Our concerned UX Design Manager stumbled upon this now infamous article:
The sad state of web development
The author copped a lot of flack about this but ultimately the web community has been acknowledging that the new world of front end web development is still too hard. There have been efforts to lower the barrier. No doubt if our teams started their journey into Node and React now as opposed to 9 months ago, it would be easier already to adopt.
I can appreciate the complexity of the front end now but what the JS community in particular has not done well is provide opinionated approaches and frameworks which ultimately drives adoption and a level of common understanding. Infact they have done almost everything they can to avoid it (very web really, always a bit punk) but the result is ultimately ambiguity, complexity, duplication and confusion. It feels to me that the tide is starting to turn and opinionated approaches and frameworks are starting to come through but there are still gaps where developers just need to work it out.
I still struggle to see the positive trade-off of the high quality outcomes of the node/react world vs the productivity of the Rails/jQuery world. Rails always prided itself on being opinionated, complete and incredibly simple to use. Node and React pride themselves on being incredibly flexible, un-opinionated and capable of doing the most amazing things. What is the ideal? Well, like most things it’s probably somewhere in the middle!
… and by that I mean Rails 5 with React 