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

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471–480 of 688 posts

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

#471

One thing that frustrates me as a front-end dev is the inability to settle down in an ecosystem. Every minute, new tool/framework is coming with a tagline "There is no need to do that like you did with X, Y takes care of it for you". Now the Y might be webpack/React, tomorrow it might me something else. Whoever says React gives them a consistent way of doing things, they would have said the same thing to Backbone/Ang…

One of my absolute favorite online comments is https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/39wsfi/what_are_pr... :

"Every framework can be viewed as an attempt to say "the hardest part of writing a webapp is {X}, so here's some code to make that easier". ... Backbone is the result of feeling like the hard parts are fetching and persisting models to a REST API, and client side routing; that's basically all it does. Figuring out how to turn your models into HTML is easy (apparently), but models are hard, so it helps you.

Angular is what you get if you think the biggest problem with writing webapps is that Javascript isn't Java; Ember that it's not Ruby. (I kid. But I'm less familiar with those frameworks.) And so on. Everyone has their own ideas of what's hard to solve.

React + Flux is based on the idea that what's really hard with writing webapps is non-deterministic behaviour and unclear data flow. And if you've worked on a large Knockout or Backbone project, you're probably inclined to agree."

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

#472
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…

> JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale

What does this even mean? I see the phrase "does not scale" bandied about all the time. In what way is a language supposed to scale? It seems like its just the latest semi-technical hand-wavy way to disparage something.

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

#473

The cleanest and most efficient methodologies for web development today are largely unpopular. The people who know how to write efficient websites, web pages, and web software in general are going to be either the people who have been doing it long enough to remember the old ways, or those who wade through enough of today's bullshit to understand how to do things with less code, and faster rendering times.

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

#476

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Literally all of the things you listed have made web programming much better.

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

#477
post #450

Some people have already mentioned GWT. I think this is the best evidence that yes, web programming is extremely hackish. GWT is an entire framework to write web applications in a strongly typed language - it compiles Java down to JavaScript. GWT was made in an era that we're just now escaping: the era of browser quirks. IMHO, GWT didn't take off because of one reason: Its target demographic, web developers, do not h…

> Its target demographic, web developers, do not have the same technical training as traditional computer scientists I think this is the money quote, and the reason why this thread is full of such ill-informed opinions. I have a degree in CS. I've done systems programming, devops, and mobile before settling on web. Just recently I joined a company of very strong back-end people with a severe dearth of people who have…

As a Real Programmer who started his career right when the web took off, I can tell you why. At first, web apps were CGI scripts, so back-end only. But most of the jobs were in native applications. At some point you play around with interactive web page, and the DOM is a mess, browsers all behave differently and you give it up in frustration. Swing, Qt, Win32, are all not bad, and act quite predictably. Then you see web apps start coming, but they are slow, and you still have that bad experience from earlier. Then you start reading HN and notice that every six months the new thing changes, and you say, "hm, Swing, Qt, Win32 don't need to change all the time, something about this web app stuff smells like Done Wrong," and you avoid it like the plague. And when you talk to your non-profit friends who are setting up an online store, they are all hiring some guy to do it in WordPress, and it takes 7 seconds to load, 50+ JS files, and 30+ CSS files (I kid you not), and you don't even want to talk shop with that kind of developer.

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

#479
post #12

I think it feels hacky because it is, and it's natural. And by natural I mean this is how spontaneous complex systems evolve. Internet is a result of half of a century of millions of people's contributions for different and often opposing goals and priorities. For other examples of hackiness take a look at other complex natural processes, like multicellular living creatures and ecosystem in general.

But Is hackiness how we humans want to do engineering? I don't think that biological systems are considered ideal models for building bridges or planes. Is software different?

I thought we were talking about what we already have, not what we want to have?

EDIT: Bridges and planes are built by strictly organized companies, with clear (ideally) leadership and plans. Internet has evolved much less centralized, and as a result, in a more natural fashion. No one stopping you from attempting to write a perfect software, but if you want to re-use results of million man-years of development, you'll have to deal with natural processes.

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

#480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People here always seem interested in my 14 years of experience but want to pay me closer to a junior / intermediate salary.
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