Developers Rail Against JavaScript ‘Merchants of Complexity’
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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.
