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

Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 292 posts

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#91

Post by engineerDave »

I don't know if this helps or hurts but I took up Elixir a few years ago and was liking it, the way the FP simplifies the scope you have to operate within and the general stability of the API that Jose has stated, i.e. it's feature complete for the foreseeable future, changes now are mostly optimizations such as pushing more into the erlang layer.

Then they introduced releases which can package everything into a tar file that has all the CSS, JS, HTML, erlang VM, etc. in it and runs as a binary via systemd and proxied through your .

Then they introduced LiveView and it was the first time I really had a "wow" moment since first learning Rails many many years ago. I can do nearly everything I want in real-time with it + JS hooks.

I really do think this addresses a lot of the frustration I keep experiencing w/r/t complexity in web development. I can just write Elixir code and get about 90% of the features of a JS framework like React.

The only real knock on it is it's strongly typed not static typed (they're working on a solution) but with code analysis tools like dialyzer and credo a lot of that worry is addressed. It's not for everyone but FWIW it has been a breath of fresh air to me a 10+ year web developer.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#92

Post by eddsh »

kbrannigan wrote: post #28
coffeefirst wrote: post #16

I call this the "path to enlightenment." You have discovered that the most popular toolchain is overkill for 95% of the things its used for. The problem is that's true literally across the board. You move to the backend and you have to deal with people who fell in love with microservices and weird databases that they didn't need. You move to ops and you have to deal with k8s when a single container would do. If you t…

Speaking of ops. What is the simplest reproducible way to accomplish this task. - create vm instance ( setup firewall, users, network dna, stuff) - install : apache, runtime - install app.

Honestly I use bash for this. I keep a local repo of .deb/.tar.gz files and scp them onto a machine which makes them reproducible. I use uvt-kvm for VMs, config files to cover basic settings, and that's basically it. I run a fairly decent sized test lab with multiple servers that have to be reproducible, quick to edit, and install fairly complex toolchains.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#93

Post by mediascreen »

There are a few things I think you could do about it:

1. Find somewhere to work were they use a tech stack you feel is more appropriate.

2. Work at a smaller company where you have more say in the tech stack and tooling.

3. Find a company or team where someone else works on developer tooling and automation, so you only need to worry about site building.

4. Freelance and specialise in what you enjoy working with.

I work at a small (15 people) web agency where I have a large say in what we use. It's surprisingly little React/Vue, a bit of WordPress (not everyones favourite maybe) and a lot of backend work on APIs and admins in Laravel and plain PHP/HTML with some vanilla JS. Only about 10 percent of the clients ever care what stack we use.

All of our 60+ projects are setup the same way:

1. Pull down the repo and run "docker compose up" to start you local environment. Any composer or npm commands should be run through docker compose, so no local installs (except docker) are needed.

2. Push to staging branch to deploy to staging and merge to production branch to deploy to production.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#94

Post by akrymski »

dimmke wrote: post #81
akrymski wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what we need is a new spec that compiles down to whatever HTML/CSS/JS/WASM is supported by browsers over time. Waiting for browser vendors to agree on a new spec takes far too long. The same thing happens in all of comp-sci: we create a new programming language that compiles to an old language (C to Assembly) because changing the old one takes longer than inventing a new one.

Ultimately, that's what all these different frameworks actually are though. Look at how many different languages over the years have compiled down to JS? CoffeeScript, TypeScript, Elm. And all the frameworks that have smoothed over the native DOM API: React, Angular, JQuery, too many to list. They all implement these concepts in Javascript. But if we don't standardize and allow browser vendors to implement at a lower…

Sort of, but React is not a language. It's a runtime lib. JSX is not really helpful - still writing HTML and CSS.

TypeScript has been very useful and successful but it hasn't touched the UI stuff.

We need a better alternative to HTML and CSS. With WASM any language can now be compiled to run in the browser, and it's a matter of time until WASM integrates with the DOM as well.

This isn't web specific. Desktop UI APIs change frequently too. UI is hard, and only higher level of abstractions can simplify things.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#95

Post by the-printer »

ScottStevenson wrote: post #71
coffeefirst wrote: post #16

I call this the "path to enlightenment." You have discovered that the most popular toolchain is overkill for 95% of the things its used for. The problem is that's true literally across the board. You move to the backend and you have to deal with people who fell in love with microservices and weird databases that they didn't need. You move to ops and you have to deal with k8s when a single container would do. If you t…

>Why does this happen? I wrote about a hypothesis here: https://medium.com/@scott.stevenson/how-to-finally-make-some... Most of us are scared by the ambiguity of actual creative work, so unless we are under the threat of deadline, we seek out "structured games" to play so that we can put off the anxiety of freeform work. These games are: (1) Tool Game: Researching and setting up tools (2) Learning Game: Books, podcas…

> (1) Tool Game: Researching and setting up tools (2) Learning Game: Books, podcasts, courses (3) Maintenance Game: Cleaning up our desktop, desk, house, etc. (4) Process Game: Setting up new processes and following them

I…I…I am triggered by this.

So it’s as if, people such as myself are on the hunt for artificial positive feedback loops that are functionally beautified masks of procrastination. Fueled by, perhaps a subconscious lack of confidence, or a sense of ignorance. Something to that effect.

So now imagine an entire department, teams, organizations all suffering from this? This can explain a lot.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#96

Post by stavros »

xd wrote: post #75
bottlepalm wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This point of view is a fallacy itself. ORMs are about productivity and maintainability. Some of us write enterprise applications where ORMs are a godsend. They're not a replacement for being knowledgeable in SQL whatsoever.

It's just my opinion based on 20+ years of developing data management solutions across thousands of customers.. any framework employs a set of beliefs and that creates a box you are constrained to think in, hell SQL is one of them boxes. You say "They're not a replacement for being knowledgeable in SQL whatsoever." .. so what are they then? Edit: I once spent/wasted almost 2 years of my life trying to develop the ult…

They're a convenience for 99.9% of use cases. For the other 0.1%, I write SQL, but to be honest, I've never had to yet.

You can deliver business value with boring glue code.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#97

Post by noduerme »

coffeefirst wrote: post #16

I call this the "path to enlightenment." You have discovered that the most popular toolchain is overkill for 95% of the things its used for. The problem is that's true literally across the board. You move to the backend and you have to deal with people who fell in love with microservices and weird databases that they didn't need. You move to ops and you have to deal with k8s when a single container would do. If you t…

I just still use jQuery or vanilla typescript when building frontends. To me it's so much more readable, and I almost never have to worry about newer code not playing well with older code. No client has ever even asked me what framework was being used. If the software works and the code is well documented, the fewer frameworks you use the better.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#98

Post by boxed »

engineerDave wrote: post #91

I don't know if this helps or hurts but I took up Elixir a few years ago and was liking it, the way the FP simplifies the scope you have to operate within and the general stability of the API that Jose has stated, i.e. it's feature complete for the foreseeable future, changes now are mostly optimizations such as pushing more into the erlang layer. Then they introduced releases which can package everything into a tar…

I've looked at Elixir a bit, but I came away with the expression that it would be a bit like doing Django before 1.7 where I had to do schema migrations manually. This is a huge deal to me.

I didn't see any forms libraries either, so the forms situation seems even more primitive. I'm the author of iommi so I now have very high level abstractions for forms/tables/menus/etc, and a transparent way to compose these. I would hate to start over from scratch...

Am I just missing some libraries?

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#99

Post by klyrs »

I haven't done proper web development in a very long time, but I recently did some work with a front-end contractor. I made some self-effacing comment about not knowing frameworks and all that, and he gave me an amused look and said that he doesn't bother with them. He showed me his code, and it was all quite easy to read and looked very maintainable. His output is great, and to my knowledge we've almost never had post-deploy issues.

In my career, I've witnessed a lot of "framework"-style vanity projects (several were my idea). Fewer than 100% of them have been boondoggles (but that's the most generous estimate I'll give).

Food for thought, you might be better off without.

Re: Ask HN: Getting tired of complexity in web development

#100

Post by yrgulation »

bottlepalm wrote: post #88
xd wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just my opinion based on 20+ years of developing data management solutions across thousands of customers.. any framework employs a set of beliefs and that creates a box you are constrained to think in, hell SQL is one of them boxes. You say "They're not a replacement for being knowledgeable in SQL whatsoever." .. so what are they then? Edit: I once spent/wasted almost 2 years of my life trying to develop the ult…

Not sure if you've used Entity Framework, but you can do compos (with logic) amazing complex queries with relatively little code in a way that is statically typed and super easy to maintain. I'm talking about pulling heavily structured data from the database without having to pull from flat tables and structure it yourself server side. Also working with databases with thousands of tables and relationships, hundreds o…

But you can already write amazingly complex queries in sql, and structure them as objects directly using pdo. If there are hundreds of developers working against the same codebase then that codebase is too large. If you need to query hundreds of tables in one go you need to consider denormalisation or using a document storage.
Post reply on HN