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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?

#201

Post by realharo »

flukus wrote: post #166
segmondy wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What huge application are built with javascript? Visual Studio Code is probably the biggest I can think of and I don't know what would be second.

VS Code is built with TypeScript.

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

#202

Post by palerdot »

One important thing is a final web page is a confluence of code coming from different sources, and not controlled by the end user or the developer/website. If you define some functionality, I could just override (intentionally or not) with my code which also gets loaded along with yours.

Combine this with the inconsistent browser playground, you might get some perspective of the hacky nature of the workings in the front end world.

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

#204

Post by imtringued »

Scarbutt wrote: post #107
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…

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.

This is why I don't understand the purpose of electron apps. Why not remove the electron part and just install and run a local http server written in any language and access it from your browser? No need to download the same 50MB+ for electron every time. The overhead from running multiple browser engines is gone. Basically everything is as it should be.

The Kimchi KMV UI is a pretty good example how to do it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12477030

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

#205

Post by kowdermeister »

Uptrenda wrote: post #32

Technical: * Multiple browsers that respond to the same code slightly differently. * Multiple platforms that all need to be supported. * Countless different screen sizes to consider. * Standards that aren't supported across browsers and platforms (and different versions of each in use) * Hundreds of undifferentiated web frameworks that all claim to do the same basic task better than each other. * Thousands of ways to…

No, it just takes experience and a healthy amount of curiosity. I can handle these types of challenges.

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

#206

Post by flukus »

copperx wrote: post #57
bikamonki wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I give it to you: npm is a Gran Bazaar mostly selling crap....but Node is brilliant.

I have been waiting for the dust to settle on the "Node is the worst idea of mankind" vs "Node is brilliant" before taking a look into it.

The amount of breakages I get using my static site/blog generator has my leaning toward worst ever. If that's any indication then anything actually complicated would be breaking all the time.

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

#207

Post by 314 »

segmondy wrote: post #127
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…

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…

I maintain a web-application by myself: I choose the platform and exactly which bits I wrote myself, and whre I pulled things in from other sources.

It still sucks. The target environment is undefined. In most programming problems we start with with a well defined target environment (or at least the language semantics are well defined and we quickly learn where the platform-specific hacks are).

In web programming each of the browsers is slightly different in about a hundred different ways. The main goal of using the web (presenting a platform independent UI without needing to download native code) is not entirely achievable. Instead, each year we apply slightly different hacks to go around in circles.

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

#208

Post by kowdermeister »

> Am I missing something?

Probably. Good folks to learn from.

> Is it me resisting change?

Only you can tell, but client side web development is fine, thanks :)

> Is web programming really that bad?

No, it's doing fine, thanks for asking.

> Is it really just that I need a new mental paradigm?

If you really want to take your time working with client side projects, then you need to relax a bit and just learn a bit more and play a bit more with these techs. Some you'll hate, some you'll love. That's it.

I don't really understand why is this hate against web development goes on HN. I'm building web apps for lots of years now and the major obstacles were never really the technology, but money or people.

Building UI-s in the browser with CSS is not a rocket science; a JS app is easily scalable to 100k lines of code; backend wise you need some good team and a sane PM who don't want to immediately scale your app to Death Star level. Projects does get fucked from time to time, but if you picked your stack well, you'll be fine. I admit it takes experience to identify the crap tools, but what profession doesn't?

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

#209

Post by Pitarou »

flukus wrote: post #159
lobster_johnson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is, in my opinion, a big step forward in reclaiming the front end as a mature UI environment. I have also found that CSS becomes a lot more tolerable with CSS Modules, in combination with React, which allows you to write CSS that targets one component and only that component. By eschewing cascading, you can finally write modular, reusable CSS that avoids side effects and still allows fine-tuning (overriding) by…

IMO react is a big step backwards. Adding an abstraction layer almost never produces a better result, it just makes things more complicated.

I'm glad you added the qualifier "almost" because, even in low-level C, you're typically sitting on about 4 layers of abstraction:

C -> ASM / byte code -> machine code -> primitive CPU operations

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