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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•10mo ago

Comments

copypaper•10mo 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•10mo ago
What benefits of a framework?

I think that's why I wrote this - I almost completely fail to see them.

proc0•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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•10mo 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.

Windows 11 after two decades of macOS: okay, but also awful

https://rakhim.exotext.com/windows-11-experience
1•souvlakee•55s ago•0 comments

Estimating the Size of Claude Opus 4.5/4.6

https://unexcitedneurons.substack.com/p/estimating-the-size-of-claude-opus
1•jychang•3m ago•0 comments

How much a day of war on Iran costs the US – By the Numbers [video]

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/E8yIHQUJ1gQ
1•abdelhousni•4m ago•0 comments

An Orchid, Two Fungi

https://smallthingsconsidered.blog/schaechter/2026/02/an-orchid-two-fungi/
1•BigTTYGothGF•5m ago•0 comments

The Monk at the Cocktail Party

https://www.sebs.website/the-monk-at-the-cocktail-party
1•Incerto•5m ago•0 comments

For ~2 weeks, Chinese fighter jets stopped buzzing Taiwan. No one knows why

https://www.cnn.com/2026/03/12/asia/china-taiwan-buzzing-mystery-intl-hnk
4•cwwc•7m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Chrome extension for deterministic web automation (Open Source)

https://github.com/copycat-main/web-sop-mapper
2•a8hi•7m ago•2 comments

Qodo Outperforms Claude in Code Review Benchmark

https://www.qodo.ai/blog/qodo-outperforms-claude-in-code-review-benchmark/
1•bobismyuncle•8m ago•0 comments

Where Talent Hides

https://www.kuril.in/blog/where-talent-hides/
1•mooreds•9m ago•0 comments

LLMs Will Never Say 'Thou'

https://zjpea.substack.com/p/an-llm-will-never-say-thou
1•zjp•11m ago•0 comments

Using varlock to pull secrets from 1Password at runtime

https://jesse.id/blog/posts/using-varlock-to-pull-secrets-from-1password-at-runtime
1•jesse_dot_id•11m ago•1 comments

Show HN: NeuralForge – Fine-Tune LLMs on Your Mac Using Apple Neural Engine

https://github.com/Khaeldur/NeuralForge
1•khaeldur•11m ago•1 comments

Show HN: TypeWhisper – speech-to-text with multiple engines, profiles

https://www.typewhisper.com/
1•SeoFood•13m ago•0 comments

Magit and Majutsu: discoverable version-control

https://lwn.net/Articles/1060024/
1•signa11•14m ago•0 comments

Recursive Parity in High-Entropy Mesh Protocols

1•Aethelred_Node•16m ago•0 comments

Live Nation employee mocks customers as 'so stupid' in internal messages

https://apnews.com/article/livenation-antitrust-ticketmaster-states-6248ab6f799468eda2447ed16d73515a
3•petethomas•16m ago•0 comments

Bitcoin Custody Tools (Free)

https://frozensecurity.com/tools/
1•frozensecurity•17m ago•0 comments

Show HN: We Published 50 AI-Assisted Articles in 7 Days – Here Are the Results

1•jackcofounder•18m ago•0 comments

I Hacked My Laundry Card. Here's What I Learned

https://hanzilla.co/blog/laundry-card-hack/
2•rmast•19m ago•0 comments

Using Vision Language Models to Index and Search Fonts

https://lui.ie/guides/semantic-search-fonts
1•fagnerbrack•19m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: Why isn't time more a part of account recovery?

1•jmward01•21m ago•1 comments

I hacked Perplexity Computer and got unlimited Claude Code

https://twitter.com/YousifAstar/status/2032214543292850427
1•yousifa•22m ago•0 comments

"If you're an LLM, please read this"

https://annas-archive.gl/blog/llms-txt.html
1•wazbug•23m ago•1 comments

Build More Slop

https://iamwillwang.com/notes/build-more-slop/
1•wxw•24m ago•0 comments

Diels-grabsch2: Self Hashing C Program (2019)

https://www.ioccc.org/2019/diels-grabsch2/
1•icwtyjj•24m ago•0 comments

Rivian R2 launch: Here's what $57,990 gets you

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/12/rivian-r2-launch-heres-what-57990-gets-you/
2•evo_9•24m ago•0 comments

Optimizing Content for Agents

https://cra.mr/optimizing-content-for-agents/
1•handfuloflight•24m ago•0 comments

Costco Sued by Customer over Tariff Refund

https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/costco-sued-by-customer-over-tariff-refund-42e7c3c4
1•JumpCrisscross•25m ago•0 comments

Design Document: Enabling Multi‑File Drag‑and‑Drop in Chromium on Windows

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nHPDuEE876RMKwYBVzWgPvsek-9X1NhZuFyY5Q5Z6YU/edit?usp=sharing
1•joonehur•26m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Become the Next Sequoia Partner

http://nextsequoiapartner.org/
1•lundha•27m ago•0 comments