The rebelling against JavaScript frameworks continues. In the latest Lex Fridman interview, AI app developer Pieter Levels explained that he builds all his apps with vanilla HTML, PHP, a bit of JavaScript via jQuery, and SQLite. No fancy JavaScript frameworks, no modern programming languages, no Wasm.
“I’m seeing a revival now,” said Levels, regarding PHP. “People are getting sick of frameworks. All the JavaScript frameworks are so… what do you call it, like [un]wieldy. It takes so much work to just maintain this code, and then it updates to a new version, you need to change everything. PHP just stays the same and works.”
I often don’t like what the vanilla language absolutists claim on topics like this.
Sure, there are a ton of frameworks, and you could write all of that in vanilla JS if you wanted to. But the issue lies here. My job is to make a product, and by using an existing framework, I can save countless hours of work. People incomprehensibly smarter than me have made that process so much smoother.
No one is asking, let alone forcing you to use any framework out there.
But I also find it ironic, that an “AI” entrepreneur, and Lex Fridman of all people, are complaining about this