Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#161

Post by sundarurfriend » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 9:53 PM UTC

dimmke wrote: post #9

>I’ve hit a point where it just doesn’t seem like the end justifies the means in the vast majority of cases anymore I agree, but the only path forward is to change the specifications for HTML/CSS/JavaScript. As an industry we need to accept that these technologies get used to build web pages as well as software and adjust. This will remove a ton of the tooling. I think there are 3 basic things we could do to solve th…

In practice, any attempt to change these basic specs would be diverted to be to the benefit of Google and its ilk, with the power they have to steer conversations and decisions. It's an accident of history that we ended up with these fairly open and hackable systems as the basis for the Web, and it's at a delicate point where a lot of companies are annoyed that they can't silo and close down more of it.

So the unfortunate reality is that any well-intentioned attempt to reform them would be used instead to reshape them for corporate interests, with no guarantee that we even end up with better specs from a developer point of view. The incentives lay in the direction of guaranteeing corporate interests, with users losing more of their freedom to choose how they access and use the Web; the developer concerns will at best be used as a PR front for the press headlines.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#162

Post by P5fRxh5kUvp2th » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

coffeefirst wrote: post #16

I call this the "path to enlightenment." You have discovered that the most popular toolchain is overkill for 95% of the things its used for. The problem is that's true literally across the board. You move to the backend and you have to deal with people who fell in love with microservices and weird databases that they didn't need. You move to ops and you have to deal with k8s when a single container would do. If you t…

It happens because everyone wants to imagine they're smart and just happen to work for a no name company.

The intelligence is in the end result of the engineering, but no one wants their work to be so simple it could have been done by a junior.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#163

Post by sliq » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

5350-uiop-1130 wrote: post #18

no such thing as frontend development. only full stack. and react for all the trillions of words written about it, what can you actually do with it? not much. also it's over-saturated as hell. you think there's high demand, you're right, now try applying for a position and see how it goes. there are two types of roles in modern web dev: 1 .90% of jobs are code monkey work: extremely saturated, you are competing with…

you nailed it! this is exactly the problem. everything is horribly overcomplicated these days. i've 13 years of business experience and it gets harder and harder to even set up the most simple "hello world" demo of most frameworks. also the job market represents this insanity too: 5 years ago I easily got senior positions, now i don't even know the words inside most job descriptions even in my field. And on top of all, stuff like kubernetes, kibana and prometheus now also is often expected from a typical backend developer. absolute mayhem!

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#164

Post by exabrial » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 9:57 PM UTC

Use a component based framework like Primefaces and you’ll realize you can push code way about 10x faster than a js stack.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#165

Post by idlehand » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 9:58 PM UTC

hnuser847 wrote: post #58

coffeefirst wrote: post #16

I call this the "path to enlightenment." You have discovered that the most popular toolchain is overkill for 95% of the things its used for. The problem is that's true literally across the board. You move to the backend and you have to deal with people who fell in love with microservices and weird databases that they didn't need. You move to ops and you have to deal with k8s when a single container would do. If you t…

> The only thing you can do (besides leave it all behind and open a taqueria) is be a voice for simplicity. What are we going to build? What tools make sense for it? I tried to do this at several companies and ended up feeling like a pariah. At the end of the day, engineers, especially younger ones, like to follow trends, "learn new things", pad their resumes, and build bespoke solutions. Trying to fight against this…

As a younger dev I see the opposite in my corner of the world. The senior developers spend countless hours debating the best design, engineering large architectures to bounce a handful of kilobytes of information around in the just right way to achieve architectural purity. Then they do greenfield development with old tech that is simultaneously somehow both old and barely used, as if to generate their own job security.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#166

Post by dimmke » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 10:07 PM UTC

an1sotropy wrote: post #157

dimmke wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

1. It's confusing. The fact that there's a "role" attribute that is implicit sometimes and needs to be declared other times and a "aria-XYZ" set of attributes is stupid. The purist HTML take was always "Markup should describe content" - now we're describing content with attributes?

2. It's positioned specifically as being for accessibility. This is bad for several reasons. First, it's not necessary. The entire goal of semantic markup in the first place was to make it so that the content of documents can be read by machines (both screen readers and other systems) - tacking on a special system just for accessibility is basically them giving up on this entirely. Secondly, a lot of people don't care about accessibility. Like I said, in our current system people barely know how to write HTML. Or they write some bastardized version of it in JSX or w/e. You think they're going to learn the intricacies of ARIA? No.

The goal should be for HTML to be a language that when written properly is accessible by default. Not just "hey everybody it's cool if you use divs for everything, just make sure screen readers know what it's supposed to be."

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#167

Post by ostenning » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 10:07 PM UTC

My academic background is Electronic Engineering and embedded development but found myself in fullstack and then frontend development roles for over 7 years. I began to experience what you described, essentially a bunch of hype technologies bandwagoned by junior devs and HR recruiters spouting buzzwords and insane abstractions, npm dependency hell and glue code coming out of my ears. The whole ecosystem is crazy.

The worst part about it is the technical debt that companies encounter. Technology should be serving business objectives, first and foremost. If your tech-stack is outdated in 2 years time, something is really wrong.

I’ve gone back to EE, hardware engineering and embedded development. I think this specialization probably reduces job availability, but I can always fall back to webdev in tougher times if I have to, and its something to set me apart from all the 8 week bootcamp coders flooding into the webdev market

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#168

Post by CodeSgt » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 10:10 PM UTC

johnfn wrote: post #47

coffeefirst wrote: post #16

I call this the "path to enlightenment." You have discovered that the most popular toolchain is overkill for 95% of the things its used for. The problem is that's true literally across the board. You move to the backend and you have to deal with people who fell in love with microservices and weird databases that they didn't need. You move to ops and you have to deal with k8s when a single container would do. If you t…

> Why does this happen? It happens because these technologies solve real problem for some subset of their users. Usually when people are saying that technology has become too complicated, it's because they happen to be looking from a perspective where the problems that the technology solves are invisible to them. That doesn't mean that the problem isn't important - it just means the problem isn't important for them .…

I agree with the sentiment so this comment is more of a nitpick than anything constructive, but I do feel you may have missed the mark with the typescript example.

Even if you don't want to use TS in it's full glory, you can just rename your files with a `.ts`, turn strict mode off, run everything through the compilation step, and weed out a category of simple mistakes from that alone. Add in that you can slowly add in certain rules to reach a level of strictness as you need and I see no reason how a JS dev would be better off writing vanilla JS than at least using TS and only running the compile step. Of course, I think taking the time to learn and fully utilize typescript the best path forward, even those with absolutely no desire to learn it can utilize some of it's strengths by reading the docs for 15 minutes.

Far from an unnecessary complexity, it's because an incredibly helpful tool at all levels.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#169

Post by bottlepalm » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 10:15 PM UTC

yrgulation wrote: post #158

bottlepalm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am concerned how much your posts center around you writing code and not a team. Are you concerned about maintainability? Have you written software with large teams before and have had to maintain that software over a number of years?

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#170

Post by knackfuss » Sat, Oct 08, 2022, 10:25 PM UTC

Switched from web backend to unreal engine game programming dev. Havent started yet on the new gig but one of my main motivations to not do web stuff anymore was having to deal with people introducing unnecessary layers between you and what you want to do in code, all that time. It is just a thing because web companies can afford both the extra cost and extra performance hit that these "best practices" incurr (and cultural inertia, maybe), while in games, I believe, there isnt space for any of that, you must start simple to complex because of budgets. Not the other way around.