PPK on web-development tools →
Peter-Paul Koch’s right on the money here:
The movement toward toolchains and ever more libraries to do ever less useful things has become hysterical, and with every day that passes I’m more happy with my 2006 decision to ignore tools and just carry on. Tools don’t solve problems any more, they have become the problem. There’s just too many of them and they all include an incredible amount of features that you don’t use on your site — but that users are still required to download and execute.
I don’t know if the web’s decline in relevance can be turned around, but megabytes of Javascript frameworks and cluttered layouts full of widgets and garbage ads aren’t helping.
They’re not as necessary or beneficial to web developers as most of them think, either. Web development has never been more complicated or convoluted than it is today due to the sheer quantity of tools (and their rapid rate of change) involved in most modern web-dev environments.
The entire culture dominant among web developers today is bizarrely framework-heavy, with seemingly no thought given to minimizing dependencies and page weight. Most times I land on a Stack Overflow page with a simple Javascript question, the highest-voted answer is “Just include [framework X] and then call this function,” even though a few posts beneath it is a perfectly suitable, standalone 10-line function.