Let’s pause and spare a thought for Sebastien Castiel. Let’s send him our sympathy and our very best wishes. Sebastien Castiel is an author who has just written a book on NextJS. The title of his book is, “Serverless Web Applications With React and Next.js: Use Next.js serverless features to access databases and authenticate users in your React applications”. His book is due for release in just over a month’s time. On Amazon, you can pre-order his book. As far as we can tell, his book looks very professional and very thoughtfully put together. We have every reason to assume that it’s an excellent book and certainly something that would have surely required a great deal of time and effort to produce. Unfortunately, Sebastien woke up to the news – yesterday – that is book is now virtually worthless. It’s out of date literally before it has even been released! That’s because the team behind NextJS have taken it upon themselves to completely rewrite their framework. Now, Sebastien must come to terms with the thought that he has just wasted his time by writing a book that’s out of date before it has even been released. Sebastien is a victim of rewrite culture. He joins a very long and growing list of real people who are being hurt when framework makers break their own assets by releasing new versions constantly. In the case of NextJS, the disease of rewrite culture appears to be particularly out of control. The framework itself is only six years old and already they’re on version 13. This means that the team behind NextJS have a track record of breaking their own framework more than twice per year. From what we understand, this most recent rewrite is particularly devastating. Every book. Every tutorial. Every website. Every presentation. Every course. ALL NOW OUT OF DATE AND OBSOLETE. And for what? What great innovation did the team behind NextJS bring to the table to justify this insane rewrite? Based on their Apple inspired presentation the answer appears to be 'speed'. In short, they built an asset in Rust that compiles faster than Webpack. This is, apparently, a justification for breaking and literally rewriting their entire framework. So, once again, many thousands of web developers must ask the question, “Is it worth breaking an entire ecosystem for the purpose of faster benchmarks?” To anyone who is tempted to answer ‘yes’, consider Python. It’s a well-documented fact that Python has outrageously slow benchmarks. Despite this, Python is the most popular programming language on Earth. That’s according to the Tiobe index, which is widely considered to be the ultimate authority on this subject (source: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/). Regardless of what you think of Python, and regardless of Python’s slow benchmarks, the success of Python - in terms of popularity and worldwide usage - is undeniable. In spite of the fact that many thousands of NextJS developers are waking up to the news that their work is out of date, NextJS 13 will probably be successful. That’s because as we speak ‘the usual suspects’ on YouTube, Udemy and elsewhere will be licking their lips and already they’ll be preparing their ‘build a task manager’ tutorials, along with their twenty dollar courses. There’s big money to be made in rewriting frameworks frequently. That’s unless, of course, you’re unlucky enough to be an ordinary developer or – heaven forbid – an entrepreneur whose business depends upon some fleeting, frequently rewritten, over-engineered framework. To be fair, Turbopack (which is their new flagship asset) appears to be addressing a legitimate concern. There have been a great number of developers who have expressed concerns, previously, about Webpack being slow. A quick search on Google confirms this. Turbopack solves this issue. That should be applauded. It's important to encourage and applaud framework makers when they solve real problems. The point of contention is nothing to do with stopping or holding back innovation. Some of us, however, take the viewpoint that innovation should not necessarily come at the expense of stability. As far as we can tell, most of the framework makers have little or no regard for stability. If you're a NextJS developer and that doesn't worry you then it should! So, let's be clear about what's being said here. We congratulate the team behind NextJS for building Turbopack. However, we are disappointed that they are taking their place in a very long line of framework makers who appear to be determined to break their own assets constantly. It's important for framework makers to realise that rewrite culture hurts real people. We - as a community - must raise our standards. It's time for the web development community to insist upon stability. Travernigov