Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, that the issue with php devs.
Oh I don't know any PHP, sadly. That's probably another issue with us.
You think you did a funny but you’d be surprised how many php devs dont know php.
Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
151–160 of 292 posts
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sort of, but React is not a language. It's a runtime lib. JSX is not really helpful - still writing HTML and CSS. TypeScript has been very useful and successful but it hasn't touched the UI stuff. We need a better alternative to HTML and CSS. With WASM any language can now be compiled to run in the browser, and it's a matter of time until WASM integrates with the DOM as well. This isn't web specific. Desktop UI APIs…
>Sort of, but React is not a language. It's a runtime lib. JSX is not really helpful - still writing HTML and CSS. TypeScript has been very useful and successful but it hasn't touched the UI stuff. That's my point. The main thing that JSX does is address that you can't do conditional rendering or interpolation with HTML. It's the same with literally all of these other templating languages. Blade, Jade, Handlebars, Mu…
HTML and CSS were not designed for building software. There's a reason it's nearly impossible to implement a web browser from scratch these days. The spec is an ancient monster. Adding more layout options to CSS doesn't simplify things, but only complicates. How many ways are there to layout stuff these days? Try explaining flexbox to a newbie.
HTML was meant for hyperlinked documents. It may be ok for that, but it's inappropriate for apps. Who cares about semantic meanings of DOM nodes in an app?
I don't think people prefer web dev to desktop dev, but really there's no choice if you need to support multiple OSes. Swift UI is a much more consistent development experience for example. Visual Basic was that for Windows. But cross platform? The only real target there is Skia.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#153I feel your pain. My career happiness peaked around 2014 or 2015, when I was writing Rails monoliths. I felt like I could focus 100% of my energy on business logic since the framework was so opinionated and the stack was simple. Things went rapidly downhill after that, once microservices, SPAs, node.js, NoSQL, and serverless computing started becoming popular. Everything just felt like a step backward. Microservices…
>NoSQL, frankly, is utterly pointless, and I have no clue why it ever caught on.
It caught on because "feature factory" startups used simple frameworks to make an MVP and didn't know shit about RDBMS administration, optimization, or schema planning so when it was schema migration time it was time for things to start breaking. With NoSQL (specifically the "document store" types) you could just keep throwing shit in there whenever you needed it -- magic schema migration! And it was "Web Scale"©!
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#154I think you should try out Angular. React ecosystem is a mess and needs extremely experienced developers to produce software that doesn't suck. Angular, on the other hand, it's quite simple and helps you to get the shit done.
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Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#155I focus on backend and native GUI development, when required to do Web GUI development vanilaJS + SSR are my tools for the last 20 years, I leave the deep knowledge of the FE framework of the day to the FE teams.
To this day I have been lucky to always been able to find something, maybe because I've always embraced a polyglot toolbox and not being int a silo as XYZ Developer.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#156Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Number 3 is the ARIA spec right? You should be using that already if you’re writing accessible applications. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A...
Here's what I don't understand about the ARIA spec - and maybe you can help clarify it for me. Why are we using attributes instead of element names? Like take this for example: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/A... Did we just give up on using semantic elements? People barely know how to write regular HTML anymore, and the ARIA spec is confusing. I'm glad it exists, but to me it fits into th…
Can you say more about why "it sucks"? Are there some specific changes you can think of that would have made it a less bad idea?
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hold on, we are talking php here. There is no code compiling. Either way what you are describing sounds like instead of maintaining sql code you prefer maintaining orm code. DTOs are just overhead. I gave up on all these after 15 years of using them because the benefits are precisely zero (except for migrations). Similarly with typescript, if you are competent enough with js and as a programmer you dont need it. The…
With hundreds of developers and millions of lines of code - yes Typescript and ORMs will completely eliminate entire classes of bugs, and be a force multiplier when it comes to productivity. You should never rule out a tool as 'unnecessary' even if you can't think of any possible reason for it. Try to keep an open mind here, you may not know everything.
Totally agreed re keeping an open mind. But after having used all the niceties you describe i understood that php itself is a fractal of poor design and practices. Gave up on using literally everything you described and ended up writing better code at a fraction of the time.
I do recommend reflecting on things as not knowing everything goes both ways.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're going to get a huge reduction in code for all sorts of things, especially when navigating multiple relations, grouping, sub-selects, etc.. var results = db.myTable .where(x => x.value > 6) .where(mySpecialConditionalLogicFunction) .select(x => { thing = x.relation.relation.relation.value, thingList2 = x.relation.relations .groupby(y => y.value) .select(g => g.count) .orderby(y => y.value) .take(5), thing3 = x.…
This brings fond memories of my early stages where i became fond of the method chaining pattern. I became fascinated by it when using doctrine. However the code you pasted is horrible and easily replaced by sql. Not only does someone else need to learn your custom logic functions and dtos but they also need to read stuff like “ x.relation.relation.relation.value”. I see your point in regards to dtos “automagically” u…
Take a single line from my example 'x.relation.relation.relation.value'
The SQL would be
select w.value
from x
join y on y.relation=x.relation
join z on z.relation=y.relation
join w on w.relation=z.relation
In addition compiling will validate the ORM code generates valid SQL. On the other hand compiling will not validate a SQL string.
'Custom functions' are just larger versions of the anonymous functions in my example. Very easy for other developers to go to the reference and understand.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#160I don't know if this helps or hurts but I took up Elixir a few years ago and was liking it, the way the FP simplifies the scope you have to operate within and the general stability of the API that Jose has stated, i.e. it's feature complete for the foreseeable future, changes now are mostly optimizations such as pushing more into the erlang layer. Then they introduced releases which can package everything into a tar…
I've looked at Elixir a bit, but I came away with the expression that it would be a bit like doing Django before 1.7 where I had to do schema migrations manually. This is a huge deal to me. I didn't see any forms libraries either, so the forms situation seems even more primitive. I'm the author of iommi so I now have very high level abstractions for forms/tables/menus/etc, and a transparent way to compose these. I wo…
Fwiw I was afraid of manual migrations too, coming from Django, but its not that terrible once you get used to it. There should be a few form libs out there but I havent needed one so far. Chris McCord said at ElixirConf that there are plans of reworking the forms api to make it work better with LiveView.