are that I got fired up about doing a web site again after reading Robin Sloan's exhortation to experiment, which I covered already, but also that I am pissed off about front-end development and its layers and layers and layers. For me the bridge too far wasn't GraphQL - I used that for a little while and thought it was mostly not worth it but grudgingly admitted that you do get something for everything you trade away. And Apollo isn't the worst. But of course Redux has been terrible for a while, Webpack's terrible... by which I mean they both combo with the natural complexity of bad codebases (such as most codebases that only exist for capital's purposes) in a way that makes my brain unable to perform its duties. There are more terrible things doing that but I seem to have blessedly forgotten them.
For me, though, the last straw was TypeScript. It isn't even that hard to deal with, I admit, but the way it treats you when you aren't letting it have complete control of your shit... and it gives you nothing of value. For fuck's sake, adding a whole-ass totalizing layer so you can band-aid problems you gave yourself with other pieces of your architecture... and then you don't even get the advantages of static types because the language wasn't built for them! If you love static types so much, learn Rust and use WebAssembly! It's not that scary! Honest!
I didn't used to be this mad. I forget where I ran across the Spicy Web but it started with this spicy take, and that was enough to get me started, but then I read this, which... basically accuses Facebook of doing a massive heist of the resources and attention of the rest of the field? And like, if it's true... if React has been a ten-year cul de sac...
Anyway, I'm writing a website in Clojure with a couple of libraries that let me not write JavaScript at all, not even ClojureScript, to do almost all my interactivity by sending snippets of markup down from the server. Fuck the stacks. If I'm going to develop more webs, I'm gonna do it exactly how I want.
