In web design, everything easy is hard again
&gt;simply npm your webpack via grunt with vue babel or bower to react asdfjkl;lkdhgxdlciuhw<p>&gt;[...]<p>&gt;I had to install a package manager to install a package manager.<p>And that&#x27;s coming from a designer, not a programmer.<p>A few years ago I had to take over a project that required installing something like 6 different package managers, 2 build systems, and a dozen different languages (counting things like jade and coffeescript), including dependencies that somehow required conflicting versions of the same libraries!  (It took building  pieces of it on 2 separate VMs and then merging them to get it to work.)  All to build what turned out to be a simple little web site that in the end was basically 12 static pages and a simple form.  That doesn&#x27;t make things way easier.<p>When I started programming, the key important things were to focus on getting the data model accurate, getting the business logic correct, validating input properly, and producing the desired output.  Now that is maybe 5-10% of our workload, the other 90+% is dealing with dependencies, build tools, frameworks, 57 layers of generic abstraction, and all the fragile interconnections and leaky abstractions and compatibility issues between all of those things needed primarily just to simply display a page of content or handle a CRUD form.<p>Sure, they&#x27;re beautiful and interesting from an intellectual standpoint, and when they&#x27;re working properly, they do make things that were once quite difficult a lot easier.  But they also add a lot of complexity, require a lot of maintenance, and make the simple things much more complicated.  Often, it&#x27;s as if we&#x27;re flying a squadron of helicopters down to the corner store to get milk (because isn&#x27;t that cool and fun?!), and by the time the operation&#x27;s completed and we&#x27;ve returned home and got all the helicopters repaired, we realize that we forgot the milk, or it&#x27;s already spoiled, or we ended up with a potato instead.<p>I do love playing with the new toys.  React is really cool, a lot of the new stuff is interesting.  But all those layers, all that indirection, all that distances us from the domain data and business logic can make it a lot harder to solve real problems and produce real value.  Sometimes I just want to build something and not have to deal with all that mess.