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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?

#301

Post by meredydd »

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…

If anything, this understates the problem. A modal web application today takes an absolute minimum of five programming languages and three frameworks:

    * HTML
    * CSS
    * JS
    * A server-side language (eg Python)
    * SQL
And then come the (leaky) abstractions on top of them:

    * A framework to make JS bearable (eg Angular)
    * A framework to make server-side bearable (eg Django)
    * A framework to make CSS bearable (eg Bootstrap)
...and often...

    * A framework to make SQL bearable (eg SQLAlchemy...)
When someone asks me how to learn to build web apps - even someone who can already program a bit - I feel embarrassed explaining to them what a pile of patches the Web is. Even if the languages themselves were saner, this is a monstrous amount of complexity for something that takes one language and a drag'n'drop GUI builder on any other platform.

Trying to fix this, at least for simple apps, is why we built Anvil - https://anvil.works - where everything is in Python, and the GUI is drag'n'drop.

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

#302

Post by arethuza »

gaius wrote: post #255
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…

The web was conceived for hypertext and doesn't do a bad job of it. 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…

NeWS was a lovely thing (and the HyperNeWS environment that was built on it is still one of all time favourite frameworks) but I'm not sure it was directly comparable with HTML+JS+AJAX - it was more like an attempt to do a better X11.

Specifically I don't remember (even, ironically given its name, in HyperNews) there being much support for working with documents or hyperlinks. Mind you - it did do the client side scripting in a wonderful way (at least if PostScript is your thing).

I also seem to remember that it didn't have a particularly strong security model?

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

#303

Post by PUSH_AX »

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…

What is your source for full stack devs being under paid? Or maybe a better question is what do you consider a low wage for a full stack dev?

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

#304

Post by nurettin »

douche wrote: post #284
totalcrepe wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But none of your examples are as cross system portable and "native/normal feel" as writing an app that only works in chrome/chromium. For the decades leading up to this stage cross system GUIs with a few simple library dependencies have been an unachieved "easy" task. Web remains as frustrating as ever because now we need it to work on all non portable browsers even on platforms that supports better ones. Then we wan…

Why is native/normal feel the end-all-be-all of UI systems? I've never quite understood why this is so desirable. Or why the answer seems to be using a shoddy UI system stuffed in a browser frame.

I know a great coder who refuses to start personal projects because he can't find UI libraries which are:

1. Cross-platform across mac-win-linux-android-ios 2. Built for a compiled language such as pascal or C++ 3. Built to use native controls 4. Integrated to registered libraries through an interface like activex 5. Accompanied by a UI builder with design-time and runtime states and component builders. 6. Easily integrated to embedded and server-side SQL.

Sometimes we impose too many constraints on ourselves and never actually start anything. Fear of success?

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

#305

Post by erlich »

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…

It sounds like you are unfamiliar with what modern JS looks like.

> JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever.

Flow has resolved this. It has good investment from Facebook, plenty of adoption, a flexible type system, and you can sprinkle it into existing code as you like.

Also try wallaby.js for instant test running.

> CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage.

See webpack's local css scope. https://github.com/webpack/css-loader.

> HTML - At the heart of it, the foundation is the layout engine and positioning, and it sucks. Flexbox was supposed to bring sanity, but I feel like we're still waiting on it.

Bootstrap or any million css libraries. Just have to wait for Flexbox and we are good.

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

#306

Post by erlich »

meredydd wrote: post #301
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…

If anything, this understates the problem. A modal web application today takes an absolute minimum of five programming languages and three frameworks: * HTML * CSS * JS * A server-side language (eg Python) * SQL And then come the (leaky) abstractions on top of them: * A framework to make JS bearable (eg Angular) * A framework to make server-side bearable (eg Django) * A framework to make CSS bearable (eg Bootstrap) .…

You can literally use Javascript for all of this.

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

#307

Post by drdaeman »

palerdot wrote: post #199

One thing that frustrates me as a front-end dev is the inability to settle down in an ecosystem. Every minute, new tool/framework is coming with a tagline "There is no need to do that like you did with X, Y takes care of it for you". Now the Y might be webpack/React, tomorrow it might me something else. Whoever says React gives them a consistent way of doing things, they would have said the same thing to Backbone/Ang…

It's not just "takes care of it for you". The constraints and assumptions are rarely mentioned, so every other thing is marketed (sometimes by its very owners, sometimes by the community) almost as a miracle that is - unlike its puny predecessors - "just works". Creating an impression things are easy.

My usual story with every new library, toolkit or framework (with the pace JS world's moving, it's new one for every new project) is that I start with "oh, nice" then find myself knee-deep into the its gory intestines, trying figure out how some "magic" works and how to make it do things I want or need it to do. No fun at all.

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

#308

Post by transfire »

I was thinking about this the other day, and one possible way to improve the situation is place a hard separation between web documents from web applications. Currently we try to shove both capabilities into a single paradigm (stack). But the two don't mix well.

What might that look like? Ultimately a much more elegant HTML and simplified CSS for web documents, and quite likely no HTML for web apps -- the Javascript and CSS would merge into a GUI-oriented language.

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

#309

Post by meredydd »

erlich wrote: post #306
meredydd wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, this understates the problem. A modal web application today takes an absolute minimum of five programming languages and three frameworks: * HTML * CSS * JS * A server-side language (eg Python) * SQL And then come the (leaky) abstractions on top of them: * A framework to make JS bearable (eg Angular) * A framework to make server-side bearable (eg Django) * A framework to make CSS bearable (eg Bootstrap) .…

You can literally use Javascript for all of this.

I think you may be misunderstanding my point. If you have to invoke a brand new JS framework with limited uptake and many competitors, and "one of a million" CSS frameworks, in order to declare this problem solved, you are perpetuating the problem.

I don't want to knock these tools too hard, because I can readily believe that (eg) Flow, or Typescript, or whatever we'll all be using next week, is much better than using vanilla JS/CSS. But the fact that we need to know all of Flow, and all of JS, and all of bootstrap, and all of CSS, and we're still not even off the client yet, is exactly why the web is a mess.

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

#310

Post by unclebucknasty »

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…

Indeed. You only left out the proliferation of frameworks du jour, which promised to deliver us from this pain, yet somehow seemed to only amplify it with additional layers of pain.
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