It's actually quite elementary and obvious if you have been in the market long enough: from websites it shifted to web apps, which have a different type of and higher complexity.
Beside that, also the websites got more complex, as a wider range of people started to use them, as well as different types of devices, languages, purpose and so on.
Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
201–210 of 398 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
#202I keep seeing this type of thing popping up. The short answer is because people are expecting more from the web.
What interests me is why are so many people perturbed by this. If I look through my bookmarks, pretty much everything could be server side rendered without any need for JS. It’s all stuff like HN or news sites. I wonder if the OP and others who have asked this before see the same thing: the consumer internet sites they most visit don’t need complex JS. But that doesn’t describe all sites. There are plenty that do require a lot of complexity.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
TWenty years ago windows development was a lot simpler than modern browser applications. Fire up visual studio and create a new winforms project. You could literally drag and drop your way to a modest application with only minimal programming 'under the hood' for the business logic. I still don't think anything has surpassed the usability of winforms for a developer just wanting to get something done.
drag and drop forms from 20 years ago assumed a desktop PC. Today your form has to work on mobile
The drag and drop your parent comment mentions is used for creating the WinForms application, not for interacting with it.
Creating the application is still done on a Desktop PC.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell that to European corporations. Angular + NgRx/NGXS is the de-facto gold standard there.
I think Observables are much simpler to grok than some hundreds-line multi-file combined reducer/actions amalgamation.
I think React hooks are so much easier to write than observables. It provides similar functionality to observables, but without the added complexity.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
#205Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
#206Developers are smart people who enjoy solving complex, interesting problems. If you give them a simple problem, very often they will find a way to make it interesting.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
#207On the web side you need to synchronize the DOM, the visual state (which is mostly related to the DOM), the user's state, and the backend state using a protocol that's stateless. Really, the browser side stuff is the real PITA. It's a hacked together piece of shit written by people who were too clever by half. And it's designed to be used/driven by less-than-skilled individuals. But in the end one big problem is ther…
> How do you specify "animation like x/y/z" on a screen?
And not just "a" screen, but screens of all dimensions and even physical interfaces (but mostly, desktops vs phones, which are completely different).
I've only dabbled mostly amateurishly on web frontend, but personally I think I'd prefer to serve totally different files to someone based on the form factor of their device rather than deal with reactive frontend frameworks. Heck, I already serve both Gemini and HTTP.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
#208Because the browser nowadays is an "operating system" that needs to be capable of handling all manner of dynamic software: maps, video, image editors, games, etc. I haven't done Windows development, but I assume browser-based development complexity will continue trending towards essentially the same complexity as developing e.g. a Windows program.
A couple of months ago I had to develop a whole CRUD GUI in, wait for it...Excel, using VBA.
It was very much like designing desktop programs some 20 years ago using WinForms, which was actually a piece of cake using the designer tools that came with Visual Studio etc.
It's shameful that creating programs in Excel is such a smooth ride compared to even the most trivial web app. But of course, the web app must be compatible with a billion of other things, compared to Excel and VBA.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
#209> Is that complexity necessary or artificially inflated?
100% inflated and ego-based. How do I know? After years of struggling to understand the increasingly complex front-end space, I decided to build my own full-stack framework [1] to check my own opinions weren't left-field.
Here's the harsh truth: it doesn't need to be as complex as it's made out to be. Not even close. I can speculate as to why (ego, job security, etc) but ultimately the punchline is that all of the APIs and a lot of the code under the hood are pointless Rube Goldberg machines.
People don't want to hear that because they're invested emotionally in a lot of these tools, but from direct experience doing multi-year research and building of a framework, it's all a scam.
Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?
#210Because business cares about business and moves too fast to get it right or waste time on values, and by the time enough people might object the network effect or inertia or tech debt or whatever you want to call it has become The Way It’s Done and nobody can stop long enough to fix that.