We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top

Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’

submited by

Style Pass

2024-08-29 10:30:03

We’re so glad you’re here. You can expect all the best TNS content to arrive Monday through Friday to keep you on top of the news and at the top of your game.

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.”

Levels lists seven different startups on his X profile, and on one of his websites he offers the advice, “Launch early and multiple times.” He’s a go-getter, in other words, and prefers to build quickly and fast — which means eschewing complex web frameworks.