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Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#171

Post by tcldr »

WandaVision wrote: post #114

Unpopular biased opinion. Frontend development is mostly done by people who are into visual things and less into logic. Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit and less by visual appearance. This leads to the adaptation of large number of garbage frameworks in frontend primarily because their landing pages look visually appealing. After some time fronten…

> Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit and less by visual appearance.

Yes. Backend engineering is completely immune to hype and increased complexity.

laughs into a cloud of micro services

But, more seriously, both front and backend architecture has increased in complexity. I think it’s more than condescending to say it’s because front end engineers base their decisions solely on website aesthetics.

A lot has to do with the fact that for a long time JavaScript has been the only game in town, and engineers have had to work hard within the constraints to afford the same programmer ergonomics available within other environments. This has led to a proliferation of tooling and frameworks which are a nightmare to manage.

No one is picking webpack because ‘it make pretty’.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#172

Post by ThePadawan »

meindnoch wrote: post #144
arcturus17 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing some research recently and it continues to be by far the most popular state management framework for React. The fact that there are alternatives doesn't mean that most projects have abandoned it.

Has it occurred to you that maybe “state management” is not something you need a framework for?

This relates in no way to any statement from the comment you replied to.

Did you mean to reply to a different comment?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#173

Post by _8j50 »

peterhunt wrote: post #167

Early react team member here. The popular react/webpack/npm stack is probably what the OP is talking about. It was popularized because the Instagram web team used webpack and npm in 2013 so we recommended it alongside react in the early days. I was TLM of the team when we made these decisions. There are three main points I want to add to the conversation. 1. UIs actually have a lot of complexity. The number of states…

What is ZIRP?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#174

Post by mojuba »

andix wrote: post #80
mojuba wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for MVC/MVVM and Co specifically on mobile. These things were created to teach beginners a few important concepts, mainly separation of concerns. MVC/MVVM work well on toy sample projects with 2-3 pages but can ruin a larger project. Somehow wherever I'm seeing MVVM applied there's also messy, buggy, impenetrable code around it. I don't think it's a coincidence.

Exactly, those patterns may be good if you know exactly what you're doing. But in all the other cases, they just make everything more complicated and harder to understand. I've once worked with a messy codebase, it was written in a very "naive" way, but that was also the strength of that code. Every view was in one file, every action was just one method, so you exactly knew what code was executed when. We tried to re…

I find that in larger GUI apps the best thing to have is a layered architecture where visual and non-visual parts are separated globally, not on a view-by-view basis. One advantage of this is that you can slice off your visual part and have something like a "headless browser" variant of your app. Among other things this is good for writing integration tests if you also have a backend. Same trick is impossible or very difficult to do with MVVM.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#175

Post by peterhunt »

_8j50 wrote: post #173
peterhunt wrote: post #167

Early react team member here. The popular react/webpack/npm stack is probably what the OP is talking about. It was popularized because the Instagram web team used webpack and npm in 2013 so we recommended it alongside react in the early days. I was TLM of the team when we made these decisions. There are three main points I want to add to the conversation. 1. UIs actually have a lot of complexity. The number of states…

What is ZIRP?

Zero interest rate policies :)

Sometimes companies have too much money and they overhire.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#176

Post by [deleted] »

karaterobot wrote: post #141
WandaVision wrote: post #114

Unpopular biased opinion. Frontend development is mostly done by people who are into visual things and less into logic. Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit and less by visual appearance. This leads to the adaptation of large number of garbage frameworks in frontend primarily because their landing pages look visually appealing. After some time fronten…

> Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit. Sometimes I wish I could do the crying-while-laughing emoji on HN. Backend devs have biases and get tricked into making the wrong choices just like everyone else.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#177

Post by wankle »

perrygeo wrote: post #132

The question itself might contain a partial answer. If "frontend" and "backend" are assumed to be two completely separate disciplines, the architecture is going to reflect that (Conway's law). It's possible that building a website as a wholistic product (ala Ruby on Rails) is inherently less complex because it eliminates an artificial boundary. We see backend teams struggling to build APIs and frontend teams struggli…

"Consider what if the software team (singular) just created HTML UIs directly from the DB and eliminated the middleman? I'm looking at things like HTMX and phoenix live view as a potential solution."

In the enterprise, data transit, processing and management architecture is more complex than save this text in the database; just as decent UI and UX is more complex than a text field and input button.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#178

Post by treis »

shivekkhurana wrote: post #25

1- As @tgflynn mentioned: historical complexity The web was made for publishing text, not making rich apps. But it turned out to be exceptionally good for publishing SaaS. So we continued to pigggy back on it. Working directly with the DOM is too verbose, hence nobody wants to touch it. 2- Service oriented architecture When mobiles became a thing around 2008, normal MVC apps with some AJAX would not cut, because mobi…

>Working directly with the DOM

I think this is the fundamental problem. The data structures you work with are different from the data structures displayed. Almost every framework out there is there to solve this problem in a different way.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#179

Post by ls15 »

WandaVision wrote: post #114

Unpopular biased opinion. Frontend development is mostly done by people who are into visual things and less into logic. Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit and less by visual appearance. This leads to the adaptation of large number of garbage frameworks in frontend primarily because their landing pages look visually appealing. After some time fronten…

Ok, but why aren't companies then firing all frontend developers and instead let backend developers build logic frontends with vanilla HTML/JS/CSS?

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#180

Post by brimstedt »

The main reason is because we shoehorn complex apps/ui's into a browser that wasn't made for it.

It's not the UI is very complex , or that there are ton of frameworks with different maturity levels.

It's because the browser and thus html/CSS was made for documents.

If we made a "browser" made for apps, where we didn't need to transpile to js, and didn't need to cater for incompatible browser versions, but could concentrate on what really matters we wouldt have such a big problem

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