When I first started learning programming which is roughly in the start of 2018, Deno and Bun didn't exist. Crypto was not popular and AI was far less powerful; It was a different world to say.
I have gotten interested in web development only recently but my first experience with it probably dates back to 2018 too, I didn't know much about HTTP back then and didn't even know what frameworks were.
I never used frameworks as a result of that.
That's why I am thankful for Svelte, the first framework I have used. I am thankful it's the first because Svelte is more beautiful then any other framework I could imagine.
See, a good framework makes you need to use it but a beautiful framework makes you want to use it.
That's exactly what happened with Svelte so this is the story of me learning Svelte and why Svelte is beautiful.
I started when I heard of Svelte 5, it looked appealing to me and concise, so I went for it. I started the Svelte Tutorial and that was a life-changing experience, to say that would be an understatement.
It instantly pulled me in, all future websites I wanted to do we of course going to be build in Svelte. Everything about the framework was what I wanted, so I naturally learned more and more and saw more of what I wanted.
See Svelte feels like plain HTML which is easy to write, most of what I was writing was HTML, little JS. This might not happen for everyone but I think that pulled me more because less interaction with an API was needed and I could use HTML more.
Compare it to React, you use TSX in React and it feels more like JS from the start where you return HTML from functions. It instantly pulls into the API side more then it does to beautifully tinkered HTML.
In Svelte reactivity is pretty easy, you just make variables in your JS and it just becomes reactive in the HTML. Little to no setup required.
No again let's compare to React which by default doesn't even have full reactivity builtin as it doesn't live monitor and replace like Svelte does so React is to an extent not even fully reactive.
Svelte is pretty simple like very simple to get started with. You can create your first Svelte component and then just use regular HTML and JS with a bit more custom syntax to make anything you want.
React on the other hand has TSX again which is much more API-oriented and harder to grasp then a bit custom HTML syntax, you don't even need to use Svelte's API for simple applications but in React you surprisingly need to.
React was created in 2013 and Svelte was created in 2016, since React does a lot of what Svelte does but worse it was used a lot and became standard to the point that programmers started naming themselves after it! (it's stupid to do that with any framework)
Then Svelte came and made it much better though as React has a headstart it's still used today and improved, and it does have some advantages over Svelte.
It makes sense why people used React, it was the only choice for this kind of thing back then but now with Svelte we have a market split and now I would choose Svelte over React.
Sure we have Angular, Vue and other frameworks too but with reactivity and markup React and Svelte come most to my mind.