It feels like everyday a new JavaScript framework is born. It promises to be “blazing” fast and better than anything that came before it (obviously).
You check the landing page, you star the Github repo “just in case” and you move on with your life.
Or maybe you don’t, maybe you feel offended to the bone that this new generation of developers is just running in circles, reinventing what PHP or JSP were able to do 15 years ago. You go on HackerNews and rant about framework-of-the-day and how everyone is wasting your time.
Why do people react like this when someone just shares with them usually free work. Work that took months of their lives. The authors probably spent days and days not only writing the code, but also picking a name, a logo, making a landing page, writing documentation. But then instead of the expected support and excitement, they are faced with rejection or even rage.
How dare you make me learn something new, when the old thing was perfectly decent?
In reality, the birth of a new framework, language or protocol doesn’t prevent anyone from opening NotePad , hand writing HTML and CSS, sprinkling some JS and putting it on a production server using FTP.
All that is and will ALWAYS be possible no matter how much React gets popular and no matter how many frameworks are on the top of HackerNews page.
I think it comes down to one word "employability". Developers want to keep getting paid for what they already know and use. They are worried that a new thing will become so trendy and leave them needing to learn yet another thing to keep being employable.
It is true you can still make a web page using NotePad, but it would be very hard to get anyone to pay for it.
It also comes from this cynicism, where we individually believe the industry to be filled with hype-chasing idiots and that it will move under our feet without any justifiable gains.
Refarming the framework discussion from purely technical to an employability made all those angry comments make a lot more sense to me.
It is just self defense.