I don't have any context, but I do have trouble imagining that any of your projects have scale/complexity above brochure-ware if you haven't run into this.
I have a lot of "framework free" single-developer projects as well (such as https://bongo.to ), but that isn't really what I think we are talking about here. Single developer projects can do whatever they want, it isn't a problem. The problem comes when you have to work with distributed teams, juniors, etc. One way or another a large team still has to come to agreements about how to do things, and without an external reference it will have to be made up in an ad-hoc manner instead. This often leads to issues, many of us have noticed.
The claim upthread was that you couldn't make a web app at all without a framework ("or it would just be a document"). I said yes you can and the goalposts shifted to: sure, but only "brochure-ware" (referring to simple unambitious projects). I show an ambitious interactive project made without a framework and now the goalposts are moving to: sure, but large distributed teams couldn't work like this? You know, this solo project is more ambitious than 99% of the projects I work on at my actual work. You know, projects that have 10, 40, or 100 devs working on it.
I absoluetly agree with your sentiment, and furthermore in projects as large and mature as mine, with 500K LOC (about maybe 30% in TypeScript) lots of times I simply cannot remember enough about my code to effectively refactor it from memory without type safety (to check me) and IDE refactoring to DO the refactoring.
I mean if I need to change a variable name in a class or something, unless it's a perfectly unique name (easily searchable), it would take me hours to do in JS what I can do in 4 seconds with TypeScript.
Even if you know of massive projects in JS, the problem isn't that they cannot exist, it's that maintaining them takes 100x the manpower it would in TypeScript.
Yes it is. App.js is all the code there is. You can't count the two other files with 10 lines each. lol. Let's be honest here.
And yeah for a tiny toy project like this you can get away with having zero design, zero architecture, zero object models, zero classes, and sure since everything is zero, we can throw in "Zero TypeScript" and "Zero Frameworks". Looks like some high-schooler's first ever coding project.
There's literally only 4 JS files in the whole repo and you couldn't be bothered to check how much code they have? Even after I told the other guy who made the same false claim "no, it's not a single file codebase"?
Jesus you people are insufferable. So obnoxiously confident while being wrong about easily verifiable facts.
> tiny toy project
Huh? 99% of web development is about rendering text and images. This project is moving your mouse inside a web browser & provides a plausible chat experience without a language model. That's more ambitious than just about any actual work project I've seen.
Even considering chatbot.js, it's still a small enough toy project to just barely get by without type safety. I don't consider a project "large" until it's in the 30K to 50K LOC at least, where it becomes impossible to literally remember where each use of any given variable is. Type Safety catches most typos at build time, and also allows ease of refactoring. Only these small projects can get by without type safety, but EVEN the small projects DO benefit from catching errors at build time. It's just a self-foot-shoot to find bugs at runtime instead of build time.
The question in this thread is not TypeScript vs JavaScript. It's framework vs no-framework. Specifically, is it possible - possible at all - to create an interactive web app without frameworks - one that isn't "just a document" or "brochure-ware". I've demonstrated pretty clearly that yes it is possible. You people just keep shifting the goalposts further and further... Now it doesn't count unless it's 50K LoC? As if unnecessary complexity was some kind of inherent good.
I never saw anyone on this thread deny that JS CAN be used without frameworks. As a developer since before the internet even existed I've written probably at least two to four million lines of JS in my life, so I'm well aware.
What people are saying is that for LARGE projects you NEED a framework. And your app is tiny. It's got like two source files. So it's just an example of a tiny project getting by without a framework. I have a couple of those currently myself, because I don't need a framework for them. They're just HTML+CSS+JS.
> And your app is tiny. It's got like two source files.
If the same app had been written by a typical team of React devs, it would be >1000 source files and 50K LoC. That's not an argument against my approach, it's an argument in favor of it.
The SPA version would unmanageable without the latest 4th generation JS build tools. Spend an afternoon reading the manual for the configs. Watch the output of 'pnpm list' break your terminal environment when you try piping it through 'less'.
You have it exactly backwards. Since React does all the DOM updates automatically, my massive project, with 100s of thousands of TypeScript LOC, has zero DOM calls in it. lol.
He's right. You have a project with two source files in it. That's basically not at any kind of scale he was talking about, and is easily classified as brochure-ware, from an architectural standpoint, simply because there's no architecture to it at all. Just a monolithic file.
I was willing to assume good intentions from you earlier, but at this point it's clear you're just lying. You've seen the number of files in the repository, we already had a back and forth and you already conceded there was more than one file. And yet here you are, reiterating the same lie. Weird stuff.
Those two 17 LOC files don't count. That leaves precisely two source files, just like I said. It's well under the threshold where I'd consider a framework mandatory.
