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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.

A few geek quizzes for time to pass

https://textlog.cc/tag/quiz?chunk=5
1•stagas•2m ago•0 comments

Pyshackle: A hard pre-execution gate for AI agent tool calls (open source)

https://pypi.org/project/pyshackle/
1•SHACKLE-PRO-•3m ago•0 comments

Map of stars around Earth out to 40 light years

https://claude.ai/code/artifact/872ab302-5cb2-4a95-ae66-7c0144177b53
1•EthanHeilman•5m ago•0 comments

US diplomat secretly flown home ‘had child abuse images at flat’

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/crime/article/us-diplomat-flown-home-immunity-bv58b3v7q
3•Betelbuddy•7m ago•1 comments

Dario Amodei says China presents 'toughest dilemma' for his proposed AI slowdown

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/13/china-dilemma-ai-slowdown-anthropic.html
3•donsupreme•9m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Pinocchio: Harness for Verifiable Work

https://pinocchio.goedelmachines.com
1•lazaruslong•10m ago•0 comments

MOBA: Mixture of Block Attention for Long-Context LLMs

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.13189
1•ur-whale•11m ago•0 comments

Show HN: sengi.ai — Verified candidate sourcing for hard-to-fill roles

https://sengi.ai/
1•vmalyi•15m ago•0 comments

GCC 13.5 Released With 265 Bug Fixes

https://www.phoronix.com/news/GCC-13.5-Released
1•fork-bomber•18m ago•0 comments

Qalb: A programming language that uses the Arabic script instead of Latin

https://nas.sr/%D9%82%D9%84%D8%A8/
1•Muhammad523•20m ago•1 comments

Show HN: An agent that calculates how energy levels affect your goal progression

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVUH2mna41g
1•ifeanyi_sa•20m ago•0 comments

The Case of Yemen's .YE Country-Code Domain

https://freethedotye.org/blog/when-militia-owns-ye/
2•FreeTheDotYE•24m ago•0 comments

How Mike Will Made It

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/11/how-mike-will-made-it
2•georgex7•26m ago•0 comments

AI recursive self-improvement might not come so quickly after all (August 2026)

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/08/18/1142188/ai-recursive-self-improvement/
6•dgellow•33m ago•1 comments

Flock cameras used to arrest a child for playing on a swing

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=koclOnlde0E
37•chadgpt3•36m ago•13 comments

The History of the Internet - Tay Zonday [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y15olL4kzOA
1•CharlesW•37m ago•0 comments

Playing Bad Apple on the brain of a simulated fruit fly

https://www.reddit.com/r/oddlyterrifying/comments/1w9yhqv/playing_bad_apple_on_the_brain_of_a_sim...
2•robotnikman•37m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: One month, zero paying customers – keep it or kill it?

2•iGag•41m ago•2 comments

Molt – Thermally aware QLORA fine-tuning for Windows laptop GPUs

https://github.com/PraveenNimilka/MOLT
1•PraveenNimilka•41m ago•0 comments

AI Agent Doesn't Need a Bigger Prompt. It Needs a Data Catalog

https://aeroscissorz.github.io/aeroscissorz/posts/knowledge-catalog/
2•aeroscissorz1•42m ago•0 comments

What Is to Be Done? (2023)

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1666113642709020672
1•tosh•45m ago•0 comments

The tab is coming due for America's borrowing binge

https://www.axios.com/2026/09/13/national-debt-interest-rates-rising
2•toomuchtodo•46m ago•2 comments

Image to SVG in the browser, with no upload and real point editing

https://getsvg.app/
2•msmode•46m ago•0 comments

Calspan Bicycle and Motorcycle Dynamics Reports

http://bicycle.tudelft.nl/schwab/Bicycle/calspan/
1•Bluestein•47m ago•0 comments

Google is ending Gmail 'Send as' support for third-party accounts

https://proton.me/blog/gmail-ends-send-as-third-party
2•sltkr•47m ago•0 comments

The Air Computer

https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/the-air-computer
2•klelatti•48m ago•0 comments

Suicidal Compassion: Utilitarianism at AI Companies Endangers Humanity

https://ai-frontiers.org/articles/suicidal-compassion-how-utilitarianism-at-ai-companies-endanger...
3•YeGoblynQueenne•50m ago•0 comments

Government Survey Finds More Screentime Means Lower Scores for Japanese Students

https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h02871/
3•akyuu•50m ago•0 comments

Rhizome ArtBase

https://artbase.rhizome.org/wiki/Main_Page
4•themaxdavitt•50m ago•0 comments

One event, five status codes and a class

https://percentes.ai/writing/2026/one-event-five-status-codes-and-a-class/
3•itsveems•51m ago•0 comments