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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.

Clockwork Mechanics, Maintenance, and Metaphors in the Late Middle Ages

https://www.jhiblog.org/2026/10/19/clockwork-metaphors/
1•benbreen•3m ago•0 comments

Exa 3.0

https://exa.ai/blog/exa-3
1•opengears•5m ago•0 comments

Voice packs plus an open-source agent for texts, calls and Slack

https://github.com/eyeguide-dev/speakvora-pack-agent
1•speakvora•7m ago•0 comments

Cash every week iPhone app: way to see where your money goes, one week at a time

https://andrewarrow.dev/cashew/
2•cs1996•8m ago•1 comments

Alberta referendum: Province awaits results after delays on voting day

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/livestory/alberta-referendum-results-live-updates-separat...
1•mooreds•15m ago•0 comments

Textideo Director – an AI video creation tool for scenes, shots

https://textideo.com/director
1•Yummiy•15m ago•0 comments

How to read QR codes by hand (and make bad ones that work) [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYqX8CNgzwM
1•gregsadetsky•17m ago•0 comments

Don't Choose. Join

https://github.com/ckir/clavity
1•ckir1508•17m ago•0 comments

Healthy Reef Sounds Can Boost Coral and Fish Recovery Efforts

https://today.ucsd.edu/story/healthy-reef-sounds-can-boost-coral-and-fish-recovery-efforts
1•gmays•21m ago•0 comments

Edward Snowden on Palestine and Sam Altman [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMG6aRZhIGE
1•matteohorvath•22m ago•0 comments

Go will reject certificate chains containing eight distrusted SPKIs

https://github.com/golang/go/issues/82345
4•mendym•23m ago•1 comments

CNN's Christiane Amanpour to depart network after 43 years

https://www.nbcnews.com/business/media/cnns-christiane-amanpour-depart-network-43-years-rcna604365
1•theanonymousone•25m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Search for AI-agents and usefulness score

https://xtract-production-2efc.up.railway.app/
1•Ayobamiu•31m ago•0 comments

Supercapacitor cement is key to buildings that store their own power

https://newatlas.com/energy/cement-based-supercapacitor/
1•gmays•31m ago•0 comments

LinSparkle: A sparkle style auto updated for AppImages

https://github.com/medcelerate/LinSparkle
1•medcelerate•31m ago•1 comments

Scaling to Test-Time Iterations with Loop-Native Attention

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11570
1•simonpure•32m ago•0 comments

Show HN: AppMaker – Build business apps with AI, visual editing and code

https://appmaker.io/
1•codeguppy•33m ago•0 comments

SOMETHING WORTH READING: About the pressure of writing

https://mvndy.cl/blog/something-worth-reading
1•yuna2k•37m ago•0 comments

Wearing headphones during surgery may reduce nausea and vomiting afterward

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1146699
1•gmays•40m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Yana – A local-first, human-governed AI runtime and IDE in Rust

https://github.com/yanacuti1121/yana-ai
3•vutam•40m ago•0 comments

Anthropic calls human attention the bottleneck in the botsitting world to come

https://fortune.com/2026/10/19/work-botsitting-meetings-army-of-claudes-anthropic/
2•handfuloflight•40m ago•1 comments

Triton Notes

https://junupark.xyz/triton-notes/
1•qwertyforce•47m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Approve Sudo with Android Biometrics

https://github.com/hparadiz/kdesu-android-biometric-auth
1•hparadiz•49m ago•0 comments

Rabbit Holes: The Secret to Technical Expertise (2019)

https://blog.bityard.net/articles/2019/August/rabbit-holes-the-secret-to-technical-expertise
1•1317•50m ago•0 comments

The Deadly 1.5-Mile Corridor That Shows the Fatal Flaw in America's Road Design

https://www.wsj.com/us-news/the-deadly-1-5-mile-corridor-that-shows-the-fatal-flaw-in-americas-ro...
1•bcaulfield•51m ago•0 comments

Russians Snap Up Chinese EVs as Ukrainian Attacks Make Fuel Scarce

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/04/world/europe/russia-ukraine-war-ev-sales.html
1•lxm•56m ago•0 comments

"Saga Is Decentralized, 2PC Is Centralized" Is Mostly a Myth

https://medium.com/scalar-engineering/saga-is-decentralized-2pc-is-centralized-is-mostly-a-myth-7...
1•feeblefakie•56m ago•0 comments

Everyone Recommends Saga. Almost Nobody Mentions How Hard It Is to Get Right

https://medium.com/scalar-engineering/everyone-recommends-saga-almost-nobody-mentions-how-hard-it...
1•feeblefakie•56m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Free text classification piece for Activepieces

https://jeffyclassify.com/blog/activepieces-jeffy/
1•nico•1h ago•0 comments

US trial begins for Rwandan-American accused of role in genocide

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/10/13/us-trial-begins-for-rwandan-american-accused-of-role-in...
1•snarky-comments•1h ago•0 comments