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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?

#41

Post by ilaksh »

My take on this is that backend developers have always been at odds with frontend developers in terms of being given larger salaries than frontend while not having to keep up with new UI technologies and simultaneously downplaying the skills of the front end programmers.

So now, when you have to learn about the web platform since you just cannot ignore it anymore, you are feeling pretty overwhelmed, and can't help yourself -- you fall back on what you know, which is to shit on the skills of front-end developers.

I say this as someone who has done front, back, database, ops, on web-based and desktop stacks.

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

#42

Post by sp527 »

What you're witnessing is the migration of complexity to the frontend. It's becoming very difficult to find a backend problem that doesn't have a well-defined, generally accepted solution and accompanying FOSS that you would be stupid (or even borderline criminally negligent) to ignore. In fact, full-stack programming in general is boring enough that I welcome anything that stirs the pot a bit. That said, having tried at one time or another PM, management, and sales: programming is the worst monetizable career option, except for all the others.

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

#43

Post by shabbyrobe »

SimeVidas wrote: post #36

The web platform is disorganized and has many missing pieces. It has also grown quite a lot in the last couple of years, so it’s virtually impossible to understand all of it. As long as you’re disciplined about learning from the relevant blogs, it will “become better” (but it may take months).

How can you know what constitutes "relevant" though? There are loud voices in the community that seem right at first but the more you learn, the more you realise you may have been led astray. I guess that's a way of learning, but that particular path to enlightenment is covered in litter.

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

#44

Post by tekacs »

I'm more unnerved by how few maintainers so many critical/core open source projects/libraries have, whether in web or otherwise.

However high our project or company's bus factor gets, it's concerning to realise that the framework or critical library underlying has a bus factor close to one. We can certainly adopt it, but that's folding in a lot of new complexity. o_O

This applies irrespective of the language, incidentally - it's often true in Java/Python/Scala even as in JavaScript/npm, as much as people like to bash on the latter.

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

#46

Post by ankurdhama »

Any software, no matter what type, that evolves over time will become a series of hacks on hacks. The more the frequency of evolution is the more hacks will be there. Unfortunately the frequency of evolution in any web app is way way too much then other kinds of applications.

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

#47

Post by popopopo »

weird. commenters seem to be either new web devs, or non-web devs at all judging from comments and cries.

web development is as hard as any other development environment. you must know a lot of stuff, hacks ARE NOT mandatory at all and it is not as bad as people tell you.

maybe you just work with terrible base code is the answer?

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

#48

Post by nixos »

meshko wrote: post #37

It 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…

Or it would have turned into ActiveX. Great on Windows, not so great (if extant) on anything else.

If anything, Flash was multi-platform. You got the same flash on Linux, Mac and Windows.

"Microsoft Java" would be anything but.

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

#49

Post by ktRolster »

Web programming is ok. A lot of the complexity comes because it is actually two different problems:

1) The problem of displaying a (mostly static) page of HTML

2) The problem creating an application

There are web frameworks in existence that solve either of these problems, but things get ugly when people don't think about which problem they are trying to solve.

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

#50

Post by captainbenises »

pixie_ wrote: 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…

This post makes me sad. Javascript, CSS and HTML can all be used powerfully, performantly and in a managed way where anyone can come on board and contribute. Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. To broadly paint this web stack that so many people poured countless hours into making, as 'impossible' to use is doing it a great disservice.

But hey man, that's just like your opinion.

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