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Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

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Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#361

Post by EMM_386 »

lukeramsden wrote: post #334
EMM_386 wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> some architect thinks that segmenting a system into as many components/technologies as possible somehow always makes it more reliable at the end. If I owned a software company, I'd immediately get rid of anyone showing these behaviors. But I have to admit: the bigger the mess, the more hours I can bill :) I recently greenlit a project that uses the latest Angular, C# REST APIs and a SQL server. It's clean, it works…

(note: I agree with your approach, just making a point) > that uses the latest Angular But what's the migration plan for the next time Angular goes through a massive ecosystem migration and suddenly you're staring down the barrel of being massively out of date, or investing anywhere from days to months of work running just to stay in place? This is what actually seems to be the problem to me, not just in frontend eit…

Speaking just for Angular, things seem to have settled down a lot. The applicaton was originally created under 13 and has been migrated to 14 and just recently to 15.

Those upgrades were quick and painless. Some new features come with each update, but aren't required to implement them and the existing code runs fine under v15.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#362

Post by flippinburgers »

art0rz wrote: post #77
flippinburgers wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web apps used to be just html and forms so no the complexity has skyrocketed.

Where the majority of the complexity was in the backend. Now, the complexity has simply moved. I'm quite happy I don't need to have two different codebases in different languages for most things anymore. I'm more than happy to offload it to the browser to save me some effort, time and money.

You have to validate on the backend among other things. Honestly the only thing we have nowadays is flashier websites for the most part. Some very small percentage of websites actually require the tech that has been built despite the fact that nearly all engineering teams seem to push for it.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#363

Post by disqard »

myth2018 wrote: post #99
chiefalchemist wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. No user wakes up and says, "I gots to find me a UI built with React* today, or I'm going to cry." Ever. Users. Don't. Care. We keep adding tech and tools and experiences - if you asked users - aren't improving all that much. * Or whatever technolgy being championed.

> We keep adding tech and tools and experiences - if you asked users - aren't improving all that much. Nowadays, when a provider adds an "experience" resulting only in no improvement, I feel actually quite happy. The general rule seems to be (not so slowly) migrating to activelly deteriorate functionality. Past week my bank changed their UI to show a cute animation of a hand shaking some cash in a transaction confirm…

It's the only way promos can happen -- adding more gratuitous useless "features" to an already-steaming pile of crap.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#364

Post by gardenhedge »

nicoburns wrote: post #139
patentatt wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And this is why half of the internet is borderline unusable. Page layout jumping around for 5-10 seconds after what appears to be a full page load, buttons simply not functioning, and god forbid you try to use the back button. I know some expert will say none of those things have to happen and has nothing to do with react, but the reality of it is that these things are incredibly common in modern front end developmen…

> And this is why half of the internet is borderline unusable. Page layout jumping around for 5-10 seconds after what appears to be a full page load This is not why half the internet is borderline unusable. React will happily do a full page render in under a second (including network load time). The primary reasons for that are: 1. People writing code that does many network requests in series. 5-10 seems to be not un…

Also add in cookie banners, analytical tracking, newsletter popups.

React is a small library that loads quickly for most people.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#365

Post by taeric »

marcellus23 wrote: post #360
taeric wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what modern applications written with it are running circles? Legit question.

Almost all of the apps bundled with macOS are written in Cocoa (some are written in Cocoa Touch, which is itself a nearly 15-year-old framework). And a great deal of excellent third-party apps -- off the top of my head, Transmit, Pixelmator, Day One, the Omni Group apps.

The bundled apps feels like an odd claim. I don't think of many of those that feel modern. That said, I'm probably not thinking of the right ones.

Will try to take a peek at the rest of this list. I don't, oddly, use that many native Mac applications.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#366

Post by marcellus23 »

taeric wrote: post #365
marcellus23 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost all of the apps bundled with macOS are written in Cocoa (some are written in Cocoa Touch, which is itself a nearly 15-year-old framework). And a great deal of excellent third-party apps -- off the top of my head, Transmit, Pixelmator, Day One, the Omni Group apps.

The bundled apps feels like an odd claim. I don't think of many of those that feel modern. That said, I'm probably not thinking of the right ones. Will try to take a peek at the rest of this list. I don't, oddly, use that many native Mac applications.

> I don't think of many of those that feel modern.

This is a bit interesting to me, which bundled apps don't feel modern to you? Mail, Notes, Pages, Safari... they all seem modern enough to me.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#367

Post by ecshafer »

thefourthchime wrote: post #310
peterhunt wrote: post #167

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…

> Modern backend eng is a morass of kubernetes configuration, needless microservices and overuse of async queues, for example That's certainly the trend. At my org, we "partnered" with AWS to help us figure out what the tech stack should look like. Sure enough, everything should be in an SQS queue, triggered off S3 running in AWS Step that's triggered through SNS notifications. All this requires countless lambdas whi…

I worked at a company that did the same, and got the same answer. I hated that technical setup. Lambdas everywhere, Queues everywhere, microservices everywhere Exactly as you can said it was a huge pain to debug, and on top of that searching for code became a huge pain as it became split across so many different git repos, teams, and docs. And when you throw IAM on top of it all..... I am not a fan.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#368

Post by greggman3 »

Lukas_Skywalker wrote: post #203
greggman3 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

drag and drop forms from 20 years ago assumed a desktop PC. Today your form has to work on mobile

The drag and drop your parent comment mentions is used for creating the WinForms application, not for interacting with it. Creating the application is still done on a Desktop PC.

Correct, but the form itself was always a fixed layout, designed for desktop, not a responsive layout where things changed based on the size of the user's display and the input methods available to them

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#370

Post by chrisco255 »

layer8 wrote: post #324
chrisco255 wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web front ends are great because they truly run on any device without needing to install a binary. They're our only way to permissionlessly reach mobile users (due to mobile duopoly and sandboxed OSes). A web front end can reach billions of users and devices and be deployed in milliseconds.

That doesn't mean that the tech stack/ecosystem is great compared to how good or bad it hypothetically could be while having the property you mention. It's like saying a programming language is great because it is Turing-complete, which, while certainly an important property, is not exactly an encompassing measure of quality.

The web is the way it is because no one owns it. The web standards and protocols were negotiated over decades and have already accounted for countless amounts of compromise and feature sets between numerous competing interests and evolving tech while also maintaining backwards compatibility. How great it could hypothetically be is practically useless as an argument.
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