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Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
211–220 of 292 posts
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#212PHP. Use PHP, it’s so crazy easy for web development. - No compiling, - no middleware, - no state (which also means no memory leaks), - just drop a file on web server and it works (no crazy CI pipeline), - the documentation is fantastic, - it’s extremely fast, and - no surprises because it’s tried and true. PHP is so under appreciated.
Shhhh stop talking about PHP, the ruby devs will start contributing code and ruin it! (I'm already angry that they moved the YAML parser out of the PHP standard library...)
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#213I 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? No idea, but it's not lost on me that a lot of these things are backed by huge companies with giant piles of money who are using them as marketing.
1. New Tools, in the modern era means Promotion, VCs, Money, Prestige. personal branding.
2. Creating complexity, in the name of needs for these Big Tech is a great way to create a moat for themselves.
3. Ideology, web development is possibly the 2nd worst places if it wasn't for Rust evangelism strike force. The idea that every single god damn thing should be in Javascript or SPA.
4. The Act of design before coding is gone. Especially in the era of Web Development. Lead by Google and Facebook which later spread across Silicon Valley and later across the world. An Act which is even seen as evil or forbidden.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#214PHP. Use PHP, it’s so crazy easy for web development. - No compiling, - no middleware, - no state (which also means no memory leaks), - just drop a file on web server and it works (no crazy CI pipeline), - the documentation is fantastic, - it’s extremely fast, and - no surprises because it’s tried and true. PHP is so under appreciated.
> - no state (which also means no memory leaks), Ehh, what? Sessions are state. > - just drop a file on web server and it works (no crazy CI pipeline) Except when I have to set-up php-fpm, opcache and configure countless parameters in php.ini. > - the documentation is fantastic, Yes, but I still have to check it for useless constructs like "mysql_real_escape_string" vs "mysql_escape_string" which should have never ex…
> Sessions are state
Is database state?
> php-fpm, opcache
Nope
> countless parameters
Certainly not
> "mysql_real_escape_string" vs "mysql_escape_string"
There are only a handful of these, and you can learn about them with a simple google search.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#215I 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? I wrote about a hypothesis here: https://medium.com/@scott.stevenson/how-to-finally-make-some... Most of us are scared by the ambiguity of actual creative work, so unless we are under the threat of deadline, we seek out "structured games" to play so that we can put off the anxiety of freeform work. These games are: (1) Tool Game: Researching and setting up tools (2) Learning Game: Books, podcas…
Based on this description, I should vary my playing of games.
Anyway, I find the usage of the term "game" to be quite odd. Why not "strategy?" I'm not sure I agree with the overall point, but enjoy how you've operationalized/categorized behavior in this way. There is value in that.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#216I 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 I wrote up my hypothesis here: https://hasen.substack.com/i/52275953/why-the-situation-pers... Basically, programmers love complexity. If they can't solve real problems, they will create fake problems so they can solve them. They might not realize that's what they're doing. Programmers love solving puzzles. It's why they program. The problem arises when they can't solve the real puzzle due to l…
I'm guilty.
> "How can I write 1000 lines of code to solve this problem?"
I opt for "Why are these libraries so complicated? I'll research all 20 libraries and take the parts I like and build a newer, simpler framework."
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#217Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 .…
Basically, it's the problem with vaccines and the rise of antivaxxers. Because vaccines were so successful in their harm reduction to even elimination, there h created a perverse belief that vaccines were not effective, and then that they were actually harmful. Being ubiquitous and their effects the same, and the absence of their necessary disease. Tools that solve problems experience a lifecycle that eventually if s…
Same goes for the Y2K problem: prodigious efforts went into solving the problem, which was mostly averted. But since "nothing happened", people started asking if the whole thing was overblown.
More on topic, web frameworks solve the following problems for me, which I guess are things now taken for granted:
1. Provide a standard API across all popular browswes by papering over subtle differences in JS- or rendering-engines. This is kess of an issue now worh the homogenization of browser engines
2. Provide components with out-of-the-box accessibility. For me, this alone is worth the price of admissions. YMMV if yiu don't care about your (potential) users who use assistive tech like screen-readers
3. Design systems, CSS frameworks and iconsets makw my webapps look much better than if I were to be left to my own devices. I'm no designer, but the added complexity is worth it to me (think internal tools, not public products with a design budget).
4. Job mobility and the ability to transfer knowledge from one employer to the next. When I put down "react" on my resume, the reader will know exactly what I mean (as opposed to "CorpWebVu revision 5". I am also able to get up to speed on a React codebase because I know the conventions. This also is worth the price of admission by itself.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#218I bumped into an old friend recently and he and his wife work at a real estate company. They were raving about this new system they are a couple of years into the development of and how it's built on this great "Kubernetes" system.. they asked what I develop my products with and I almost felt embarrassed to say PHP and a couple of servers in two locations for redundancy that run Archlinux with a LAMP (LNMP? I guess w…
Thing is if you understand php you dont really need a framework. Sure composer packages are a must to avoid rewriting whats out there, but a framework not so much. When i conducted interviews i was shocked at how many php devs had no clue about what an sql injection is, they almost all answered “the framework does it for you” and it was such a basic thing.
I ask this question a lot too, and yeah it’s shocking to see how many that believe things like magic quotes or some other unknown layer solve everything.
Magic quotes is of course very different from an ORM doing the application-specific encoding. It’s just very worrying when people don’t know which layer of the stack sanitizes for them.
For those of you young enough to not have witnessed php. Magic quotes used to be a popular configuration option that would sanitize all GET and POST inputs to make it safe to use in sql. Needless to say, it didn’t work and instead corrupts user data that is not intended to go through sql.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#219It's simple, quit web development and slide into other niches. I found mine in blockchain and smart contract development. Now I find myself solving interesting problems rather than trying to make 1000 frameworks and libraries work.
Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development
#220Web development is complex and has always been. 15 years ago you'd deal with complex hacks to work around the table based layout mess, the horrible browser APIs, javascript's prototype inheritance, Apache configuration and, god forbid, networks of .htaccess files. 10 years ago you'd deal with communicating stuff between language borders, what interaction to handle in javascript, what in ruby/php/perl/whatever and how…
I think that developers will always complicate things to the point where they can't complicate it any further. If something is already complex (due to browser incompatibilities, weird HTML/CSS/JS bugs, etc.) then developers can't raise the complexity much. Now that those issues have mostly been resolved, we've invented build systems and weird declarative/functional frameworks to bring it back up to that same complexity level.