A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective
There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2.
Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere.
Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.
Some people enjoy the front end. Some people enjoy the back end. Some people like accessibility. Some people enjoy the full stack, and some people enjoy gratuitous innuendo.
Not that there’s anything wrong with any of that, but just about all software engineering is a dumpster fire today. This isn’t the future that was imagined by those resource-constrained titans who came before us, basking in the incandescent glow of the blinkenlights, fearing nothing in this world except dropping a box of several hundred punch cards thus rendering them out of order.
What we really need is a new language, design system, serialization format, package manager, build system, project management methodology, architectural pattern, IDE, and please, please, I’m begging you man, just give me one more framework to tide me over until Monday when the stores open again. My supply chain is under attack brah.
class SilverBulletFactoryFactory;