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

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 688 posts

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

#181

Post by IanCal »

flushandforget wrote: post #167

I think what saddens me with web programming, is constant rewrites of the same old projects, that pretty much do the same thing. As a community we'd be better to focus on a few core APIs like a web shop or a booking app. A church or school could have a common underlying built platform. Where functions of outfits are unified, we could drop in one size fits all solutions. In England (UK) you have about 24 thousand scho…

Why do you need any new APIs for that? Sounds like you just need a shared template.

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

#183

Post by LBarret »

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…

look at elmlang maybe ? it solves a few of these problems, but this is quite different from what we are used to.

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

#184

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#185

Post by apatters »

jaredklewis wrote: post #176
apatters wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why I've always been puzzled by the urge to move more and more logic to the frontend. In backend development you have a choice of many mature languages, tools and frameworks which are fairly sane. I'll take that environment as the foundation of a web application any day and apply the mania of client-side javascript to it selectively in cases where we need to minimize server roundtrips.

I think it mainly comes from the fact that web applications are becoming more interactive. If you are going to implement photoshop in the browser, there's going to be a lot of client side logic. Before, web development was more like, "fill in this form and when you're ready hit submit and we'll check it." Now people are implementing word processors and music libraries.

That's very true, there are web apps where "cases where we need to minimize server roundtrips" are the default case. For these situations it makes sense to run a lot of the logic on the client.

However it seems like this has been taken way too far -- I run into a fair share of developers out there who look at basically any proposed web app and say, "Oh yeah, this needs to be a SPA built with React." Why? "Because it's better" and then a rattling off of generic reasons that SPA and doing everything client-side are superior. This is basically the modern version of the Lisp fanboy, they find a good hammer they want to work with more and now everything they see is a nail.

These are often the younger guys who have not yet seen this pattern carry itself out over a generation or two of developers -- if there's any reason why tech ageism is amazingly dumb it's this one imo (have the guy on your team who's graduated past the fanboy stage make your tool, platform and framework choices, you will save far more than the premium that you have to pay him).

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

#186

Post by jaredklewis »

adrianratnapala wrote: post #142
jaredklewis wrote: post #77

I 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…

Remember MS-DOS also succeeded because of its "strengths" in some very special, narrow sense. In the more ordinary sense, it succeeded in spite of its weakness, but Windows has slowly recovered from that and is now a good system. The modern web is somewhat the the reverse: it is worse than its progenitor. HTML, HTTP and what would eventually be called ReST were all good ideas and succeeded because (a) they were a goo…

It's not good, just better than anything else.

If things like running apps over an x-display server didn't totally suck, then the clients would have been adopted and eventually it would be zero install. God didn't command that browsers be installed everywhere. Companies and users did so of their own free will.

Maybe I haven't dug deep enough, but what are these alternative, non-hacky delivery platforms that the world passed up in favor of the web? The ones I've heard about have tons of problems, just like browsers.

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

#188

Post by tonyedgecombe »

raverbashing wrote: post #140
pixie_ wrote: post #58

Earlier 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…

Complicated to create UIs? Win32 was complicated. MFC was complicated. GTK is hard HTML and CSS aren't as complex as those. Not even close

Delphi, VB6, WinForms made development a lot easier, there was a reason they were called RAD tools.

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

#189

Post by scotty79 »

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…

> Yes, even web programming was better 10 years ago.

I've been doing this for over 10 years and no, it was way, way worse.

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

#190

Post by nodamage »

raverbashing wrote: post #158
bbcbasic wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can create controls in WIN32 or MFC that would simply be impossible in HTML for a reasonable level of performance

Yes, but this doesn't matter for the majority of applications today

Replace "WIN32 or MFC" with "iOS or Android" and the point still stands, especially on mobile devices where processing power is limited and battery life more important.
Post reply on HN