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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?

#381

Post by tempodox »

emodendroket wrote: post #355
pixie_ wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

You could say the same thing about Unix but nobody seems to be calling for that to die.

> nobody seems to be calling for that to die.

There is the Unix Hater's Handbook (http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf).

However, Unix doesn't suck half as bad as web development. Web development keeps a lot of problems alive that have been overcome in Unix development and everywhere else.

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

#383

Post by aclsid »

TimJYoung wrote: post #335
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

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 opera…

But you should really compare these with modern desktop UI development. Anchors are awesome in .NET and don't get me started with Java layouts. UI design truly is better on the desktop side. Maybe it will be more difficult for a designer to develop a nice interface for a desktop program but that's about it.

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

#384

Post by tempodox »

gbog wrote: post #120
pdonis wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. And they throw huge amounts of resources at the web stack to do it. It might work for them, but I'm not sure that makes it powerful, performant, and manageable for those of us who aren't huge companies.

You probably do not have the complexity level of these companies either. To me js and css are kind of manageable, a bit the same way as python: use strongly enforced linters forbidding anything ambiguous, do not jump every other day in a new sexy bandwagon, and do not let one line of code commited in without an automated test running it on a ci machine. What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: f…

> You probably do not have the complexity level of these companies either.

Have you looked at the microservices craze lately? You need a new one of these each time you scratch your head.

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

#385

Post by aclsid »

douche wrote: post #284
totalcrepe wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But none of your examples are as cross system portable and "native/normal feel" as writing an app that only works in chrome/chromium. 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 wan…

Why is native/normal feel the end-all-be-all of UI systems? I've never quite understood why this is so desirable. Or why the answer seems to be using a shoddy UI system stuffed in a browser frame.

It is a good idea because you reduce the learning curve for end-users of application by the use of common controls. Think about the MS-DOS era, and then Windows came along, with the ubiquitous F1 key everywhere, Ctrl-P and Ctrl-S, not to mention the toolbars, etc.

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

#387

Post by aclsid »

sangnoir wrote: post #212
nivertech wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/…

> I'd say building Win32 GUIs in C++ was easier than current Web stack. >Same with Java AWT and Swing libraries. I will have to vehemently disagree. I have no experience with Win32 GUIs, but I still have nightmares about wrangling nested LayoutManagers: comparing that to the current state of the web (especially after Flexbox) is downright absurd. I am very happy with: Typescript + (Sass|LESS) + framework (Angular|Boo…

The difference between what you are doing and what desktop UI has always enjoyed is a component system that works flawlessly. The Web Components specification is a good step forward in this regard, but as many people have pointer out, try to do something trivial like a modal wizard in Java/.NET and try the same thing on the web side.

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

#388

Post by wepple »

my biggest realisation of this was when reading the opening chapters to Michel Zalewski's Tangled web [1]. He does an excellent brief intro to how we got to where we are, warts and all.

Things like content sniffing where a browser can't work out what type of file it's been given, so has an algorithm to take a guess and render based on that are what we've got to deal with.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Tangled-Web-Securing-Modern-Applicati...

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

#389

Post by Klathmon »

goatlover wrote: post #360
Klathmon wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't get it either. Nothing in history has come close to the current web platform. There has never been a language/runtime/framework/system where you could have this much flexibility, that "installs" in literally seconds (from a cold cache, never having been there in the first place), and works on every platform under the sun (not just linux/windows, but mac, android, ios, windows phone, ubuntu phone, my TV, my ca…

I think it's when you get beyond the niceties of the delivery system that is the web to making complex apps compared to other environments is where the complaints stem from. Also, the JVM, Flash and Silverlight would have have all been able to provide a similarly nice delivery system across all platforms if they had been the equivalent of the web. But instead, they were used as plugins.

But i'm talking about complex applications. I'm not talking about your average website, but full blown 100k+ loc applications. It's so much nicer than the alternatives that many developers are making desktop-only applications using those technologies. I don't know if that is because of familiarity, or if it's actually a better platform, but I know that when I did the "move" from GTK and swing applications to HTML/CSS/JS based applications, i instantly became almost a magnitude more productive.

And I don't buy that JVM, Flash, Silverlight, or any of the others could have been able to provide something similar (or better) that the web world. The biggest benefits of the web ecosystem currently are NPM and the "runs literally everywhere". The JVM/Java ecosystem is closest in that area, but that story gets really ugly when it comes to cross-platform UIs and startup time. And while they could have created their own system that installs/runs instantly without needing complex permissions, without needing to "install" at all, automatically cleans itself up, and can be accessed from anywhere in the world by a simple string, they didn't. Flash/Silverlight tried, but in the end they ended up just being worse versions of the js world (remember the damn loading bar that every single flash application needed for some reason?)

Like it or not, the web nailed all the right things, and it became pretty much the most used platform over the course of a few years. Not by accident, but because it did something right.

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

#390

Post by GrinningFool »

jordanlev wrote: post #164
pixie_ wrote: post #24

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…

CSS is not impossible to manage if you keep things modular and avoid specificity issue (basically, use something like BEM and pretend the "C" in "CSS" doesn't exist). re: HTML: layout and positioning is the domain of CSS, not HTML. HTML's purpose is to provide semantic structure to the content and non-semantic styling hooks (divs and classes) for CSS. It's true that layout has sucked for a long time (more accurately,…

The thing that makes me dubious of this claim is the number of years for which we've been reading variants of, "the upcoming (grid/flex/canvas/css3/html5/ecma spec/etc) will make things much better".
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