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The Business Case for Vanilla JavaScript

https://lewiscampbell.tech/blog/250430.html
6•LAC-Tech•12mo ago

Comments

copypaper•12mo 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•12mo ago
What benefits of a framework?

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

proc0•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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•12mo 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.

Agents can now access your Instagram social graph

https://onfabric.substack.com/p/build-personal-context-into-your
1•maxalbarello•32s ago•0 comments

When the Paradigm Shifts: A Zero-Trust Model for AI Agents

https://worklifenotes.com/2026/04/29/when-the-paradigm-shifts-a-zero-trust-model-for-ai-agents/
1•taleodor•53s ago•0 comments

Turning a Trick into a Technique

https://www.johndcook.com/blog/2026/04/28/even-series-trick/
1•ibobev•1m ago•0 comments

Fast Tight Spectral-Norm Bounds

https://jiha-kim.github.io/posts/fast-spectral-norm-bounds-from-scaled-gram-moments/
1•ibobev•2m ago•0 comments

Larry's Risky Business

https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/920378/oracle-openai-datacenter-buildout
1•stalfosknight•2m ago•0 comments

Replacing labor with AI shifts costs to compute – and compute is still expensive

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/cost-compute-far-beyond-costs-071100797.html
1•latentframe•2m ago•1 comments

Online age verification is the hill to die on

https://xcancel.com/GlennMeder/status/2049088498163216560
1•Cider9986•3m ago•0 comments

Remote agents in Vibe and Mistral Medium 3.5

https://twitter.com/mistralvibe/status/2049511749603168520
1•kieloo•3m ago•0 comments

Going Full Time on Open Source

https://jdx.dev/posts/2026-04-17-going-full-time-on-open-source/
1•ahamez•4m ago•0 comments

Pan American chooses Amadeus for the iconic carrier's return

https://amadeus.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/pan-american-world-airways-chooses-amadeus-for-car...
1•vednig•4m ago•0 comments

The Smelly Baby Problem

https://www.worksinprogress.news/p/how-disposable-diapers-conquered
1•dionysou•4m ago•0 comments

Moscow Economics School That Helped Produce Revolut, XTX

https://valeman.medium.com/the-small-moscow-economics-school-that-helped-produce-revolut-xtx-and-...
1•ibobev•5m ago•0 comments

Show HN: OmniForge – document intelligence and audio capture with local LLM

https://omniforge.online/
1•vlad_omniforge•5m ago•0 comments

Patterns for Reducing App LLM Costs (Video Series)

https://usagetap.com/ai-app-cost-savings
1•troymagennis•5m ago•1 comments

Fedora Linux 44 has been released

https://lwn.net/Articles/1070198/
1•Brajeshwar•6m ago•0 comments

Colombians are divided over the fate of Pablo Escobar's hippos

https://apnews.com/article/colombia-hippos-magdalena-river-7fb1d991ddaf2690edcb31d04f7891fe
1•speckx•7m ago•0 comments

Third Editor Fired in Elsevier's Citation Cartel Crackdown

https://www.chrisbrunet.com/p/third-editor-fired-in-elseviers-citation
1•RigbyTaro•7m ago•0 comments

Valkey – On Release Candidates

https://valkey.io/blog/on-release-candidates/
1•milkglass•7m ago•0 comments

Why the future doesn't need us [pdf]

https://sites.cc.gatech.edu/computing/nano/documents/Joy%20-%20Why%20the%20Future%20Doesn%27t%20N...
1•gregsadetsky•8m ago•1 comments

AI Overviews are coming to your Gmail at work

https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/22/ai-overviews-are-coming-to-your-gmail-at-work/
1•gmays•9m ago•1 comments

What happens when you can't pull the plug on your agent?

https://highflame.com/blogs/why-metas-ai-alignment-director-couldnt-stop-her-own-agent--and-how-t...
1•jalbrethsen•10m ago•1 comments

Pennsylvania is updating its voter registration system but won't reveal progress

https://www.votebeat.org/pennsylvania/2026/04/28/department-of-state-sure-voter-registration-syst...
4•hn_acker•12m ago•1 comments

Overanalyzing My Poor 1/2 Marathon Performance

https://wjgilmore.com/articles/overanalyzing-my-half-marathon-performance/
1•wjgilmore•12m ago•1 comments

The Elephant in the Room

https://www.joshwcomeau.com/email/wham-launch-005-elephant-1-es/
2•fredley•12m ago•0 comments

Cursor Camp

https://neal.fun/cursor-camp/
4•bpierre•13m ago•0 comments

Leveraging Rust and the GPU to render user interfaces at 120 FPS

https://zed.dev/blog/videogame
1•chuckhend•13m ago•0 comments

Victims Allege OpenAI Is Responsible for Mass Shooting

https://www.motherjones.com/criminal-justice/2026/04/lawsuit-openai-chatgpt-tumbler-ridge-mass-sh...
2•cdrnsf•15m ago•0 comments

U.S. war in Iran has cost $25B so far, says Pentagon official

https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-war-iran-has-cost-25-billion-so-far-says-pentagon-of...
6•onemoresoop•16m ago•1 comments

When AI Goes Wrong: How PocketOS Lost All Its Data

https://devops.com/when-ai-goes-really-really-wrong-how-pocketos-lost-all-its-data/
1•CrankyBear•16m ago•0 comments

Parents don't want me doing CS because they feel the job market will disappear

https://programming.dev/post/49547483
3•rglullis•17m ago•0 comments