All this modern technology…
…makes it look like we’re stuck in the last decade
Still between jobs, I’m casually browsing ads. I don’t know if it’s my masochistic urge or anxiety about not having a full-time job (which I don’t urgently need), but I do it anyway. One thing that caught my eye early on is the use of the phrase “modern technology” to refer to several pieces of tech that, in my memory, isn’t anywhere near modern… in fact it had appeared shortly after or even before I got into web development.
Take a look at this picture.
I seriously doubt anyone would call the Nokia 230 (pictured above) a “modern phone”. After all, it was was released in 2015. A long time ago!
That “long time ago” is actually two years after React. It was also nine years after SASS and six years after LESS. Unless one’s been sleeping under a rock, that’s ancient. And do you know TypeScript is actually older than React, and a over a decade old as of this writing?
Our industry is moving as slow as the projects we work on, burdened by bureaucracy, fear, and religion. We’re still stuck in the 2010’s claiming we’re doing something new and “modern”. Well, the “modern” part is actually not even wrong. Since we’re stuck in the old times, we’re simply copy-pasting the 2010’s into 2020’s and that makes it modern again…
Sure there’s been incremental improvement to all these things over the years, but nothing at the level of introducing entirely new paradigms. Some frameworks have become a little faster. Some got type hints. Some got additional ways to do the same things, but no real solution to any of problems that actually plagued them. Browser technologies got a host of cosmetic changes (sorry, I can’t really call an arrow function an improvement as it’s just another way to say function and classes are nowhere near as polished as I’d hoped), and bits that I think can legitimately be categorized as improvements, like IntersectionObserver, position: sticky, drag and drop API, CSS variables, flexbox, custom elements…
Some “improvements” even go backwards, like how SSR is done today compared to 10 years ago, or how we are consistently breaking the rule of least power by using JavaScript for everything, or breaking separation of concerns by shoving CSS in HTML. Or how service workers “replaced” a perfectly workable way of doing offline-capable apps using just a list of assets in the manifest. Yes it adds bells and whistles, but it makes you jump through fiery hoops just to get offline capability in the basic cases and it still doesn’t quite work. I’m not sure I’d call it an improvement.
It’s quite ironic that when someone does vanilla, people say “it’s old technology, and there’s a good reason it got replaced by the modern frameworks.” Well, first it never got “replaced” to begin with, secondly, the modern technology is not even modern. The joke’s on them, I guess. And it’s not the ha-ha kind of joke either.
To be completely honest, I’m a bit depressed about all this because one of these days I’m going to be interviewed by someone who genuinely believes they’re using the cutting edge tech, and to me it looks like a person using a feature phone in 2020s. Well, nothing wrong with feature phones, I use one — it’s the lack of awareness that we’re talking about ancient technology that’s both comedic and sad at the same time.
If you can’t tell how dated your stack is — and, worse yet, picking it because you believe it’s new — how can you make informed decisions about more important aspects of web development? Like cost, efficiency, performance, knowing what corners to cut and when…