A friend called me last week. Someone who’d built web applications back for a long time before moving exclusively to backend and infra work. He’d just opened a modern React codebase for the first time in over a decade.
“What the hell is this?” he asked. “What are all these generated class names? Did we just… cancel the cascade? Who made the web work this way?”
I laughed, but his confusion cut deeper than he realized. He remembered a web where CSS cascaded naturally, where the DOM was something you worked with, where the browser handled routing, forms, and events without twenty abstractions in between. To him, our modern frontend stack looked like we’d declared war on the platform itself.
He asked me to explain how we got here. That conversation became this essay.
A disclaimer before we begin: This is one perspective, shaped by having lived through the first browser war. I applied pngfix.js to make 24-bit PNGs work in IE6. I debugged hasLayout bugs at 2 AM. I wrote JavaScript when you couldn’t trust addEventListener to work the same way across browsers. I watched jQuery become necessary, then indispensable, then legacy. I might be wrong about some of this. My perspective is biased for sure, but it also comes with the memory that the web didn’t need constant reinvention to be useful.
Introduction
There’s a strange irony at the heart of modern web development. The web was born from documents, hyperlinks, and a cascading stylesheet language. It was always messy, mutable, and gloriously side-effectful. Yet over the past decade, our most influential frontend tools have been shaped by engineers chasing functional programming purity: immutability, determinism, and the elimination of side effects.
This pursuit gave us powerful abstractions. React taught us to think in components. Redux made state changes traceable. TypeScript brought compile-time safety to a dynamic language. But it also led us down a strange path. A one where we fought against the platform instead of embracing it. We rebuilt the browser’s native capabilities in JavaScript, added layers of indirection to “protect” ourselves from the DOM, and convinced ourselves that the web’s inherent messiness was a problem to solve rather than a feature to understand.
The question isn’t whether functional programming principles have value. They do. The question is whether applying them dogmatically to the web (a platform designed around mutability, global scope, and user-driven chaos) made our work better, or just more complex.
The Nature of the Web
... continue reading