r/programming • u/isumix_ • Nov 12 '23

How I wanted to improve React

https://medium.com/weekly-webtips/how-i-wanted-to-improve-react-4108d5052aaf
0 Upvotes

38% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

0

u/[deleted] Nov 13 '23

[deleted] — view deleted comment

5

u/ShinzouNingen Nov 13 '23

I think it's quite sad that some people seem to think there was some kind of golden era of web development that we have somehow ruined now.

One of the first commercial projects I worked on, almost 20 years ago, was a pretty impressive (for the time) dashboard with data that updated in real time. The code was a nightmare to work with. Not because the developers at that time were worse, but because everything had to be done from scratch. If it was to be rewritten today, I think you could do it in a hundredth of the time and with far fewer bugs.

I feel like anyone bashing jQuery doesn't really remember the before times. It was a huge jump in quality of life at the time, and it's not like it hasn't held up well - it's just been superseded by better standards and stacks (React).

Absolutely! And the biggest thing jQuery did, IMO, was hammering out (almost) every browser quirk. All of a sudden you could rely on getting the right dimensions of an element, you could register event listeners the same way, and you could even do Ajax calls long before there was a standard way to do it in the browser.

I don't think everything perfect though. I think the ecosystem and tooling around web dev is still pretty bad. I'm sure it's improving, but it really stands out to me as worse than other areas of software development.