This is a good resource in terms of 'getting your head into the space'.
Not aimed at beginners but it made me think a lot more about how complex this can actually be then a set of related technologies.
Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
121–130 of 688 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#122Do web developers find ways to create work for themselves?
You allude to it below when you say "zillions of hours".
There is a significant amount of money moving through the "web development industry".
People are getting paid to write things that suck.
The internet actually has made leaps and bounds in terms of what can be delivered over it to the masses.
But the "web" has become a cesspool of redirects, overstuffed headers and pages crammed with beacons, ad server links and ad-related Javascript, accessible through ad-sales-company-sponsored software ("web browsers") to run the ad-related Javascript.
If and when users grow tired of web advertising, the entire system is a risk of a serious correction.
Again, significant and increasingly larger sums of money are moving through the web ad and user data collection cesspool so no one really cares how poor the quality of the "content" becomes.
And you want to learn to orient your mind to this "new way of thinking"?
Maybe you are not resisting change. Maybe you are resisting stupidity. Your time may be better spent focusing on backend development. Today's "backend" may be tomorrow's frontend.
All that "content" can easily be delivered without a single line of Javascript and without using search-engine-ad-sales-company-sponsored software.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
What's sad is the zillions of hours wasted by engineers on an inherently flawed stack. What's sad is how ridiculously complicated it is to create and manage relatively simple UIs. What's sad is an entire generations of programmers growing up and thinking this is normal. Programming is supposed to be about creating platforms for each other so we can continue solving higher (and higher) level problems. This web crap ha…
The web lets you reach a large audience in a way nothing else can. You have to get over yourself about the tools not being elegant, and make sure the thing you're using the flawed tools for is worth the aggravation.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#124While I hate css, sort of like js and hate html layout, a lot of the problems come from accessibility. In that, it's so accessible anyone can do "web". This means you get non-engineers with no engineering background put into situations where thinking about things from an engineering perspective would really help and might produce actual workable solutions. Like wtf is this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/string.protot…
String.prototype.endsWith is native [0], it was added as part of ES2015. If you're supporting older platforms, you need to polyfill it. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
How well supported is ES6 across browsers? Chrome for sure. Not sure about FF or IE.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#125Yes. 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…
Languages don't scale. Systems scale. Without said, Javascript has never really been the language for programming in the large. But make no mistake about it, it's slowly getting there as is evident by huge applications, not just web but even desktop that are being built with it. It's not impossible to refactor. The issue from what I've seen is that people think it as if it's a class based language instead of the prot…
> The issue from what I've seen is that people think it as if it's a class based language instead of the prototypical language that is.
This always gets trotted out as the issue. "It's not JavaScript that's bad for building large applications, it's just everyone is using it wrong."
Prototype inheritance is even more brittle and hard to follow than class-based inheritance which is why developers, for their own sanity, try and shoe-horn it in.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#126"
In Richard Feynman’s popular book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” he tells how during his college years he “often liked to play tricks on people”. Most of these tricks were designed to show how dumb people are. For example, in a mechanical drawing class at MIT where the students were taught to use a drawing instrument called a French curve (a curly piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves), Feynman informed the other students that “the French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal”. He reports that the other students in the class were excited by this discovery, and began holding up their French curves and turning them in various ways, trying to verify that the curve was always horizontal at the lowest point. Feynman found this funny, because they had already taken calculus and supposedly learned that the derivative of the minimum of any curve is zero. (Of course, it’s also intuitively obvious: If a curve at a given point is not flat, the point is obviously not the minimum.) Feynman says “I don’t know what’s the matter with people: they don’t learn by understanding; they learn by some other way – by rote or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!”
www.mathpages.com/home/kmath687/kmath687.htm
"Easy to begin, hard to master" languages/frameworks let you go very far in spite of your knowledge fragility. Some interesting topics to reduce this fragility are data structures, design patterns, software and hardware architecture and, distributed computing.
If I had a penny for every JR. Dev that thinks they can get around the CAP theorem...
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#127It 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…
I'm sorry but I beg to differ, web programming 10 years ago was a nightmare. It's much better today. It's not web programming that sucks, it's programming with others. I bet most people won't complain much if they got choose what tools they wanted and worked alone. When working with others, different ideas and opinion clash heavily. Programmers are not best known for their awesome communication and the lack of it leads to more mental strain than necessary.
The reality is that one can drive the frontend with 100% javascript no frameworks, html, css, keep things simple avoid the framework nightmare. Use typescript if the project is large enough. How come people are not doing this? Because they are not putting in the time to learn the language, it's all about learning framework. I see the same in backends, people who know rails but not ruby, laravel but not not enough php, android framework but not enough java. This is the problem.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's sad is the zillions of hours wasted by engineers on an inherently flawed stack. What's sad is how ridiculously complicated it is to create and manage relatively simple UIs. What's sad is an entire generations of programmers growing up and thinking this is normal. Programming is supposed to be about creating platforms for each other so we can continue solving higher (and higher) level problems. This web crap ha…
The web lets you reach a large audience in a way nothing else can. You have to get over yourself about the tools not being elegant, and make sure the thing you're using the flawed tools for is worth the aggravation.
That's why it's so successful. There has to be a reason something so terrible could possibly be this successful and you hit the nail on the head.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#129I think it's worth noting that back-end web development is an usually pleasant place. In most other types of programming, many technical decisions are made by the platform and working with tons of legacy cruft is the norm, not the exception. For example, where else can you so freely choose the programming language? Linux Driver? Use C. Mobile App? Java or Swift/Objective-C for Android or iPhone, respectively. GUI App…
IMO the browser's strength is really 'zero-install distribution of applications', I don't think HTML/CSS/JS have anything to do with it. Having said that, I think your argument its a straw-man, back-end web development is just a part (sometimes even unnecessary) of browser programming.
Well I think it has something to do with the web's success.
For one thing, the HTML/CSS/JS separation of concerns made it so that someone could make a non-interactive, static web page with very little knowledge. The basics of HTML and CSS can be taught in a week. This is important! I think we would have far less success training people to create static documents with many of the various programming language UI Kits. Though becoming less important, there was definitely a time when this helped to increase the adoption of browsers (and I would argue still makes it easier to teach).
Another thing, is the HTML/CSS/JS were all open standards that have accepted contributions from a wide range of parties. Look at scheme: beautiful, consistent, and completely unused. HTML/CSS/JS would without question be much more pleasant if they had been designed by a benevolent dictator. But open nature of the RFC process I think both greatly helped adoption as well as contributed to the inconsistent nature of the APIs.
You only have zero-install (i.e. ships with the OS) because the web got wide spread adoption, and I think HTML/CSS/JS contributed to that.
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#130It 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…
I'm sorry but I beg to differ, web programming 10 years ago was a nightmare. It's much better today. It's not web programming that sucks, it's programming with others. I bet most people won't complain much if they got choose what tools they wanted and worked alone. When working with others, different ideas and opinion clash heavily. Programmers are not best known for their awesome communication and the lack of it lea…
How can programming with others be the reason, if the OP is saying they find programming for the web with others is much harder than applications development with others?