Earlier 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.
The first two paint points are perfectly solved by GWT[1]. But for some reason it isn't picked up by web community, even though you can still make really cool web apps with it. 1. http://www.gwtproject.org/
Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
271–280 of 688 posts
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree—I loathe frontend development, but React made it tolerable to do for limited periods—but it's still a hack on a teetering Jenga tower of hacks.
The really funny thing is that the OS runs a simple event + render loop, then the browser implements a wildly complex stateful/declarative structure on top of that (the DOM), then React apps create a simple event + render loop again, this time with special diffing logic to update the underlying DOM as little as possible
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#273I use GWT for anything serious. It's not what the cool kids like, but it feels super-solid compared to the flake that I experience when working with a heap'o JS libs. And debugging it years later is awesome (barring a couple gotchas) because it makes sense. I've always thought GWT has a crazy learning curve until we did a project in Angular2 on top of ASP.net core, using a customer-selected template that required ton…
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#274Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO react is a big step backwards. Adding an abstraction layer almost never produces a better result, it just makes things more complicated.
Abstraction is the foundation of modern modern computer science. I mean would you prefer writing in assembler rather the a higher level programming language ?
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#275Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
> 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. More info please?
It seems that back then people were more focused on making things actually work instead of making them look sexy and easy to sell.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corona_(satellite)#Recovery
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inertial_navigation_system#His...
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> laravel but not not enough php I haven't used those much, just glanced over a system written in them. But that sounds bizarre: I thought the whole point of PHP was to be bland and mainstream. If you know how to program at all, then what is there to learn about it?
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/…
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#278It's been ruined by a generation of developers who believe it a good idea to build stateful applications on top of an inherently stateless document-centric infrastructure.
And that's what we choose to imitate to communicate with each other? A hack on top of a hack!!! Why should I write something that makes you hear in your mind's ear my chewing organ fashioning air.
Wouldn't it be a lot better to ACTUALLY communicate with you some kind of direct meaning, rather than trying to jury-rig an entire civilization on top of imitations of flapping meat? Plus, the spelling is linked with the meaning anyway, if I had misspelled "meat" as "meet" just now you would have been confused! So why not take away the part where you're hearing this in your mind's ear, and just communicate!
blah blah blah. In other words, it doesn't matter what "INFRASTRUCTURE IS". A two year old's infrastructure for language is a mouth organ that they also eat with. It's OBVIOUSLY a design wart. This is completely obvious.
It also works. Gmail is fine and fun to use, even though as I type a to: field it predicts the address. Not something a stateless document-centric infrastructure was designed to do.
Oh well. It's called progress and civilization. It doesn't matter if it starts with flapping a chewing organ, and then imitating a poor abstraction of that through writing. who cares!
Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
Abstraction is the foundation of modern modern computer science. I mean would you prefer writing in assembler rather the a higher level programming language ?
Maybe?
The problem that haunts me -and a lot of other hackers I presume- is that we have this urge to understand every little detail of the systems we design. Nothing is good enough.
The other problem is that by using arcane and primitive tools we limit ourselves in the ability of producing real work. As with everything in life, we need to make the distinction between tinkering and doing real work.
If all we do is tinker, very little gets done :).
PS: I just read the satire Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal [1], my comment could be highly biased from that.
[1]: http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/real.programmers.html Bonus: Here is a little bookmarklet I wrote for styling unstyled html pages for easier reading.
javascript:(function() { document.body.style.maxWidth='700px'; document.body.style.margin='0 auto'; document.body.style.lineHeight='1.5'; document.body.style.fontSize='20px';} )();Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/…
ttk does