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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.

Thousands of Interstellar Objects May Be Lurking in Our Solar System

https://www.404media.co/thousands-of-interstellar-objects-may-be-lurking-in-our-solar-system/
1•Brajeshwar•43s ago•0 comments

Firefox Addon – "summary" link for Hacker News posts

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/hacker-news-summary/
1•JSeiko•1m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Too many articles to read, let random algorithm decide what I read next

https://read.mustakim.dev/bored
1•mustak_im•3m ago•1 comments

Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining European Union

https://www.nbcnews.com/world/europe/iceland-votes-whether-restart-talks-joining-european-union-r...
1•newgolobal•4m ago•0 comments

QDay Algebra 2M prime factor in nanoseconds

https://zenodo.org/records/22157593
1•GeometryKernel•4m ago•0 comments

Tiny World Model

https://paul.mou.dev/posts/2026-08-16-twm/
2•ppymou•5m ago•0 comments

Let the Clicks Speak: A Simple Score for Popularity-Driven Ranking

https://medium.com/@oleber_62556/let-the-clicks-speak-a-simple-score-for-popularity-driven-rankin...
1•softwaredoug•5m ago•0 comments

Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quis_custodiet_ipsos_custodes%3F
3•tosh•10m ago•1 comments

News-deframe: Structural comparison of how news outlets frame the same event

https://github.com/422August/news-deframe
1•August0422•13m ago•0 comments

Magic eye tube (The first RF "debugger")

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_eye_tube
1•peter_d_sherman•15m ago•1 comments

Understanding Event-Driven Systems

https://www.thetrueengineer.com/p/understanding-event-driven-systems
2•adletbalzhanov•17m ago•0 comments

Google translate is a better writer than me

https://theoo.dev/notes/google-translate-is-a-better-writer-than-me-29
3•speckx•18m ago•0 comments

I Found Two Shopify Plugin Zero-Days in a Bathtub

https://alec.is/posts/i-found-two-shopify-plugin-zero-days-in-a-bathtub/
1•arm32•18m ago•0 comments

OpenLake: Fast, Durable Storage for LLM Inference and Training

https://www.theopenlake.com/blog/introducing-openlake
2•kunalsin9h•18m ago•0 comments

Who Is Antigone? The 2500-Year-Old Rebel with a Cause

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/22/theater/antigone-theater-art-sophocles-adaptations.html
1•bryanrasmussen•18m ago•0 comments

SwarmWorld: Stigmergic technological evolution in societies of LLM agents

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.26081
1•wintercarver•19m ago•1 comments

Why Everybody Hates Palantir

https://www.economist.com/britain/2026/08/20/why-everybody-hates-palantir
3•bookofjoe•19m ago•1 comments

Xiaomi Magnetic Bluetooth Speaker: iPhone MagSafe Stand and Speaker in One Tiny

https://www.gizmoweek.com/xiaomi-magnetic-bluetooth-speaker/
1•takumi123•20m ago•0 comments

ELPI – Embeddable Lambda Prolog Interpreter

https://github.com/LPCIC/elpi
2•TheWiggles•21m ago•0 comments

Experience Machine

https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/experience-7
1•loughnane•23m ago•0 comments

RFC draft-meow-mrrp-00

https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-meow-mrrp-00.txt
2•ruined•25m ago•0 comments

BoqCalc, an AI pipeline that prices a 500-line BOQ without hallucinating rates

https://boqcalc.com
1•boqcalc•25m ago•0 comments

Blue-Collar Jobs Are the New Flashpoint in Data-Center Fight

https://www.wsj.com/economy/jobs/blue-collar-jobs-are-the-new-flashpoint-in-data-center-fight-aac...
2•627467•26m ago•1 comments

AI Lattice Proofs with Chris Peikert

https://securitycryptographywhatever.com/2026/08/26/ai-lattice-proofs-with-chris-peikert/
1•henrikhorluck•27m ago•0 comments

When do Markov chains converge?

https://amitharlev.com/blog/mc_convergence/
1•vismit2000•28m ago•0 comments

Cloudflare Workers: Request Collapsing

https://developers.cloudflare.com/workers/cache/
1•tosh•30m ago•0 comments

Right to Repair State Laws Continue to Surge – Enforcement Remains Nonexistent

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/08/28/right-to-repair-state-laws-continue-to-surge-but-enforcement-...
1•speckx•31m ago•0 comments

The Inverse of Ensloppification?

https://getisland.app/blog/inverse-of-ensloppification/
2•ethanpronev•34m ago•0 comments

The Hugging Face attack surprised me

https://www.planned-obsolescence.org/p/the-hugging-face-attack-surprised
2•dnw•34m ago•0 comments

Would you share your weirdest agent logs with AI safety researchers?

https://www.reddit.com/r/AI_Agents/comments/1w1nuzb/whats_your_weirdest_ai_agent_log/
3•matildagh•35m ago•0 comments