Title: Hopefully this can be a fruitful discussion since I think I have a quite clear but also reasonably common set of needs. I have a feeling that if you&#x27;re &quot;in the world&quot; of frontend engineering you get a much more intuitive feeling for these tooling questions than I can get at a distance by reading SEO-spam developer blogs and State Of JS (although the latter does seem really helpful).<p>I&#x27;m thinking of building a text-annotation based app _alone in my spare time_. The core usage loop is about viewing and interacting with &quot;visual markup&quot; applied to a body of text. So lots of tooltips&#x2F;hoverbars I guess.<p>Some notes about my needs:<p>- This would be by far the most complex GUI I&#x27;ve ever built.<p>- Relatedly, I expect to get the UX design horribly horribly wrong and start from scratch at least once.<p>- I also suck at making things look pretty and also don&#x27;t find this problem very rewardinging to think or read about.<p>- All of the above point towards a framework that is pretty easy to get started in and prototype quickly.<p>- Because of limited time, and low confidence in UX design decisions, I would often follow the path of least resistance and the end product would be heavily influenced by the tools I used to build it.<p>----<p>- Despite what I said about quick rampup I&#x27;m fine with learning new languages.<p>- Weak typing is a deal-breaker. If using JS, must have good TypeScript integration or similar. (Does anyone still write plain JS?)<p>------<p>- I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ll want a native desktop app but an iOS&#x2F;Android version could make sense. But I&#x27;ll never have time if this can&#x27;t share most of the code with the web version.<p>-------<p>- I don&#x27;t really have the discipline for manual testing. Luckily I also find it satisfying to over-invest in test automation. I don&#x27;t really know how this is done in frontend land but good tooling would be a big plus.<p>-----<p>- I&#x27;m happy to sacrifice one or more of the other requirements in favour of tools that are likely to be maintained 10 years from now.<p>----<p>What are HNs thoughts?
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