261–270 of 688 posts
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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.
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React is, in my opinion, a big step forward in reclaiming the front end as a mature UI environment. I have also found that CSS becomes a lot more tolerable with CSS Modules, in combination with React, which allows you to write CSS that targets one component and only that component. By eschewing cascading, you can finally write modular, reusable CSS that avoids side effects and still allows fine-tuning (overriding) by…
I agree—I loathe frontend development, but React made it tolerable to do for limited periods—but it's still a hack on a teetering Jenga tower of hacks.
Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…
The web was conceived for hypertext and doesn't do a bad job of it. The actual problem is that people took something that was always intended for displaying (illustrated but mainly text) documents that happened to have clickable words that would display other documents, and tried to make it do desktop-style applications too. We've been hammering square pegs into round holes ever since. And the infuriating thing is we…
Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…
The web was conceived for hypertext and doesn't do a bad job of it. The actual problem is that people took something that was always intended for displaying (illustrated but mainly text) documents that happened to have clickable words that would display other documents, and tried to make it do desktop-style applications too. We've been hammering square pegs into round holes ever since. And the infuriating thing is we…
Worse yet, it's becoming more and more difficult to simply read the freaking web as a series of documents, which was the entire purpose in the first place. There's TOS, pages that don't work without JS, and so on. I fully expect publishers to try to force legislation to require people to download all this crap simply to read an essay, whether they want to or not.
We had a nice hammer, and we're doing a pretty good job of pounding everything else in the universe into various versions of a nail. But it's ugly.
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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
I was building GUIs in pure Win32, with my own C++ wrapper classes for Win32 and later with OWL and MFC. I'd say building Win32 GUIs in C++ was easier than current Web stack. Same with Java AWT and Swing libraries. Objective C / Cocoa is more complex - never really managed to learn it beyond basic stuff, maybe with Swift it's easier. Elm is close to those desktop GUI frameworks, but functional instead of OO. But Tcl/…
For the decades leading up to this stage cross system GUIs with a few simple library dependencies have been an unachieved "easy" task. Web remains as frustrating as ever because now we need it to work on all non portable browsers even on platforms that supports better ones. Then we want new features at an alarming pace that GTK could never normalize across *nixes.
Using the only non-browser that I think sort of got cross system portability working as an example.. I don't think things functioned reliably against the weird m$, Ibm and gcj Java implementations. But since they aren't really GUIs themselves with bookmarks, and familiar menus, no one gets upset when you tell them to replace an odd Java implementation before running a Java program.
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Abstractions make things more complicated? I think you're missing the basic definition and purpose of abstractions. So how do you define "almost"?
I think the correct term is complex. Abstractions make things more complex, as there are more moving parts. This normally leads to complications when trying to debug some obscure error that you will get when the project gets bigger. At that point you feel for calling on some ancient deity to spite the developer who decided to use this framework 6 months, until you remember that you proposed it as replacement for the…
Tis a trick question. The actual complexity experienced by humans depends on the job they are trying to do with the object. If you are a botanist/arborist driving to work, then clearly it is the apple. If you are a mechanic on your lunch break, then clearly it is the engine.
I resided over a medium sized custom CMS that was going through changes on all levels. I tried my best to keep it pretty. Fact it was made with Python made it easier for me. Due to that I was quick to find aesthetics to guide my coding. One of the "ugly hacks" actually turned out to save some 50 ms of time on each request. That was significant enough for me to go find a deeper principle for it and implement it in a nice, clean way.
Hacks-on-hacks is SNAFU for web development. Just remember to demand time to refactor and clean up once in a while, otherwise you'll end up shoveling shit from one pile to the next and never managing to vacate it.
Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…
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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/
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React is, in my opinion, a big step forward in reclaiming the front end as a mature UI environment. I have also found that CSS becomes a lot more tolerable with CSS Modules, in combination with React, which allows you to write CSS that targets one component and only that component. By eschewing cascading, you can finally write modular, reusable CSS that avoids side effects and still allows fine-tuning (overriding) by…
IMO react is a big step backwards. Adding an abstraction layer almost never produces a better result, it just makes things more complicated.