Web-Application Despair

I don’t know how to write web applications anymore. At least not at scale, in heterogeneous teams.

All I want is something sustainable, both in terms of end-user experience and development complexity. These days I’m stumped though.

JavaScript is tricky: Can’t recommend anything Node-based because there’s no serious sufficient web framework1 and the npm ecosystem is a dumpster fire2. Deno is exciting, but doesn’t currently have a satisfying framework either. The situation’s no better with edge providers’ offerings.

Ruby has Rails, obviously – still the gold standard in many ways, except it’s fallen behind with regard to front-end assets (go read the Gospel of Lucas). Structurally, boilerplate-driven development persists. Plus there’s fascism now(?).

Python doesn’t seem to be competitive these days: Django and Flask feel like they’re not up to snuff anymore. The language itself, along with the ecosystem, has also degraded in various ways. I might be totally wrong here, and I hope I am; Python used to be my paragon.

Elixir’s Phoenix is … well, too special. Interesting in a cute way, but not a serious contender.

Go? Yeah, no. (Again I refer you to Lucas.)

Rust? Under the hood, of course.

PHP, well, sure, why not?

Java and its ilk? I hear there’s proper component-based templating now. DX is still terrible in many ways though.

Client-side frameworks are not even worth considering most of the time. (You’d typically still need a server anyway, so that wouldn’t even solve my problem.)