Front-End development — The Mess We’re In
In one of the “Strange Loop Conference” talks, Joe Armstrong talks about “The mess we’re in.” He mentioned how complexity arises because of the increased amount of states your computer can be in.
The rising level of complexity applies to Front-End development as well. If you have an error from a library when you bundle your application, you must consider the Node.JS version, the package manager, the framework, and the bundler you are using.
So what is the status of Front-End development nowadays, and do we have so many possible states to consider it a mess?
Languages
There are many languages used for front-end development. This variety of languages is due to the web’s evolution and front-end developers’ needs. For example, CSS was created to style HTML pages, but as websites became more complex and dynamic, preprocessors such as Sass, Less, and Stylus were created to make writing CSS easier and maintainable.
Templating languages such as Pug and Handlebars were introduced to make it easier to generate HTML code by providing simpler syntax and the ability to reuse code snippets. This has led to a proliferation of languages used for front-end…
