I suggest you choose to fall in love with Ember.js. She is the prettiest girl in your small town and she's really friendly. Start calling yourself a programmer instead of a coder - and help move Ember toward being, not just a framework, but an SDK for the web. Everyone can complain all they want about CSS and how it's broken etc, but no one has come up with a better solution. It's not the dark ages... in fact, it's the best time in web development so far. Developers haven't had to be 'designers' in the way they are being forced to now - with variable screen-size, and alternate UI patterns for each. HTML in little dynamic templates, variables for CSS preprocessors, ES6, and modular JS patterns. Things are wonderful. +1 for a new mental paradigm.
Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
491–500 of 688 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#492Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean the browser achieved it instead of the JVM. It could have been something other than JavaScript as the scripting language. What mattered was the platform everyone ended up using.
For practical purposes it's the same either way.
But it's not the same, because not all platforms use a markup language with a separate style language in addition to the actual programming language.
A JVM or .NET based web would have been a very different kind of platform.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#493Yes. 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…
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 would exclude the 3rd framework. You do not need or want to use a CSS framework if you actually understand and have experience writing CSS.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#494It is scary how most commenters here are missing the point. No, not all programming sucks. Yes, web programming sucks more than other things. No, it doesn't have to be like this. Yes, even web programming was better 10 years ago. No, I don't know how to fix it. Neither do I know exactly where we took the wrong turn. One of my theories is this: had Sun not sued Microsoft over their extensions in JVM, MS would have kep…
> Yes, even web programming was better 10 years ago You are not serious :) Don't you remember IE5/6? Loads if inconsistent implementations and flash that supposed to fix all pain?
I'm saying there was hope. I remember 2005. IE was getting better. Chrome/Firefox/Opera were close enough, once I got one of them working i barely had to do anything. So it was essentially targeting 2 platforms (IE and non-IE) and hoping IE would get fixed. Today that problem is largely solved, but we have created an unmanageable lasagna of complexity in the process.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#495Earlier quoted context omitted.
Java had another big problem. It couldn't interact with DOM properly. I mean, it could. But it was terribly hackish and anyways involved Javascript. So you had one of two options: 1. Write an HTML webpage or 2. Write an empty webpage with a large Java applet in the center, which would be function as a "virtual terminal". Both are ugly. That's why Sun created Java Web Start (IIRC), for complicated Java applications wh…
Java could have been made to have good DOM bindings, I don't remember anyone asking for them.
Sun wanted Netscape to put Java in the browser, but Netscape was already planning on making their own scripting language. Had Sun convinced Netscape otherwise, Java would have had good DOM bindings.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#496With respect, at least part of your frustration comes from the "curse of the installed base." Long-lived software with real users in any language running on any platform becomes complex, and picks up strange-looking appendages. Sometimes those appendages are nasty hacks, and sometimes they are well-built. But they are, in most cases, necessary to the proper functioning of the software, and responsible for its success…
It comes back to that wonderful quote by Bjarne Stroustrup: "There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses"
It's apropos that the creator of C++ would say something like that. I wonder of Alan Kay, John McCarthy or Guido van Rossum would agree.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#497Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#498Yes. 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…
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) .…
... and usually ...
Five or six competing frameworks that do the same thing in different, incompatible ways, because either the guy who understood EXT-JS left the company or one group like jQuery better than DOJO and they both went off to do their own things only to be brought back together later.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#499Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Keep in mind that JS is leverage the browser, which gets installed everywhere, and because of a persistent push to standardize, delivers mostly the same user experience across platforms these days.
My point was that Java, Flash or Silverlight could have done the same if you replace the browser with a similar platform in those ecosystems. JS is getting to leverage the powerful browser platform with native integration, while the others were mere plugins.
Would be very different if the browser was a JVM based platform.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#500Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the…
Or move to the back-end, where things move at a more survivable pace. Here's the dirty secret, too: for the most part, the work you do there is actually easier than front-end work, since you have better tooling and frameworks that don't shift under you like quicksand. And building a CRUD backend to a REST API might be a tad tedious, but it's a whole lot less fiddly than mucking about with CSS and trying to make web UIs pixel perfect in every mongrel browser under the sun.