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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?

#271
post #191

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/

If GWT doesn't count as hacks built upon hacks, then I don't know what does...

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

#272

Earlier 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

And no doubt this layering will continue... "Look how I easily render this document decription into react primitives".

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

#273

I 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…

Maybe it has changed since I last used GWT, but I remember GWT compiles taking a very long time, steadily increasing with the size of your app. Has this been fixed? I have some not-so-very-fond memories of 2 minute long compile times.

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

#274
post #159

Earlier 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 ?

Maybe?

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

#275
post #257

Earlier 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?

Consider this - the 50-80s era was known not only for putting men on the Moon, military and space agencies were doing a lot of crazy shit like space shuttle that could start and land autonomously (Buran), or capturing small items dropped from orbit mid-flight over the ocean (Corona program, see [0]), precisely targeting cruise missiles [1], etc. - all without the benefits of microcomputers we know today, without high-level languages, cheap computing devices, etc.

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?

#276

Earlier 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?

You'd be amazed what people that barely know any programming can do with laravel. It's scary actually.

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

#277

Earlier 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/…

Qt is easy with Qt Designer and looks professional.

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

#278
post #134

It'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.

when I glance over your words I hear the sentence you've written in my mind's ear - even though tongues were never made for speaking - we LITERALLY use an organ that is for chewing and swallowing food, and using it to talk with, which we can only do while our mouth isn't doing what it's actually built for, which is to chew and swallow!

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?

#279

Earlier 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 dillema is that you need to understand the low-level aspects in order to understand the abstractions.

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?

#280

Earlier 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/…

> But Tcl/Tk is the most easiest GUI toolkit ever, too bad the resulting UI does not look professional.

ttk does

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