The Brutal Lifecycle of JavaScript Frameworks
Found on Stackoverflow on Sunday, 14 January 2018
JavaScript UI frameworks and libraries work in cycles. Every six months or so, a new one pops up, claiming that it has revolutionized UI development.
There was a time when jQuery was the darling of JavaScript tags on Stack Overflow, accounting for almost 8% of new questions. This picture quickly changed as AngularJS and later React were released, cannibalizing jQuery’s mindshare amongst the community. Then starting around 2016, there is a quick shift from AngularJS to Angular, which represents the subsequent versions (Angular 2+), as developers began to migrate to the latest and greatest flavors of the popular framework from Google.
So you develop your new shiney project with the latest hyped framework, only to get stuck next year when everybody moved on and (if you are really unlucky) the framework you picked has dropped dead. That means you have to spend extra time migrating to the now latest framework what usually leaves a lot of cruft behind. Rinse and repeat every year, and your code turns into a nightmare. The Javascript scene seems to be exceptionally good at taking the wrongest turns.