Why Vanilla JavaScript

So many more problems solved…

Those problems aren't 'solved'. The author has an implementation of a solution. It's one that they think is good, which is ace and I'm happy for him, but if he ever introduces a second developer to his project those 'solved' problems will become a point of friction. They'll go from 'solved' to 'solved, but in the wrong way' or 'solved, but not for this edge case', or 'solved, but why is the code so verbose?'

The massive advantage of a framework is that the people who choose it have agreed to share a solution to the common problems. This cannot be overstated - as soon as your team grows to more than one developer you move from 'solve the problem' to 'solve the problem in a way that people agree on', and that is far more complicated than just solving a problem. Sometimes you get lucky and work with people who think the same way as you, or with people who are willing to compromise on their ideal solution and accept yours, and then things still work, but if they're 'passionate' about being right then it's horrible, slow, and results in bad code.

A framework is an upfront agreement about how to build something. That has no practical advantage for a dev working alone. It's incredibly useful for two or more devs working together. Which framework doesn't really matter, except the ones with more devs behind them make it a lot easier to find people who've already accepted that way of working. That's helpful.

React is an electric screwdriver. Real hassle: battery needs charging, need to insert correct bit, may need extendy bit for some jobs. But got an IKEA cupboard and not a simple shelf? Gimme that electric screwdriver!

In vanilla JS even small SPA projects can end up tangled or you are hand compiling what React would do for you for free.

Nit: in React events are events useEffect reacts to abstract state changes.

Labeling UI frameworks as artificial complexity is simply a sign of inexperience manifested as NIH syndrome.

The vanilla approach is fine for a personal or toy project, but it's an unmitigated disaster for a project with even a moderately complex UI.

Eventually, the vanilla project becomes its own bespoke UI framework with a bunch of poor design choices because all the complexity that was dismissed as "artificial" eventually gets patched in using a rube-goldberg-machine approach to architecture.

> The idea of reactivity came from or was popularized by Angular.js

No, spreadsheets popularized reactivity. And the general point is incredibly weak.

Don't use frameworks and make your own? Sure, have your fun. But then try teaching your framework to your company of 1000 and see how quickly you realize your view of the "problems" are only a slice of the pie.

I appreciate the sentiment, but can't agree fully. I used vanilla JS for many years before AngularJS even existed (and I also tried AngulasJS when it was the new thing).

Vue is just a huge convenience over raw JavaScript for large, complex view. Sure, I don't get to do direct DOM manipulation, but when I write C code I also don't get to pick which variable goes in which CPU register. I accept giving up control that ASM would give me, for all the improvements that C brings on top of it, even if C just compiles to ASM and is an abstraction on top of it.

Did I misunderstand or was that whole rant just to establish that, actually, we do need super tiny frameworks for the front end, but they're super tiny so it's not a big deal and they're not bad like React?

Vanilla JavaScript makes sense for personal projects, but if you're working on a team, I wouldn't trust other team members to not create their own frameworks that may not be as well documented.

Especially nowadays with LLMs, the team would benefit more from the LLM innately knowing a widely used library/framework than having to spend context each session teaching the agent your custom setup through context files and skills.

Aka. I didn't like the N frameworks out there, so I invented 2 more. Now we have N+2...

My take is that the take that vanilla js is better because developers love coding more than they love building the thing. See all the frameworks/packages built as an example.

This person re-invented form handlers, frameworks, ui helpers just to be able to do some basic things.

All power to you if you like it, its just funny.

> NO, YOU CANNOT JUST USE GLOBAL STATE. USE THIRD-PARTY LIBRARY WITH FANCY FUNCTIONAL DESIGN.

window.i = 0; // initialize all my for loops in one go!

Did anyone else notice the pattern that ever since the LLMs got popular the "I hate javascript" kind of posts or comments have decreased?

It could be attributed also to typescript dominance of course, since people don't use plain js anymore.

As for the blog post, I agree, I also implemented my own js framework when I code in vanilla js and it works fine.

The problem is not inventing frameworks, the problem is that everyone invents frameworks, so people all know different things and they are hard to hire.

It’s been a minute since someone ranted about frontend frameworks. Take a shot.

This hit so close to home. For the last eight months I've been building a web app without any major framework like react or angular. Angular taught me a lot of important lessons about best practices for structuring UI. But eventually you run into boilerplate that doesn't jive with what you want to do.

The author frames this as artificial complexity, and that's the best framing I've seen. The browser has a particular presentation philosophy and the more you try to cover it up, the more awkward your code becomes at the edges.

The killer application of LLMs is their ability to inform and adapt to a particular API, and analyze the code that you write. They are garbage at producing functionality for which they don't have a thousand examples, but provide documentation and intent and they will help you fill in the gaps. This is the real 10x opportunity, and the best part is that you can still write all the code yourself.

I'm certain this doesn't just apply to javascript and the web. I predict that the need for frameworks will slowly go away.

If we are going to rant like this… i’d say even most of JS is unnecessary.

Just use server side template rendering with HTMX. LLM can see server side request flow better anyway.

I love vanilla JavaScript. All my personal projects are plain JavaScript. No Typescript. But in a company setting, it's almost impossible to find plain JavaScript roles.

Plain JS is also a lot better with AI. I don't recall Claude ever making any mistakes in terms of getting the type wrong with plain JS since I started using it. It's just not the kind of mistake that AI makes.

I feel somewhat vindicated by this. I've been saying for years that coding isn't the hard part, type correctness isn't the hard part. I also made a point that complex interfaces are a greater danger and that Typescript tends to encourage people to design complex interfaces... And look, this certainly seems to be reflected in the training data because my AI token usage at work (Typescript) is far greater than on my side projects for the same task complexity.

This is kind of proving my point that plain JS code is better architeted overall than Typescript code... It makes sense to me, any complex plain JS code MUST be well architecture because JS is unforgiving. The spaghetti doesn't go very far in JS.

The power of web components is having the ability to develop complex front end without the need for a build tool in 2026. In 2008 when I got started with heavy javascript jquery was a must have tool to fill in for all the horrible browser api incompatibilites at the time. But because we are just developing custom elements with vanilla it works fine with vue and rust and all the others.

I have to admit that I really love web components ever since Polymer 1, and agree with the article sentiment (this post was starting to get to be a mirror of many of the authors thoughts, so cut it down)

It is very interesting watching the Web cycles, and found it curious how many people here were sad that typescript was not mentioned. There are some fun (though I suppose dangerous) things you can do without it, and I've found it has had very many instances not helped me where expected like a fully matured typed language has. And I've worked with a lot of people who just went I added types and don't know how to use generics.

I guess if you have it poorly implemented, then it's best to leave as JavaScript. And, web components you can keep things very simple... Which helps keep many errors down.

I've been considering going back to vanilla javascript, given the current power of LLMs. It could become unreadable spaghetti, but it does that anyway with frameworks.

Author's EHTML "framework" reminds me of HTMX. https://e-html.org/html/vs-others.html misses comparison with HTMX. Curious on the similarities and differences.

Any framework that requires me to learn custom syntax, is a problem in my opinion. I agree with the author that the browser is already the framework, and a powerful one at that. I don't really struggle with views and dom thanks to my own libraries, so maybe those without appreciate thw guilded gardens of these frameworks. Problem is that if these frameworks fall out of favour or stray from their original quality, you're stuck with worthless knowledge and maybe code as well

This article misses the point of frameworks like Angular. Its never been about whether a framework is qualitatively better that vanilla or some other framework. The issue is when your codebase and your team reach a certain size you need the baseline, predictability and the guard rails that a framework provides. Otherwise you risk your project spiraling into chaos.

I wish there was some sort of "use strict-typed" or something that let you use in-browser interpreted typescript

Even better: vanilla TypeScript + golang middleware (esbuild) on the backend that converts to JS on the fly. Like vanilla JS but with all the benefits of a type system and no bundler or npm required.

Some good history of the JS ecosystem here but the underlying message is all the same, frameworks scale and provide structure but you don't need them. Very easy to agree up to this point.

Author then elaborates in the absence of using a common-knowledge framework you can create some tighter solution that achieves just the part you need. This is "fun" programming, and the author is suitably impressed with themselves for solving problems they created just by convincing themself not to use a framework. Sometimes that's fine, although I don't think there's much appetite for this anymore.

Article doesn't really elaborate on what "scaling" and "providing structure" means, I think it downplays the benefits because when you use <framework> you are really establishing ground rules for how all future developers are going to work on that software. You don't know exactly what they'll write, but you know they'll always gravitate towards the top 2 or 3 solutions for that framework at any given time.

When you bust out a bespoke solution that carves out that one thing you needed and does it oh so elegantly and perfectly, you're creating art but most of the canvas is left blank for future developers and they're effectively going to scribble on it with crayons.

I think OP is mainly right about this, but the tone of the article is going to annoy people very much. I believe many of us have done both the self-serving homemade framework and the industry standard framework. And many of us know the pros and cons of both approaches.

I don’t like react very much and dislike the other ones even more. Yet, it’d be stupid to say you can’t make them work. They come with a large community and pckages and solve a ton of problems that a homebrewed framework doesn’t even conceive of. And you can just start writing the stuff you need right away.

On the other hand, a homemade framework doesn’t require the extra overhead of knowing the framework, and maintaining it overtime. You don’t need to track down why the code gets run a gazillion times more than it needs to, you can debug through your events, etc.

They’re just different ways of doing things.

But mainly: react is a pain in the butt but if time is your constrain, it should get you to where you want to be faster than if you’re not using it.

What’s the Idiomatic Vanilla JavaScript way to bind data and UI in a web browser?

I like this article because it feels so pre-AI. This is what people were arguing about on HackerNews back in the day! How so very nostalgic it makes me feel.

But in response to the article: no, vanilla JS is a nightmare to keep your code organized, and battle tested frameworks do quite a good job at that. It's otherwise mostly a waste of time, or an intellectual exercise at most, to build an app with vanilla JS

*vanilla typescript

4 years doing this before AI. Then I felt my tool was not quite right for the AI environment. Now I'm building something else with AI.

Sad to see no mention of @ts-check. I love being able to write native browser JS modules with nearly all of the functionality from TypeScript.

Based and Vanilla JS pilled.

I know posts like this get a lot of whinging, but you are 100% right. The browser is in itself a platform; frameworks are not like some kind of hyper abstracted Web Scrinting Language for people too important to deal with "raw" CSS/DOM. They're a an awkward, alternate abstraction, slow as molasses, and they leak like a sieve.