251–260 of 688 posts
but really, its less "hacks on hacks" and more "unneeded abstractions on unneeded abstractions".
The inefficiency of modern web-stacks continues to absolutely astound me.
When people tout the 'efficiency' of language A against the equivalent C as being "less than 2x"...
jeez... that means you're throwing away double the power that you need to. That means you've got double the number of air-conditioners cooling your server-room. double the power bill, etc...
From that perspective, JavaScript is a garden where once planted, you can't change anything in your garden, and pretty soon it becomes inflexible to build upon old stuff.
The more tools you have, the better of you can get. E.g. TypeScript, and especially Dart help a lot with tooling (and making gardening fun again). What you end up with is isolated components that encapsulate their own code, HTML template and CSS rules. It may be called web component, angular or one of its many competitor, but eventually that is what brings you sanity.
And speaking of sanity: I've found that "the current hype" is almost always broken, half-baked, and lacks proper engineering practices. Go figure why... Use the tool that you enjoy working with and does the job well, and ignore the rest.
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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
I was building GUIs in pure Win32, with my own C++ wrapper classes for Win32 and later with OWL and MFC. I'd say building Win32 GUIs in C++ was easier than current Web stack. Same with Java AWT and Swing libraries. Objective C / Cocoa is more complex - never really managed to learn it beyond basic stuff, maybe with Swift it's easier. Elm is close to those desktop GUI frameworks, but functional instead of OO. But Tcl/…
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…
The actual problem is that people took something that was always intended for displaying (illustrated but mainly text) documents that happened to have clickable words that would display other documents, and tried to make it do desktop-style applications too. We've been hammering square pegs into round holes ever since.
And the infuriating thing is we had a great system for doing what HTML+JS+AJAX etc etc does now - it was called NEWS. But those who forget history are doomed to repeat it, first as tragedy and then as farce. Not sure which stage we're on now, maybe both.
Right now I try to write a simple react SPA and I use more libraries as if I would have done it in a tomcat webapp with static html pages.
Documentation is relatively scarce or non-existent at all and in the end you end up looking at code on github. Hunting on Stackoverflow and blogs written by people and realize that there are 100+ ways to do the same thing.
Looking at code would be fine, but looking at Javascript it's hard not to see how easy it is to write in different styles, which makes understanding the things harder. Also being in the middle of transitioning to ES6 makes it more complicated. Of course ES6 will be a big leap, but ES5 won't go anywhere anytime soon because of backward compatibility. So you will end up with overlaps and weird code.
Sass definitely helps with css. React is a great way to develop nice SPA sites webapps.
I don't know if the whole Frontend part is going in the right direction, but it will need some time to settle. For now it's more fragmented then the Android platform. And it really feels like we are trying to put a lot of stuff on top of protocols, tools and standards which were never meant for this in the first place. We might end up having such big scripts loaded for a page, that it could have been just a thick client instead of a web page.
We threw away Java Apps, we threw away flash, we are throwing away jsp/jsf, PHP, etc... And now we are recreating the same behavior with Javascript/CSS/HTML5. Soon it will be only Javascript and you literally won't write not a single line HTML. (Well React already does that to be honest.)
So yeah, interesting times. And it's hard to jump on this train whilst it's moving so fast.
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> We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages The computer for the Apollo missions had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz. My wrist-watch is many orders of magnitude more powerful than that. But the programming effort that went into it was huge (literally: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*qJnPOGdtk1q7dq17tx... ). If we were stilling coding things that way, we might…
> If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars. I think that not only we would have self-driving cars, they'd be working much more reliably than proposed solutions of today, and would utilize some pretty clever analog-driven methods. The problem isn't with JavaScript, the problem is with the culture which glorifies mindlesss throwing of shit at…
More info please?
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abstraction isn't inherently a bad thing, it's what gives us the tools to reason at a higher level. It's leaky abstractions that are the problem. Proper abstractions are supposed to compress large bundles of information into a smaller set of [broad] concepts, which then imply all the large sets of details they're abstracting away. High level languages are pretty good abstractions on top of raw assembly code for examp…
I think where a key abstraction was lost was when JavaScript became the language you had to compile to if you wanted to do web development. Biggest hope I see on the horizon is WebAssembly, which has support of many big players but I've heard very little on it recently. Ref: https://medium.com/javascript-scene/what-is-webassembly-the-...
* DOM,
* HTML Layout,
* CSS,
* A small variety of crappy events ( onDomLoaded ),
* a fairly rubbish heavyweight communication layer ( AJAX )
* Keyboard bindings that never work cross app, never cross platform
* Accessibility ??
* No idea of the energy impact of your code
* No ability to do queries on important device metrics ( energy consumption, clipboard, user presence, login / logoff, single sign on )
* History management and back button mess
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.
Often a developer is thrown into a stack that was built crooked and gets discouraged. Instead, its your job to get in there and clean it up. It may take months but you'll you yourself and your team a big service!
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Interesting, what native UI system is in your opinion easier to work with than web? Why then so many devs choose to use WebBrowser wrappers to render their desktop/mobile UIs because it's way faster and easier to develop with?
> Interesting, what native UI system is in your opinion easier to work with than web? I'll answer that: every single one. I haven't ever seen a GUI system more complicated than the HTML/CSS/JS mess. The problem with these is that at first glance they look easy. Doing 'hello world' in HTML is little more than actually typing 'Hello world'. They only become a mess if you try to do something reasonably complex. The end…