann LeCun's Billion Dollar Bet [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYkIdXwW2AE
1•rohitpaulk•11m ago•0 comments

Foxconn launches second-generation satellites via SpaceX Falcon 9

https://www.reuters.com/science/foxconn-launches-second-generation-satellites-via-spacex-falcon-9...
1•saikatsg•12m ago•0 comments

Anika Wells rewrote social media ban days before lodging legal defence

https://www.afr.com/companies/media-and-marketing/anika-wells-rewrote-social-media-ban-days-befor...
1•01-_-•12m ago•0 comments

Why PayPal Only Does the Last Mile-We Built the Card Reader, We Forgot the Store

https://normalphd.substack.com/p/why-paypal-only-does-the-last-mile
1•dooku0721•14m ago•0 comments

AI deleted my most tests, and said "All Tests Pass"

https://typia.io/blog/ai-deleted-my-tests-and-said-all-tests-pass/
1•autobe•14m ago•1 comments

Scientists Develop Bioengineered Chewing Gum That Could Help Fight Oral Cancer

https://scitechdaily.com/scientists-develop-bioengineered-chewing-gum-that-could-help-fight-oral-...
1•01-_-•15m ago•0 comments

Measure Solar Radiation&Heat Flux Without Expensive Hardware, Using Soft-Sensing

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/11476295
1•iopoer•18m ago•0 comments

The AI Revolution Hollywood Feared Is Happening – In India

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/digital/india-ai-filmmaking-1236548136/
2•thunderbong•21m ago•1 comments

Business Owners Are Worst Clients

https://zencapital.substack.com/p/business-owners-are-worst-clients
7•zenincognito•23m ago•3 comments

US Power Investment Is at Record Highs, Driven by a Solar and Battery Boom

https://www.apricitas.io/p/americas-electricity-gap
1•m-hodges•23m ago•0 comments

How to Run Any LLM in Claude Cowork and Claude Code

https://www.productcompass.pm/p/cowork-on-3p-any-llm
3•Anon84•23m ago•0 comments

Boolean logic operators are not intuitive. Let's do better

https://charon.konekopi.com/posts/boolean_logic_naming/
1•Charon77•24m ago•0 comments

Pgxbackup: Continuity Support for PgBackRest

https://thebuild.com/blog/2026/05/01/pgxbackup-continuity-support-for-pgbackrest/
2•EvanAnderson•24m ago•0 comments

VulkanForge – 14 MB Vulkan LLM engine that runs native FP8 models on AMD (Rust)

https://github.com/maeddesg/vulkanforge
1•maeddesg•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Semble – Code search for agents that uses 98% fewer tokens than grep

https://github.com/MinishLab/semble
3•stephantul•27m ago•0 comments

Why Andy Serkis Turned 'Animal Farm' into a Family Film–and What It Teaches Kids

https://www.parents.com/animal-farm-movie-for-kids-11961291
2•rawgabbit•29m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Subscribe to RSS Feeds on Kindle

https://www.rsstokindle.com/
1•nartam11•30m ago•0 comments

An HIV/AIDS tragedy spurred human evolution

https://www.science.org/content/article/how-hiv-aids-tragedy-spurred-human-evolution
3•gmays•32m ago•0 comments

Securing an OData Service Using Attribute-Based Access Control

https://www.bytefish.de/blog/aspnetcore_odata_abac_claims.html
1•bytefish•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Deckades – Was Star Wars released before or after the first Email?

https://deckades.app/daily
2•lschneider•37m ago•1 comments

Security Through Obscurity Is Not Bad

https://mobeigi.com/blog/security/security-through-obscurity-is-not-bad/
3•mobeigi•39m ago•1 comments

Redistricting and the Supreme Court have cut voters out of US House races

https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/how-redistricting-supreme-court-have-cut-voters-out-us-h...
26•Propelloni•40m ago•11 comments

Ask HN: What are you working on? (May 2026)

1•achahoud•41m ago•1 comments