Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 83 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

#41

Post by ng12 »

quanticle wrote: post #38
ng12 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a nice theory but I think it's wrong. Can you provide an example of a framework that should have been an incremental improvement (or not written at all?). The only possible example I can think of is React vs. Vue, but even then there's a pretty fundamental differentiating factor which is that Vue is lightweight (e.g. easier to drop in to an existing non-Vue project).

React. Vue. Angular 2. Meteor. Vulcan. Do any of these frameworks actually solve problems that weren't being solved before? Did rewriting Angular 1 in Typescript really improve things for the user?

> Do any of these frameworks actually solve problems that weren't being solved before?

Yes. React solved two big problems in the front-end space: building re-usable components as a first order concern and moving away from the imperative DOM. As mentioned, Vue is arguably pretty similar except with some concretely different goals.

Angular 1 -> 2 was not about just Typescript, it was a large-scale refactoring to move away from some of the more imperative aspects towards a more component-based architecture which incorporates some of the advances made since Angular 1 was introduced.

Vulcan's a framework which uses React and Meteor is it's own separate thing so I'm not sure what you're trying to identify here.

Re: Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

#43

Post by zwaps »

There's actually two facts you have to consider side by side

1. Front-end dev changes often

2. Websites have become worse at being websites

Like AMP, single-page apps being mostly broken if not viewed in a pristine no-addon Chrome, loading megabytes of scripts to display a bit of text, overlays blocking the screen, sluggish scrolling, broken dynamic loading, misused and misunderstood statistical testing suites, fragile "graceful" third party content everywhere, less accessability, pop-ups, now scripted, again! ... the list goes on and on.

Being good at displaying text is now a killer feature of only few elite websites... Imagine that.

I believe front-end devs are much less sophisticated programmers than the frameworks they use. Those frameworks are usually years of work from big corps geared at a specific use-case. Back in the day, before so many new technologies, people were hesitant to write websites with tools they would not be able to write themselves.

Today, I do not think more than a fraction of front-end devs actually understand what all these new technologies are doing under the hood, nor could write them themselves.

And if you are already playing with Legos, it of course leads to putting in too much stuff without sense and too much stuff where it doesn't belong.

Finally, I think everyone (subconciously?) realized that the web has become bad. But if the only option you see is a new framework, then people chase after new tech instead of writing better websites with simple technologies.

Re: Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

#44

Post by laser »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #39
laser wrote: post #17

To push back a little against this notion—is this even true? On the web front-end, I develop with React and Vue, which were released in 2013 and 2014 respectively. On the backend, I primarily use Phoenix, which was released in 2015. On the iOS front-end, I write apps in Swift, which was released in 2014. For our ML, practically nothing we use existed three years ago (except underlying layers, like language and below)…

> That being said, you don't have to use the newer technologies if you don't want to. When you're new to the scene, how on Earth would you know? Seemingly everybody's doing it, there's no sane source on whether it's worth using or its tangible benefits, and you can't make heads or tails of it – you need to be in the game already to even begin doing so. Web dev may not be evolving, but it certainly is developing into…

This varies by technology, but often you can get productive within a day or two with these technologies. I mean, the core Vue docs (entire essentials section, from Introduction through Components), is 12k words, including code. At 50 wpm (1/6th of college reading speed on non-technical material), that's four hours of reading. If you wanna skim the thing, you could easily see the gist of what it's about in less than an hour.

Re: Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

#45

Post by MilanoCookie »

mmvs wrote: post #26
MilanoCookie wrote: post #10

Related to this topic: What are the minimum technologies needed to get a solid front-end stack, with a nice balance between modern features without framework/library/build tool/transpiling hell? For example, I don’t want to learn TypeScript when vanilla JavaScript will suffice. I’m wary of picking up the “hot” new frameworks because they haven’t stood the test of time and may get deprecated/irrelevant. Basically, I w…

I'd say react.js. It has been proven to be a good choice for all kind of web applications (small, large) and even static web sites ( https://www.gatsbyjs.org/ , https://github.com/nozzle/react-static ). Also it has an awesome community and awesome tooling (create-react-app), which allow you not to bother with "framework/library/build tool/transpiling hell". Check this repo if you're interested in react: https://githu…

Thanks, I keep hearing great things about React, not to mention the added bonus of React Native. I’ll look into it further.

Re: Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

#46

Post by MarsAscendant »

laser wrote: post #44
MarsAscendant wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That being said, you don't have to use the newer technologies if you don't want to. When you're new to the scene, how on Earth would you know? Seemingly everybody's doing it, there's no sane source on whether it's worth using or its tangible benefits, and you can't make heads or tails of it – you need to be in the game already to even begin doing so. Web dev may not be evolving, but it certainly is developing into…

This varies by technology, but often you can get productive within a day or two with these technologies. I mean, the core Vue docs (entire essentials section, from Introduction through Components), is 12k words, including code. At 50 wpm (1/6th of college reading speed on non-technical material), that's four hours of reading. If you wanna skim the thing, you could easily see the gist of what it's about in less than a…

I'm not trying to argue about relative effectiveness behind Vue et al. I'm saying that, as a newbie, you wouldn't be able to know the difference.

"Just try it" isn't a good argument when all you see are big, unfamiliar names that you're apparently supposed to know – and without guidance, learning web dev on your own, you effectively do, even if just to see that you don't need it. It's overwhelming.

Imagine having to learn color theory and all kinds of subtle differences in the production of crayons you could have before you sit down to doodle something in your spare time. Imagine having to read your literary national treasure section whole before you want to write that cool short story you had when you took that shower. Ridiculous!

So, I argue, is the fact that there's seemingly an obligation to read up documentation for major frameworks before you sit down and code your first clicker-number-increaser.

Re: Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

#47

Post by yahnusername »

Couple ideas:

Maybe it doesn't change often, but the developer pool is full of people early in their career who would rather find the next big thing and get in on the ground level than be 3-5 years behind the curve on the existing stuff. And then they tweet all day about it.

Maybe it does change often, because there's such a focus on build tools and developer ergonomics; and doing that in 201X lets you follow the treasure map made by the ppl who already figured it all out for systems programming decades ago. The kids are calling it transpilation and tree-shaking these days. They're writing APIs for GPU access, and assembly code for the bits that need to be really performant.

Re: Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

#48

Post by akamaka »

Web development has been the greatest nexus of software innovation for the last two decades, and its influence has transformed the entire landscape around it. It has fundamentally changed data storage (XML, JSON), app integration (embedded Google Maps, share buttons), graphic design (CSS sweeping away embedded images and paving the road to flat design), and much more.

Many of these innovations began as surprising hacks which pushed browsers beyond their limits and created significant problems with security, performance, and visual rendering.

As these hacks became mainstream features, developers took two different approaches to fixing the problems. Some worked on creating front-end libraries which smoothed over the flaws in the browsers, while others worked on the more difficult problem of fixing the browsers themselves.

Front-end Javascript libraries can significantly improve developer productivity and a new, improved framework will see rapid and widespread adoption. However, the slower work of fixing the browsers themselves continues in the background, making those Javascript libraries obsolete and introducing powerful new browser features.

As we speak, there is an incredible array of new features in the latest browsers which are going mostly unused, because most web developers don't want to touch them until that last 5% of older browsers die off. Today, it might look as if a certain web framework is the be-all and end-all of web development, but in reality the groundwork has already been laid for it to be obsoleted and replaced by better, faster, more secure, more productive tools.

Re: Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

#49

Post by aastronaut »

throwaway98121 wrote: post #19

I find front end development extremely boring. Just my personal opinion. So you make another web page using a new framework. So what? How is it better or more valuable than what you could have built 5 years ago? Did you discover a framework that gives you faster time to market? Is it easier to support because it’s a smaller code base and multi platform? Is the performance that much better? Did some Ab testing really…

> "Honestly, none of the real value was in any of the web apps. The value was in the backend logic (if there was any significant business logic at all) and more so in data and real system design, balancing between function, redundancy, resiliency, extensibility, and some notion of scalability depending on who the customer was and what expected or unexpected scenarios could arise and how our systems would behave."

These are all responsibilities on the frontend as well... Website =/= Webapp. It almost seems that a lot of backend developers are not making this distinction nowadays, even though SPAs are already out there for years.

In the frontend there is the ever-responsive UI workload, the option for web workers, and service workers are on the rise. To keep your state there are JavaScript objects, web storage (session- and localstorage) and IndexedDB. WebGL anyone...? Newly developed JavaScript should sometimes work in the browser as well as in Node.js. I am solely mentioning technology here, not any implementation - this is thanks to the frontend of the web, as sandboxed app platform (and JavaScript), being so versatile. Next to the system design of the app there is also the gap to its UI/UX design to fill. ...All should work reliable on devices with very limited resources, as there is no option to scale on the client side.

"How to reach offline functionality?" Is a question with all of the complexity belonging to the frontend. Whereas the frontend is the data's real-time interaction, the backend becomes more the reliable async distribution of data. I'm sorry, but frontend app development is everything except from boring for me.

Re: Ask HN: Why does front-end development change so often?

#50

Post by laser »

MarsAscendant wrote: post #46
laser wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This varies by technology, but often you can get productive within a day or two with these technologies. I mean, the core Vue docs (entire essentials section, from Introduction through Components), is 12k words, including code. At 50 wpm (1/6th of college reading speed on non-technical material), that's four hours of reading. If you wanna skim the thing, you could easily see the gist of what it's about in less than a…

I'm not trying to argue about relative effectiveness behind Vue et al. I'm saying that, as a newbie, you wouldn't be able to know the difference. "Just try it" isn't a good argument when all you see are big, unfamiliar names that you're apparently supposed to know – and without guidance, learning web dev on your own, you effectively do, even if just to see that you don't need it. It's overwhelming. Imagine having to…

Yeh, the exploding complexity due to the increasingly wide choice of tools seems like it could exacerbate already steep learnings curves for software development—but if you don't have some teacher/learning source that you just decide to trust as your guru, I'm not sure what choice you have other than to just dive in, or spend time researching options, or maybe a little of both. I guess the ideal option here is to have an expert that can give you advice that you just go along with, so if you tell them "I just want to build a clicker" they can just tell you "Just learn javascript and html and css" or w/e
Post reply on HN