Sure developers have a hard time handling all that HTML, CSS, Javascript and connections(DOM, etc.) between them, but I see a much bigger problem in browsers. There are actually only a few browsers and most of them are based on chromium(or Webkit). Why? Because web standards are huge! Their complexity is so big, that even great programmers have a hard time creating browsers from scratch. The latest example of this is…
Well said. I've been following Andreas building Ladybird, and it has been an eye-opener to see the complexity of what is effectively an operating system built on another operating system.
I'm a Windows developer and as such I'm biased, but I think Windows apps are dramatically easier to write than web apps. I still use WinForms professionally to this day. Productivity is absurdly high. The number of concerns to worry about is low. The framework has been stable for 20 years and I know all of its quirks, which never change. Fads are ignored. We can zip around with amazing speed. On the other hand, our a…
>I'm a Windows developer and as such I'm biased, but I think Windows apps are dramatically easier to write than web apps. I agree that the developer-facing usability of a good desktop GUI toolkit runs circles around whatever webdev is these days, but the barrier to entry for a completely new programmer is certainly a lot higher than HTML.
That's why I miss good ol' VB6.
Spaghetti code? Yeah, not only that, but the whole pasta menu. On Error Resume Next.
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…
There is a significant chunk of backend devs who subconsciously and consciously avoid the complexity of front end dev and at the same time, snark about the alleged simplicity of it.
I don’t think react valued simplicity. It didn’t have an official store for years and still lacks CSS solutions out of the box but it seemed to be the only way to do components so people used it.
tailwind is the best utility css library to use with React, you can make components with Angular, React became more popular than Angular because it didn't introduce new concepts like dependency injection and stuck closer to ES6 standards
Tailwind got popular because react doesn’t include CSS in components. Angular 1 wasn’t components based and only three people ever used angular 2.
HTML and CSS weren’t designed to be general-purpose GUI description languages. HTTP wasn’t designed to be a client-server GUI application protocol. JavaScript wasn’t designed to be a serious application programming language. And the continued evolution of those technologies hasn’t focused enough on substantially changing that state of affairs. For example, a lot of basic UI controls still have to be custom-implemente…
> HTML and CSS weren’t designed to be general-purpose GUI description languages Maybe not, but they are now, and are incredibly diverse in what that can achieve. > HTTP wasn’t designed to be a client-server GUI application protocol. Again, maybe not, but it is now with Websockets, http2 and webRTC. > JavaScript wasn’t designed to be a serious application programming language. Also maybe not initially but it is now in…
So web frontends are great because ... they're incredibly successful. That kind of tautological reasoning doesn't contribute to the discussion tbh. Web frontends are everywhere because recurring payments and/or attention economy approaches are more profitable than classical software sales, simple as that.
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…
/me remembers MFC/QT/BCGsoft and C++ codebase and gently smiles on thought that maybe the issue are everywhere else except the UI complexity.
We are where we are, but it is interesting that GUI libraries from 20 years back are still running circles around latest and the greatest UI web front-end, even if it is also client rendered.
Maybe, just maybe, we should search for an issue somewhere else?
Because 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.
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.
I do not think that you would be able to do ActiveX, COM, OLE, MFC, C++ after 2 weeks of bootcamp. Yes, Delphi and Visual Basic simplified many of it but there were still many challenges to develop and ship your software. Just shipping alone and dealing with installers was a challenge by itself. Now compare it with a browser tab and a single click that deploys your code across the globe so it event can run in space on ISS.
Related question: what would the folks here recommend for someone that wants to keep the frontend “stupid simple” while not resorting to writing everything in pure HTML/CSS/JS? I’ve heard mithril.js recommended before but I’ve yet to try it. I have experience with Angular, React, and a bit of Ember and the amount of code and “magic” involved is absurd.
I've been enjoying building Web Components via lit-html for my recent projects:
To be fair most front-end projects have abandoned redux now. It was for sure boilerplate hell.
Redux is still by _far_ the most widely used state management library in React apps. By my estimates, around 35-40% of all React apps use Redux, and that's far more than any other state library in the ecosystem: - https://blog.isquaredsoftware.com/2022/07/npm-package-market...
True but not for new projects. Legacy software has quite a long life span.