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

Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 398 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#81

Post by pferde »

sorenjan wrote: post #70
sillysaurusx wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can confirm. I love winforms. Convinced that even the most hardcore Unix devs are missing out on the sheer joy of being able to double-click on a form you just dropped into an editor and seeing it automatically add an event handler for the common case of whatever type of UI component it is. (Buttons are onclick, inputs are ontextchange, etc.)

I think QTCreator provides a similar experience, but I haven't used it in years and might be wrong.

Glade did that decades ago for GTK+ apps too. A WYSIWYG UI editor which prepared all the UI boilerplate code for you automatically.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#82

Post by vikingerik »

jlangenauer wrote: post #64

I think it's something analogous to Jevons' Paradox. Jevon's Paradox, originally written about the use of coal, noted that as it become more efficient to use a resource, the end result was generally not that less of that resource was used, but in fact more. I think the same thing has happened in frontend development: Tools which were written to make development easier have not had the effect of making it easier to do…

That's it. It's induced demand. Build roads with more capacity, and more cars will appear to use them. Build frameworks with more capabilities, and more tickets will appear to use them.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#83

Post by hansworst »

eterm wrote: post #33
claudiulodro wrote: post #16

Because the browser nowadays is an "operating system" that needs to be capable of handling all manner of dynamic software: maps, video, image editors, games, etc. I haven't done Windows development, but I assume browser-based development complexity will continue trending towards essentially the same complexity as developing e.g. a Windows program.

TWenty years ago windows development was a lot simpler than modern browser applications. Fire up visual studio and create a new winforms project. You could literally drag and drop your way to a modest application with only minimal programming 'under the hood' for the business logic. I still don't think anything has surpassed the usability of winforms for a developer just wanting to get something done.

There are plenty of website builders that don’t require you to code. Platforms like squarespace or wix make it really simple.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#84

Post by bbarn »

sam0x17 wrote: post #51
spapas82 wrote: post #17

Why? I think mainly FOMO. When react was out with the blessings of Facebook people wanted to use the same library. Of course most people didn't really care/understand that their internal crud app for editing invoices wouldn't need that complexity. I think my answer should answer your second question: This kind of complexity is actually needed on some apps but these apps are a minority. Programmers love shiny new thin…

It's a mix of this FOMO and a lot of people not knowing how to wire up AJAX well. I've seen entire teams reach for react just because there is a portion of the page where some AJAX was required and react is the only way this new crop of devs knows how to do DOM stuff with server side effects.

React today, Angular before that, JQuery, Knockout, All the gloriously bloated .net AJAX controls from Webforms, etc. There's been ways to wrap AJAX calls pretty much since XMLHttpRequest was implemented.

I'd argue "Wiring it up well" is a task better suited for these vetted and highly used libraries than rolling your own code in vanilla JS.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#85

Post by arcturus17 »

etimberg wrote: post #21

I think it's generally caused by a few issues: 1. UI development is hard to do well. Throughout my career I've seen complexity explosions in C++/Win32, C#/WPF, and JS UIs so this isn't a new phenomenon 2. It's always easy to develop the correct UI in hindsight once all the requirements are known. When starting out it's hard to know what will be needed or not and this leads to overly complex solutions 3. The browser a…

> 1. UI development is hard to do well. Throughout my career I've seen complexity explosions in C++/Win32, C#/WPF, and JS UIs so this isn't a new phenomenon

The people who complain about current front-end complexity are almost always back-end devs or people who don't touch front-end. However, almost every veteran dev who has developed UIs across many media and environments repeats your point.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#87

Post by patentatt »

davedx wrote: post #43
spapas82 wrote: post #17

Why? I think mainly FOMO. When react was out with the blessings of Facebook people wanted to use the same library. Of course most people didn't really care/understand that their internal crud app for editing invoices wouldn't need that complexity. I think my answer should answer your second question: This kind of complexity is actually needed on some apps but these apps are a minority. Programmers love shiny new thin…

> these apps are a minority. I disagree with this. Almost all front-end projects I've worked on in the last 10 years or so have had some requirement that made pulling in react a better choice than trying to push back on business and/or get buy in to do everything server side. Providing users the kind of tighter feedback loops for their workflows is only possible with JavaScript.

And this is why half of the internet is borderline unusable. Page layout jumping around for 5-10 seconds after what appears to be a full page load, buttons simply not functioning, and god forbid you try to use the back button. I know some expert will say none of those things have to happen and has nothing to do with react, but the reality of it is that these things are incredibly common in modern front end development, and I blame all the over-engineered frameworks.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#88

Post by toldyouso2022 »

Tech companies get a lot of subsidies (directly and indirectly) so they develop inefficient practices. When people don't have profit and loss incentive, where incentive means they are not removed by the market due to losses, human psychology tend to favor bigger, complex things.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#89

Post by orwin »

Question 1: On average, yes, but not as much as people think.

Question 2: both?

I started my "career" with an internship job where i had to write deploy some cakephp+sencha extJS with windows server 2004 and IIS (~2013/2014).

The frontend part were "easy" but tedious, it was tables upon tables, a bit of jquery just because, absolutely hideous css (i think at the end i added bootstrap twitter classes on Sencha extJS). the "backend" was handled a bit like today, with a bit of backend work in the "View" part of the MVC (because Sencha ExtJS). Hard to find bugs induced in this "backend" work, because the only tooling you had were the old devtools, the only documentation you had with the official one (and a bit of SO/blogs, but not that much), and since typescript didn't exist, you had a lot of weird type/casts bugs.

I recently started a new job were i also have to do some short interfaces for my step functions, served by lambda (mostly). I had to learn react and typescript from scratch, and thought i wouldn't be productive in months. I was productive after a week, and after a month could confidently say i'm fluent with React router and props, and passable with typescript (Complex union type threw me off for more time than i like to admit). I still don't know if i understand ExtJS :/

By the way: the documentation isn't that much better now, with all the shitty blogs and stuff like "tutorialpoint" on google frontpage, but you can search code patterns through github and gitlab, and this help immensely.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#90

Post by cjf4 »

Most of the answers here are pointing to things like inefficiencies, short-sightedness, and over engineering, but I'm not seeing the positive side.

The web is an incredible distribution channel. With decent engineering, anyone can make an app that has access to an enormous marketplace with very little capital costs.

The past 20 years of software have been dominated by this distribution model so it's easy to take for granted, but compared to pre-web distribution that involved manufacturing and much larger differences in user platform, it makes sense that the world is trying to squeeze as much software as possible into this model.

With that comes complexity.

Post reply on HN