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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?

#351

Post by aminok »

OliverJones wrote: post #299
OliverJones wrote: post #294

With respect, at least part of your frustration comes from the "curse of the installed base." Long-lived software with real users in any language running on any platform becomes complex, and picks up strange-looking appendages. Sometimes those appendages are nasty hacks, and sometimes they are well-built. But they are, in most cases, necessary to the proper functioning of the software, and responsible for its success…

Joel Spolsky (FogBugz, Stack Overflow, Trello) wrote this article half a generation ago. It's about not giving in to the temptation to start from scratch when your software is ugly. http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

Ironically Firefox was produced as a result of the code created from the Netscape rewrite he criticised.

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

#352

Post by crgwbr »

aabajian wrote: post #348

Some people have already mentioned GWT. I think this is the best evidence that yes, web programming is extremely hackish. GWT is an entire framework to write web applications in a strongly typed language - it compiles Java down to JavaScript. GWT was made in an era that we're just now escaping: the era of browser quirks. IMHO, GWT didn't take off because of one reason: Its target demographic, web developers, do not h…

This frustrates me every day. The CodeAcadamy approach is a good start—it gets people interested and involved very quickly—but it's not enough on its own. Basics of architecture and design absolutely need to be understood to be a good developer. At the very least they should emphasis the importance of software design and being mentored by more senior devs. As it is now, it seems many people leave those academy's thinking that they know everything they need to or that "coding" is actually what software development is all about. It's not. Coding is a tool of implementation. Design is our real job.

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

#354

Post by emodendroket »

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.

So I assume you write all your programs without the benefit of an operating system then.

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

#355

Post by emodendroket »

pixie_ wrote: post #58
captainbenises wrote: post #50

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.

What's sad is the zillions of hours wasted by engineers on an inherently flawed stack. What's sad is how ridiculously complicated it is to create and manage relatively simple UIs. What's sad is an entire generations of programmers growing up and thinking this is normal. Programming is supposed to be about creating platforms for each other so we can continue solving higher (and higher) level problems. This web crap ha…

You could say the same thing about Unix but nobody seems to be calling for that to die.

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

#358

Post by tempodox »

9point6 wrote: post #312
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) .…

I think your use of "minimum" is wrong here. If you're using React running on Node and Webpack as your task-runner you just need Javascript and that's it. Node allows you to run isomorphic JavaScript that runs on both your server side and client side (to ensure you don't end up with the Angular-style skeleton pages coming from the server), You can pick a nice ORM (like sequelize) to abstract away SQL, and Webpack all…

> ... to abstract away SQL

SQL already is an abstraction, why would I want to abstract it away? Why not abstract JS away instead?

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

#359

Post by emodendroket »

millstone wrote: post #249
ivanhoe wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance yes, you can't compete with that one because browsers don't let you control the low-level stuff. But the speed of development and the ease of doing complex layouts with css is hard to match (when you master css enough, of course), specially if you're trying to do UI from the code directly, without IDE helpers and visual builders.

The speed of development is very fast for the first 75%, and comes to a screeching halt for the last 25%. The web stack has no good way to answer basic questions like "does the user have arrow keys" or "what is the current mouse position." That's the point that you start to layer on the "hacks on hacks" that OP references.

Can any system tell you that the user has arrow keys?

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

#360

Post by goatlover »

Klathmon wrote: post #295
kowdermeister wrote: post #208

> 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…

I don't get it either. Nothing in history has come close to the current web platform. There has never been a language/runtime/framework/system where you could have this much flexibility, that "installs" in literally seconds (from a cold cache, never having been there in the first place), and works on every platform under the sun (not just linux/windows, but mac, android, ios, windows phone, ubuntu phone, my TV, my ca…

I think it's when you get beyond the niceties of the delivery system that is the web to making complex apps compared to other environments is where the complaints stem from. Also, the JVM, Flash and Silverlight would have have all been able to provide a similarly nice delivery system across all platforms if they had been the equivalent of the web. But instead, they were used as plugins.
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