found drama

My first reaction to the Aurelia announcement is (of course) that this is why a lot of developers look at JavaScript and the web front-end and see only thrash, and feel only fatigue. And in this case in particular (given Eisenberg’s previous project involvements), it smells a bit of icarian hubris. ¹

And in that respect, you won’t find me among the early-adopters. (Taking a page from “sometimes better isn’t better if it’s different” here.)

That being said, this isn’t to suggest that there is nothing interesting happening in the Aurelia project. Count me with Tom Dale (here, and a couple of the tweets that immediately follow): ²

Still digesting the Aurelia announcement, but the adaptive databinding engine approach is such a no-brainer in retrospect.

— Tom Dale (@tomdale) January 27, 2015

The pluggable data-binding seems like a huge takeaway here and that we are going to see that in every framework, that you can’t have a compelling inter-op story without that. But much of the rest of what’s being pitched here (e.g., modularized code, no external dependencies, “just vanilla JavaScript”) – that’s all stuff that we’ve heard before.

I’ll stay tuned, and I’ll be watching Aurelia, but I’m mostly interested in how it will affect the roadmaps for other projects. Because frankly I’m sick to death of having being told I need to go learn this Completely New Framework/Paradigm/Whatever ³ every six weeks.

1. As a brief aside re: the icarian hubris remark above: let’s not lose sight of the easy-to-see flip side of that: that if anyone is going to propose a new framework, who better than someone like Eisenberg? who better than someone has been deep into other projects like this? And/but that’s also where the disappointment comes from – that it just winds up feeling like yet another technical leader decides to zig instead of zag, to go off and create a new thing instead of doing the hard work of taking something and making it better.[↩]
2. Here, here, here, here, and here.[↩]
3. See also: here and here.[↩]

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