That seems like kind of an overreaction. Sure, the first time I saw React I also thought it was an abomination.
But in the end it’s fine. Different, sure, but there really is something to using the same language on both front and back-end, and not having to wonder about how to reconcilliate data and markup.
React and the whole ecosystem gives you a thousand extra problems to care about, but it also takes a ton of them go away. It makes the simple things annoying but the hard things also merely annoying.
It's a sincere reaction and I'm making myself emotionally vulnerable by putting it out there.
I know that's forbidden on the Internet but I'm still deeply passionate about building good software and I'm just so disappointed by the precipitous decline in quality that's plagued the industry despite the increase budget and manpower dedicated to it.
It's inescapably the tools and methods. This ought to be the golden age. Things ought to be great. But they're terrible. Everything has been getting slower buggier and shittier. It's become more complicated while doing less. It's awful.
You mentioned you're passionate about good tooling, would you mind if I asked you what your thoughts are on Glamorous Toolkit[1] and how it compares to other tooling you've seen?
There's so many wonderful and exciting things going on in this space right now. It's hard to keep up with them. They all take 100s of hours to get half-way decent at.
Really, FWIW, the things I need are:
1. Introspection tools to find out what's going on without having to rewrite the build system.
2. Comprehension and navigation tools (like copilot) that I can interface with and give insight into where things might be happening
3. Timeline tools like rr
4. Advanced diagnotistic tools like ebpf
And that's really it. emacs and vscode are the things I cycle around. I still think these are all open problems.
But in the end it’s fine. Different, sure, but there really is something to using the same language on both front and back-end, and not having to wonder about how to reconcilliate data and markup.
React and the whole ecosystem gives you a thousand extra problems to care about, but it also takes a ton of them go away. It makes the simple things annoying but the hard things also merely annoying.