My theory is that everything is a mess, once you get close enough to notice. Every profession that appears as if its practitioners know what they're doing really is a shocking hodge-podge of temporary solutions, strung together by proverbial duct tape. From doctors to flight engineers to anything else that you thought was running like a smooth machine. Programming is no different.
Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
331–340 of 688 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Interesting, what native UI system is in your opinion easier to work with than web? I'll answer that: every single one. I haven't ever seen a GUI system more complicated than the HTML/CSS/JS mess. The problem with these is that at first glance they look easy. Doing 'hello world' in HTML is little more than actually typing 'Hello world'. They only become a mess if you try to do something reasonably complex. The end…
Which specific ones, for example? "Every one" could cover a lot of ground and doesn't have much information content. It's doubtful you have experience in every one, and it would be useful to know which specific ones have been tried and seem better.
AWT, Swing, Cocoa/CocoaTouch, Android, GTK+, QT, VCL, SWT, XAML, XUL, J2ME Polish are the one's I've used.
If I had to write a Web application I would probably start by writing a UI toolkit from scratch based on HTML5 Canvas and just bypass the whole HTML/CSS nastiness. I've written UI toolkits from scratch before (all the way down to the text rendering engine) and even that was probably less work than trying to work around HTML's mess.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#333Currently at work someone wants to learn to create web pages and prototype his ideas. He asked me if he's ready because he's learning JavaScript and I had to reply you still need to learn html, Css, sql and a server language to do what we do how we do it. It's a shame so he moved on to some new site / page from mit that's allows drag and drop boots troop elements and drag and drop database logic like "users must be logged in". It's unfortunate there's not much of a middle grown between learning 5 things and drag and drop.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#334I have been working with web technologies directly (not through Java or some other language) full time for almost 20 years. Here is the problem:
* In the 90s sloppy was awesome. The web is driven by marketing interests and not by technology interests. The name of the game back then was "get big fast". You need incompetent developers (many of them) to work in the technologies for extremely low pay, which means the technology must be extremely forgiving. The technologies tolerate a tremendous amount of sloppiness and so become sloppy themselves.
* The education around web technologies is deplorable. There are a couple of reasons for this. The technology is moving, growing, and enhancing rapidly making it hard to keep up with. Because there is sloppiness baked in its hard for people to immediately jump in and know the best approaches and avoid the pitfalls. Web technologies are generally considered incompetent toys (in academia) compared to more entrenched technologies like C++ and its spawn (C# and Java).
* Don't break the web. This means old broken approaches (the sloppiness) will continue to be supported forever even after they are deprecated and killed. We know what the best approaches are, but making the technologies more strict and unforgiving is the enemy of all marketing and shames incompetent developers (most of them). It is one thing if your language of choice fails and yells at you during a build process, but it is something different when this happens in production because web technologies don't require a build process.
You can safely ignore the technology excuses from many of the replies on here. These opinions come from people who learn web technologies only after learning something else (unrelated) first. For example, JavaScript is not Java, and if you look at it through a Java lens it will be incompetent for all kinds of reasons, but really the developer is just wishing they were still writing in Java. JavaScript will never be language x, but that isn't a valid reason to call it incompetent.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's sad is the zillions of hours wasted by engineers on an inherently flawed stack. What's sad is how ridiculously complicated it is to create and manage relatively simple UIs. What's sad is an entire generations of programmers growing up and thinking this is normal. Programming is supposed to be about creating platforms for each other so we can continue solving higher (and higher) level problems. This web crap ha…
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
Yes, from a purely presentational aspect, HTML/CSS is way better than Win32, etc. Things like a virtual DPI, easy-to-use transparency and alpha blending, no paint cycles, and much more.
However, displaying a modal window and handling messages in a local window-specific message loop is easy in Win32, and much more difficult in HTML/JS. In general, the browser makes it much more difficult to deal with synchronous operations like modal windows and server requests that require the application to wait on the response. This is how you end up with the overly-complicated mess that is callback-hell, which is then solved by another overly-complicated mess called promises.
So, presentation functionality = A+, foundational functionality for UIs = D.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#336It 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…
Supporting IE browsers were a nightmare....
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#337I've been doing web development since 1995, starting with CGI "apps" in C and Perl. Yes, it is a pile of hacks. The fundamental issue is we're building "apps" on an environment intended for document delivery.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#338It might be hack on top of hack, but I find it quite enjoyable when I'm completely in control of what I'm delivering. When I know what's reliable and what's dangerous, I can work around those limitations. Where things get particularly painful are when you are at the mercy of decisions made by a client or boss who won't listen to reason. Then it's hell.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#339Earlier quoted context omitted.
If anything, this understates the problem. A modal web application today takes an absolute minimum of five programming languages and three frameworks: * HTML * CSS * JS * A server-side language (eg Python) * SQL And then come the (leaky) abstractions on top of them: * A framework to make JS bearable (eg Angular) * A framework to make server-side bearable (eg Django) * A framework to make CSS bearable (eg Bootstrap) .…
HTML, CSS and SQL aren't programming languages, if Turing completeness is a requirement to be a programming language.
> if Turing completeness is a requirement to be a programming language
Many languages (in the formal sense) aren't Turing complete, so this certainly isn't a requirement to be a formal language. It would be odd to come up with a definition of language that excludes regular languages, for example.
TBF you did say "programming language", not just "language". But once we move from the mathematical setting of formal languages into the informal engineering setting of programming languages, I don't see why a formal concept such as Turing completeness should be the deciding criterion for what constitutes a programming language.
I think a more reasonable criterion is that a programming language needs to have at least 1) a syntax; 2) a semantics or an implementation that could, with enough effort, be given a semantics; and 3) whose primary use is giving instructions to some computational machine (Turing or otherwise).
According to this criterion, SQL is certainly a language.
If you think about it for a moment, HTML and CSS are perfectly reasonable languages as well. Their semantics, however hairy, would be given for instance terms of manipulating objects in R^2.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#340Yes, very much so. And everybody is too busy making money to go back to before all those wrong decisions and apply the knowledge we now got from hindsight.