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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?

#391

Post by eqmvii »

troels wrote: post #331

My theory is that everything is a mess, once you get close enough to notice. Every profession that appears as if its practitioners know what they're doing really is a shocking hodge-podge of temporary solutions, strung together by proverbial duct tape. From doctors to flight engineers to anything else that you thought was running like a smooth machine. Programming is no different.

This was my experience in corporate law. Long (and critically important) documents were cobbled together by small teams of brutally sleep deprived kids. The end result was a tangled webs of documents, defined terms, and clauses that all theoretically referenced one another properly without violating any laws or producing unintended results.

It was like trying to write code without being able to compile or run it. The only way it "worked" was a massive framework of tricks and hacks and legal duct tape, and even then errors were common.

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

#392

Post by erlich »

meredydd wrote: post #309
erlich wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usi…

My thinking on this is that everytime someone has tried to unify these tools it hasn't gone well. Think about Google Web Toolkit, or Microsoft's XAML.

It's better to have everyone experimenting, blogging and doing their thing, and the best ideas rise to the top.

2015 was probably the worst time to be a web developer on a greenfield project. You had Angular deprecation and the Flux wars, and Babel 5 -> 6 migration.

I do agree its a mess and a freaking nightmare most of the time. I've spent hundreds of hours setting my toolchain up and if something like webpack were to lose favour, I would be devastated.

I think we are in need of a Rails for modern JS. My prediction is that we will see this emerge soon. A shift from project-templates to simple, generic plugin system. Webpack seems quite strong as the packager. Angular 2 CLI just migrated to webpack from Brocolli for example. React and Redux are standard now. And npm is the package manager of choice.

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

#393

Post by GrinningFool »

GrinningFool wrote: post #378
raverbashing wrote: post #140

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've built native ui applications under win32 (API itself, MFC, ATL), os/2, x11, qt, gtk and more. Developing UI for each of these was a thing I found much more straightforward than web applications over the last decade. The initial learning curve was higher, but once you had that knowledge it remained correct and relevant for years- sometimes decades. And your application UX was faster and smoother. The minor lag be…

I should add what I see as the one up side - the ability to test UIs written on modern platforms in an automated way is vastly improved.

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

#394

Post by emodendroket »

tempodox wrote: post #381
emodendroket wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> nobody seems to be calling for that to die. There is the Unix Hater's Handbook ( http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf ). However, Unix doesn't suck half as bad as web development. Web development keeps a lot of problems alive that have been overcome in Unix development and everywhere else.

Yeah, there is, but it's ancient and that sort of carping seems to be a distant memory.

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

#395

Post by jinfiesto »

gr3yh47 wrote: post #343
chx wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That leads to the MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) and I am not so sure whether that's where the rosy future is.

it's not, because Mongo has huge issues [0] and angular is generally a giant mess and a pain in the ass [1] [0] http://blog.runnable.com/post/149000201856/think-before-you-... [1] if you haven't used angular, ask someone who has

I work on a large (500000+ lines) of Angular daily. Maybe this represents some sort of Stockholm syndrome, but it's really not that bad?

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

#396

Post by erlich »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #342
chx wrote: post #311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That leads to the MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) and I am not so sure whether that's where the rosy future is.

Exactly. Intuitively, I don't think the problem can be solved with the same "let's glue together a bunch of stuff and call it a stack" approach that got us here.

I'm hoping it is. We have ended up with really good tools compared to what we had before. Think about using commonjs requires, compared to the craziness of the Rails asset pipeline and sprockets, or manually specifying js files.

We just need to standardize the glue...

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

#397

Post by frostymarvelous »

meredydd wrote: post #315
9point6 wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I still count three frameworks :) (React, Node, sequelize, I'm not counting webpack but I probably would if it's anything like as much of a pain as Grunt or Gulp or... And as you say, this is the lightweight version.)

And how many frameworks can you count in a win forms or wpf application?

If we're going to count frameworks, there'd be no end it. As I once said, programming is abstraction upon abstraction.

Like an onion, a Russia doll or better still, inception.

Frameworks abound everywhere, at every layer. You just need to adjust your scope as you see fit, to find them.

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

#398

Post by kowdermeister »

meshko wrote: post #37

It is scary how most commenters here are missing the point. No, not all programming sucks. Yes, web programming sucks more than other things. No, it doesn't have to be like this. Yes, even web programming was better 10 years ago. No, I don't know how to fix it. Neither do I know exactly where we took the wrong turn. One of my theories is this: had Sun not sued Microsoft over their extensions in JVM, MS would have kep…

> Yes, even web programming was better 10 years ago

You are not serious :) Don't you remember IE5/6? Loads if inconsistent implementations and flash that supposed to fix all pain?

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

#399

Post by keithb- »

hmans wrote: 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.

Just a nitpick, but stateless/stateful are descriptions applied to protocols not applications. The mechanics of persisting application context between request/response events might be contentious and varied in web applications, but just because the protocol is stateless doesn't necessarily mean that your application is more difficult to maintain.

I agree with your point, but it is begging the question: are we overlooking the value/potential that a generation of developers found in the stateless nature of HTTP?

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

#400

Post by kowdermeister »

314 wrote: post #207
segmondy wrote: post #127

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…

I maintain a web-application by myself: I choose the platform and exactly which bits I wrote myself, and whre I pulled things in from other sources. It still sucks. The target environment is undefined. In most programming problems we start with with a well defined target environment (or at least the language semantics are well defined and we quickly learn where the platform-specific hacks are). In web programming eac…

> The target environment is undefined.

Nope, that target environment is a responsive, standards compliant software. Code for the standards and the displaying devices will catch up.

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