3-6) Agreed on all points, but I'm particularly nodding along to #6. Perhaps that encapsulates my "declarative angst" more than anything in my post: the declarative blindspot to time. As much as I love me some React, it can still drive me a little batty sometimes when I want to use The New Hot Package that someone told me about on NPM, and then I start looking at how it purports to help with all this complex logic, and its answer is: "Just drop this component here." And I'm thinking, "Wait a minute. I can't just drop the component there. There's gotta be logic governing when it gets used or what happens before it gets used and what happens after it gets used." That's why I used the example of APIs. Because IMHO, an API call must be a tightly controlled thing. It needs to happen at a very specific time - and no other time. Bundling an API call into a declaratively-called component and accepting that it will call (and re-call) an endpoint whenever the component's rendered just isn't acceptable to me.
I agree.
I think it was Rich Hickey who said in one of his talks that modern tools, frameworks and even programming languages seem to be optimised for beginners. Any tool that can't get you up and running in 3 minutes by copy pasting some examples into your code is automatically dismissed. Frameworks compete over which one makes it easier for an absolute beginner to build a toy version of a TODO list.
While I do appreciate it sometimes when I build some throwaway prototype or just want to play around with a tool to see what it's about, understanding is still the only real currency of our trade.
Amen. This was always my problem with Ruby on Rails. Everyone would show you this crazy-simple example of how they could build a RoR app from scratch in minutes. But if you start adding custom requirements (like, ohhhh... every real world app ever) and you can no longer settle for the "default" way that RoR wants to do everything, pretty soon that app takes just as long to build, and it's just as complex, as any app built in any other language.
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3-6) Agreed on all points, but I'm particularly nodding along to #6. Perhaps that encapsulates my "declarative angst" more than anything in my post: the declarative blindspot to time. As much as I love me some React, it can still drive me a little batty sometimes when I want to use The New Hot Package that someone told me about on NPM, and then I start looking at how it purports to help with all this complex logic, and its answer is: "Just drop this component here." And I'm thinking, "Wait a minute. I can't just drop the component there. There's gotta be logic governing when it gets used or what happens before it gets used and what happens after it gets used." That's why I used the example of APIs. Because IMHO, an API call must be a tightly controlled thing. It needs to happen at a very specific time - and no other time. Bundling an API call into a declaratively-called component and accepting that it will call (and re-call) an endpoint whenever the component's rendered just isn't acceptable to me.
I agree.
I think it was Rich Hickey who said in one of his talks that modern tools, frameworks and even programming languages seem to be optimised for beginners. Any tool that can't get you up and running in 3 minutes by copy pasting some examples into your code is automatically dismissed. Frameworks compete over which one makes it easier for an absolute beginner to build a toy version of a TODO list.
While I do appreciate it sometimes when I build some throwaway prototype or just want to play around with a tool to see what it's about, understanding is still the only real currency of our trade.
Amen. This was always my problem with Ruby on Rails. Everyone would show you this crazy-simple example of how they could build a RoR app from scratch in minutes. But if you start adding custom requirements (like, ohhhh... every real world app ever) and you can no longer settle for the "default" way that RoR wants to do everything, pretty soon that app takes just as long to build, and it's just as complex, as any app built in any other language.