I read an interesting article yesterday about Backbone.js vs. React that I’ve linked below.
https://backbonenotbad.hyperclay.com/
Now, obviously given the name of the blog, it’s not exactly the most unbiased source. However, I really resonated with the core message of the article and find it to be a problem more than ever with the advent of the "vibe coding" era. It begs the question: Are we becoming framework developers or are we truly JavaScript developers anymore?
My experience with Backbone.js is not extensive. I had to mess with it some at my last job during a legacy code rewrite. It was vanilla JS, PHP, and Backbone.js, and at the time I thought nothing of it other than, wow, this is a bit verbose. So, it tickled me to see it brought up in the article.
However, as I’ve been diving more deeply into foundational JavaScript again, I’ve been viewing it in a different lens in a post-framework world. I find myself wondering, is React even JavaScript anymore? I fondly remember Kyle Simpson of You Don’t Know JS disagreeing with the syntactic sugar of the Class keyword, and I can’t help but wonder what he thinks of React now. The level of abstraction is just so profound.
This is not to say that React is a bad thing. I think it’s great (though I’m a Vue-lover at heart!) and I’m happy that many developers thrive in it. It’s obviously helped us move our projects and work along so much faster. But I’m also beginning to wonder if some people are only framework developers. I think of this quote from the article: “React looks cleaner. It reads better at first glance. But that readability comes at a cost: you're trading explicit simplicity for abstraction complexity.”
As we continue to learn these tools that make development easier for us, I think it’s important to remember where we came from. We should invest our time in learning, remembering, and studying the boring, old fundamentals and not just the shiny, new (admittedly fun!) framework features. To not spend time and effort understanding the real fundamentals feels lazy and short-sighted.
Please continue to use and learn a framework, but only as a tool to shorten the implementation of JavaScript, not the understanding of it.
If you’re looking for a good challenge, try this: Take a feature you recently built in React/Angular/Vue and challenge yourself to build the exact same thing using only vanilla JavaScript and the native browser APIs. I guarantee you'll learn something new!
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