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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?

#431

Post by talmand »

kowdermeister wrote: post #205
Uptrenda wrote: post #32

Technical: * Multiple browsers that respond to the same code slightly differently. * Multiple platforms that all need to be supported. * Countless different screen sizes to consider. * Standards that aren't supported across browsers and platforms (and different versions of each in use) * Hundreds of undifferentiated web frameworks that all claim to do the same basic task better than each other. * Thousands of ways to…

No, it just takes experience and a healthy amount of curiosity. I can handle these types of challenges.

Experience is not always valued in the tech industry.

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

#432

Post by talmand »

jazoom wrote: post #239
flukus wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of breakages I get using my static site/blog generator has my leaning toward worst ever. If that's any indication then anything actually complicated would be breaking all the time.

This doesn't sound like a NodeJS problem.

It's a common problem; someone or something uses the tool badly, blame the tool.

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

#433

Post by hga »

arethuza wrote: post #302
gaius wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

NeWS was a lovely thing (and the HyperNeWS environment that was built on it is still one of all time favourite frameworks) but I'm not sure it was directly comparable with HTML+JS+AJAX - it was more like an attempt to do a better X11. Specifically I don't remember (even, ironically given its name, in HyperNews) there being much support for working with documents or hyperlinks. Mind you - it did do the client side scr…

Indeed, NeWS was at the level of X11, but tuned to the hardware and networking set up we ended up having instead of the DEC 11/750[display head with a 68000, 1MiB of memory, ~1 megapixels, i.e. pretty dumb, all this to get around government procurement law], but with Sun insisting on 6 figures to license it, it didn't have a chance.

Supposedly the major reason James Gosling insisted Sun not charge for Java runtimes and the SDK, he didn't want another major effort of his to fail for the same reason.

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

#434

Post by nameless912 »

9point6 wrote: post #312
meredydd wrote: post #301

Earlier 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) .…

I think your use of "minimum" is wrong here. If you're using React running on Node and Webpack as your task-runner you just need Javascript and that's it. Node allows you to run isomorphic JavaScript that runs on both your server side and client side (to ensure you don't end up with the Angular-style skeleton pages coming from the server), You can pick a nice ORM (like sequelize) to abstract away SQL, and Webpack all…

I would argue that React is different enough so as to almost be called its own language. After all, it does use "JSX", whatever the hell that means ;-)

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

#435

Post by pjmlp »

zeveb wrote: post #417
emodendroket wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, there is, but it's ancient and that sort of carping seems to be a distant memory.

That's kinda the problem, though: Unix really is worse than VMS or Lisp Machines, when measured on certain axes (and I love Unix!); rather than fix it, or replace it with something even better (e.g. Plan 9), the computing industry has instead decided that POSIX is the end-all, be-all of OS evolution, and collectively ignored all the ways that life could be better. It's very difficult, as I get older, not to survey th…

This is what makes me focus more on Windows, macOS and the mobile OSes.

Because these systems moved beyond what plain POSIX means.

Even on Apple and Google's OSes, their UNIX underpinnings are not that relevant, because most of the user space libraries and APIs don't have anything to do with UNIX.

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

#436

Post by Nadya »

kowdermeister wrote: post #400
314 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I maintain a web-application by myself: I choose the platform and exactly which bits I wrote myself, and whre I pulled things in from other sources. It still sucks. The target environment is undefined. In most programming problems we start with with a well defined target environment (or at least the language semantics are well defined and we quickly learn where the platform-specific hacks are). In web programming eac…

> The target environment is undefined. Nope, that target environment is a responsive, standards compliant software. Code for the standards and the displaying devices will catch up.

Something largely only possible in hobby projects unfortunately.

On hobby projects I support only standards. Your browser not to spec? Not my problem. Well, it would be my problem, due to less traffic from people with broken browsers, but I don't monetize or track my traffic.

Professionally, I'm over here supporting IE8 and Safari 5 (the last version available to Windows) still. Next year we'll finally be dropping IE (all versions) so only a few more months to go.

Unfortunately if something is broken in Chrome or Firefox - I get to fix it. Then when the browser finally fixes it - I get to go fix it by removing the old fix which now breaks things. Really unproductive but I can't argue against it.

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

#437

Post by nameless912 »

sesutton wrote: post #329
meredydd wrote: post #301

Earlier 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.

Uh, SQL is definitely Turing Complete. What are you smoking?

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

#438

Post by fulafel »

apatters wrote: post #147
jaredklewis wrote: post #77

I think it's worth noting that back-end web development is an usually pleasant place. In most other types of programming, many technical decisions are made by the platform and working with tons of legacy cruft is the norm, not the exception. For example, where else can you so freely choose the programming language? Linux Driver? Use C. Mobile App? Java or Swift/Objective-C for Android or iPhone, respectively. GUI App…

This is exactly why I've always been puzzled by the urge to move more and more logic to the frontend. In backend development you have a choice of many mature languages, tools and frameworks which are fairly sane. I'll take that environment as the foundation of a web application any day and apply the mania of client-side javascript to it selectively in cases where we need to minimize server roundtrips.

Network performance increases and reliability have taken a step back due to the shfit to wireless, and client devices have become more powerful relative to servers.

If the 1995-2005 trends had continued, by now internet services would be served by 15 GHz servers and low-latency 1-10 gigabit networks.

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

#440

Post by thwllms »

troels wrote: post #331

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.

Agreed. I was a civil engineer (specializing in water resources) before I became a full-time software developer. The science of hydrology/hydraulics is largely a messy pile of educated guesses, statistical relationships based on embarrassingly small datasets, and highly generalized models.
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