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Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

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Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#221

Post by lazyjones »

prohor wrote: post #191
captainbenises wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post makes me sad. Javascript, CSS and HTML can all be used powerfully, performantly and in a managed way where anyone can come on board and contribute. Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. To broadly paint this web stack that so many people poured countless hours into making, as 'impossible' to use is doing it a great disservice. But hey man, that's just like your opinion.

The first two paint points are perfectly solved by GWT[1]. But for some reason it isn't picked up by web community, even though you can still make really cool web apps with it. 1. http://www.gwtproject.org/

> But for some reason it isn't picked up by web community

It's Java. Last time I checked, still a painfully verbose language and build environment, with the wizardry of JVM tuning on top.

Perhaps, some day, this will turn into something more pleasant: https://sites.google.com/site/gowebuitoolkit/

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#222

Post by majewsky »

flukus wrote: post #20
buzzybee wrote: post #11

Web programming has never been wholly controlled by a platform owner. I think that's the main difference from any traditional environment that might come to mind; Unix has its traditions, so do Windows and Mac. This is even the case for mobile. In the years when IE was the only browser anyone used, one could also hope to come to grips with its buggy CSS implementation, but that is past too, and in the meantime the ba…

I'm not sure if the bazaar really applies. In the bazaar you have a range of options and can pick and choose what suits you, but on the web we are seemingly stuck on a few base tools (html js, css) that have so much momentum that the will never go away. You don't get a restriction like that on the server or desktop side.

That's just the platform. If you look around the operating-system bazaar, you still have some basic notions that are shared among all of them (e.g. all their VFS look basically the same). That's the role fulfilled by HTML/JS/CSS: a hardware abstraction layer, if you will.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#223

Post by evolve2k »

axlprose wrote: post #192
flukus wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO react is a big step backwards. Adding an abstraction layer almost never produces a better result, it just makes things more complicated.

abstraction isn't inherently a bad thing, it's what gives us the tools to reason at a higher level. It's leaky abstractions that are the problem. Proper abstractions are supposed to compress large bundles of information into a smaller set of [broad] concepts, which then imply all the large sets of details they're abstracting away. High level languages are pretty good abstractions on top of raw assembly code for examp…

I think where a key abstraction was lost was when JavaScript became the language you had to compile to if you wanted to do web development. Biggest hope I see on the horizon is WebAssembly, which has support of many big players but I've heard very little on it recently.

Ref: https://medium.com/javascript-scene/what-is-webassembly-the-...

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#224

Post by _9vpl »

flukus wrote: post #166
segmondy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Languages don't scale. Systems scale. Without said, Javascript has never really been the language for programming in the large. But make no mistake about it, it's slowly getting there as is evident by huge applications, not just web but even desktop that are being built with it. It's not impossible to refactor. The issue from what I've seen is that people think it as if it's a class based language instead of the prot…

What huge application are built with javascript? Visual Studio Code is probably the biggest I can think of and I don't know what would be second.

Brave, Slack, Atom, Popcorn Time, I'm sure there are many others. Electron (http://electron.atom.io/) is becoming a popular framework to use.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#225

Post by collyw »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #142
jaredklewis wrote: post #77

I think it's worth noting that back-end web development is an usually pleasant place. In most other types of programming, many technical decisions are made by the platform and working with tons of legacy cruft is the norm, not the exception. For example, where else can you so freely choose the programming language? Linux Driver? Use C. Mobile App? Java or Swift/Objective-C for Android or iPhone, respectively. GUI App…

Remember MS-DOS also succeeded because of its "strengths" in some very special, narrow sense. In the more ordinary sense, it succeeded in spite of its weakness, but Windows has slowly recovered from that and is now a good system. The modern web is somewhat the the reverse: it is worse than its progenitor. HTML, HTTP and what would eventually be called ReST were all good ideas and succeeded because (a) they were a goo…

That was the promise of Java - write once run anywhere. JavaScript managed to achieve it instead.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#226

Post by altern8tif »

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that while the developer experience is getting more complex, the user experience is getting better and better.

That, in my opinion, makes all the messiness worth it. I'm not saying that there's nothing wrong with the state of web dev now, but it's not without reason that we are here today.

Remember the days of table-based layouts in HTML? shudder

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#228

Post by throwanem »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #188
raverbashing wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complicated to create UIs? Win32 was complicated. MFC was complicated. GTK is hard HTML and CSS aren't as complex as those. Not even close

Delphi, VB6, WinForms made development a lot easier, there was a reason they were called RAD tools.

Because it was the 90s?

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#229

Post by [deleted] »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #188
raverbashing wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complicated to create UIs? Win32 was complicated. MFC was complicated. GTK is hard HTML and CSS aren't as complex as those. Not even close

Delphi, VB6, WinForms made development a lot easier, there was a reason they were called RAD tools.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#230

Post by Doctor_Fegg »

meshko wrote: post #37

It is scary how most commenters here are missing the point. No, not all programming sucks. Yes, web programming sucks more than other things. No, it doesn't have to be like this. Yes, even web programming was better 10 years ago. No, I don't know how to fix it. Neither do I know exactly where we took the wrong turn. One of my theories is this: had Sun not sued Microsoft over their extensions in JVM, MS would have kep…

> Java, being a significantly superior language to ActionScript

ActionScript 3 was all right. A bit too listener-heavy but a mature, reliable, comprehensible language, and arguably lighter and more approachable than Java. Had Microsoft (among others) not nobbled it back in 2008, we might be using it as the next generation of JavaScript (ES4) by now.

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