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Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

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Re: Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

#21

Post by solardev »

austin-cheney wrote: post #13

* State management is one of the most simple problems to solve in any application. * WebSockets are superior to all revisions of HTTP except that HTTP is sessionless. Typically when developers argue against WebSockets it’s because they cannot program. * Your software isn’t fast. Not ever, unless you have numbers for comparison. * Things like jquery, React, Spring, Rails, and so forth do not exist to create superior s…

> WebSockets are superior to all revisions of HTTP except that HTTP is sessionless. Typically when developers argue against WebSockets it’s because they cannot program.

What did you mean by this? Were you suggesting that interactive web apps should maintain a persistent and stateful connection to the server and use that to send interaction events and receive the outputs back, like a video game would, rather than using stateless HTTP calls and cookies and such? Why is that superior?

And sorry if I misunderstood!

Re: Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

#23

Post by solardev »

codingclaws wrote: post #18

JavaScript is excellent.

When I read this, the first thing that came to mind was "until you have to work with time zones". I generally enjoy working in JS, but it's such a pain point for me that I can't help but not think about it whenever I see a datetime.

It doesn't get as much mindshare as the problems with typing and frameworks and fashion trends and such, but my god, I've never seen a major, popular language with such poor support for basic time zone manipulation and storage. It is really really bad and won't be fixed until the Temporal API is stable and widely available: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Re: Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

#24

Post by solardev »

yen223 wrote: post #11

If you consider the constraints on how it can evolve and the alternatives that has been attempted, I think web languages turned out pretty well.

I wouldn't say they're "good", but it's cool that they've managed to stay somewhat open at all.

In an alternate timeline, Microsoft might've won out with single vendor .NET everywhere. The DX would be better but everything would be way more closed.

Re: Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

#28

Post by austin-cheney »

solardev wrote: post #21
austin-cheney wrote: post #13

* State management is one of the most simple problems to solve in any application. * WebSockets are superior to all revisions of HTTP except that HTTP is sessionless. Typically when developers argue against WebSockets it’s because they cannot program. * Your software isn’t fast. Not ever, unless you have numbers for comparison. * Things like jquery, React, Spring, Rails, and so forth do not exist to create superior s…

> WebSockets are superior to all revisions of HTTP except that HTTP is sessionless. Typically when developers argue against WebSockets it’s because they cannot program. What did you mean by this? Were you suggesting that interactive web apps should maintain a persistent and stateful connection to the server and use that to send interaction events and receive the outputs back, like a video game would, rather than usin…

> Were you suggesting that interactive web apps should maintain a persistent and stateful connection to the server and use that to send interaction events and receive the outputs back, like a video game would

That is how I design all my web facing applications now. The idea is that with WebSockets all messaging is fire and forget and that is independently true from both sides of the wire. That means everything is event oriented on each side separately and nothing waits on round trips, polling, or other complexity. In my largest application when I converted everything from HTTP to WebSocket messaging I gained an instant 8x performance boost and dramatically lower the architectural complexity of the application.

Re: Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

#29

Post by yen223 »

solardev wrote: post #24
yen223 wrote: post #11

If you consider the constraints on how it can evolve and the alternatives that has been attempted, I think web languages turned out pretty well.

I wouldn't say they're "good", but it's cool that they've managed to stay somewhat open at all. In an alternate timeline, Microsoft might've won out with single vendor .NET everywhere. The DX would be better but everything would be way more closed.

I think openness is a must. Alternatives that were proprietary largely died out because they were proprietary. They can't survive transitions into newer platforms, like how Flash failed to make it into mobile

Re: Ask HN: What are your unpopular opinions about programming?

#30

Post by dysoco »

solardev wrote: post #24
yen223 wrote: post #11

If you consider the constraints on how it can evolve and the alternatives that has been attempted, I think web languages turned out pretty well.

I wouldn't say they're "good", but it's cool that they've managed to stay somewhat open at all. In an alternate timeline, Microsoft might've won out with single vendor .NET everywhere. The DX would be better but everything would be way more closed.

To be fair if they had a monopoly perhaps they would have little incentive to make DX better in order to compete.
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