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

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 which could be loaded from the Internet.

Perhaps Google Docs could have done something like that, but I like the current UI more than the "potential Java Google Docs". The only thing Google Docs now can't do is Cntrl-S or something like that.

Also, don't forget the real reason (existing) Java Applets died - security.

Even the big companies can't do pretty basic things on the web, like justify text beautifully. It's not hard to imagine another world with much better typography on the internet. Ditto for better languages and a better layout system.

Most importantly, just because something has broad support and took a lot of effort does not put it beyond sharp criticism. That's no way to make progress and a perfect way to make entrenched worse-is-better technologies that managed to get popular even more entrenched.

But it's also a place where you can do a lot of things that no one has thought before. There are not many rules and a wide diversity of approaches. The web platform never had many of those approaches (e.g. complex web applications) in mind when it was created. It works somehow, anyhow. It's chaotic, yes, but also flexible and full of freedom.

To stay sane in this world, you have to voluntarily and deliberatly (!) reduce this freedom and create yourself some small sane pockets that you understand well enough and feel comfortable with. This can be done by increasing the abstraction level and restricting feature sets (e.g. ESlint), using Frameworks (React, Bootstrap, ...) and transpilers (TypeScript, Babel, Sass). Note that you're loosing freedom here and you're buing into other peoples understanding how a sane place of web programming should look like. In the Web there are a lot of ways to do things, there's no monoculture! And if you don't like the existing ways, roll out your own (though I wish people would be more careful / sceptical with this attitude).

And there's the backend. You've got all choices of programming languages and frameworks there. If you're making a mess of you're backend, you really can't blame the web for it.

For someone without much web experience, this process of choosing frameworks, workflows, toolsets just to get to one (of many!) sane programming experience is surely daunting. You have to choose and configure your envirionment yourself first, just to get started. You really need someone experienced to set this up and understand most of its implications. If you're having so bad experiences with your current web project, maybe some bad decisions were made regarding this. Or too much freedom (and therefore chaos) was left in place and got out of hand.

If you don't have the experience to make those decisions, you could just start with one approach that is pupular right now. I guess on hacker news this would be something like React, Babel, etc.. There are a lot of tutorials out there to put this all together.