Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 688 posts

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

#401

Post by frostymarvelous »

tempodox wrote: post #358
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…

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

Well, everything is an abstraction, down to zeroes and ones.

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

#403

Post by dspillett »

MustardTiger wrote: post #318
dspillett wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> why I've always been puzzled by the urge to move more and more logic to the frontend. This is usually about a mix of scalability, responsiveness, and partition resilience; with the level of importance of those being dependent on the application. * Scale: if the client makes fewer request of the server(s) then you have reduced server and network requirements. As server resources get cheaper (and the cheap options mo…

>This is usually about a mix of scalability, responsiveness, and partition resilience; with the level of importance of those being dependent on the application. I have never seen anyone make those arguments. I've seen people vaguely reference them in a hand wavey "I don't understand this but google facebook I am right" way. But that's as close as it gets. It is usually about following trends.

In some cases it may be about following trends.

But this particular trend started from an effort to push things client-side for good reasons that are vital, or at least useful, to many projects. It being trendy doesn't necessarily mean it is wrong! Don't be so fast to dismiss something because to don't immediately see/understand the benefit.

There is often some confusion between "mobile first" and "offline first" - the two overlap considerably but being a good mobile app doesn't absolutely necessitate being able to operate offline and offline capability does not require or imply an app will be usable on mobile (it may be to large and/or fiddly in terms of UI on a small screen, not practical to use in a touch manner, or too demanding of CPU and memory resources). Some of the hand-wavey-ness is people who know they are driving for "mobile first" and think that means they have to drive for "offline first" without really understanding the benefits & implications of that.

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

#404

Post by altern8tif »

some-guy wrote: post #243
altern8tif wrote: post #226

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that while the developer experience is getting more complex, the user experience is getting better and better. That, in my opinion, makes all the messiness worth it. I'm not saying that there's nothing wrong with the state of web dev now, but it's not without reason that we are here today. Remember the days of table-based layouts in HTML? shudder

I don't think the complexity of the web caused better UX. I think we just happen to care a lot more about UX in 2016 than we used to in this industry.

Sure, but caring a lot about UX necessitates pushing the envelope when it comes to web tech.

If we were satisfied with our HTML tables, we would never have moved on to jQuery, HTML5/CSS3, React etc.

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

#405

Post by StrangeOrange »

hackerboos wrote: post #286
jordanlev wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS is not impossible to manage if you keep things modular and avoid specificity issue (basically, use something like BEM and pretend the "C" in "CSS" doesn't exist). re: HTML: layout and positioning is the domain of CSS, not HTML. HTML's purpose is to provide semantic structure to the content and non-semantic styling hooks (divs and classes) for CSS. It's true that layout has sucked for a long time (more accurately,…

We use BEM and Sass at work and our CSS is still an unwieldy mess.

Ever thought you're just not that great at writing it?

I tend to use a combination of BEM component based rules and AtomicCSS inspired class-style, and my Sass tends to be pretty damn clean.

I think a lot of the problems with "web dev sucks!!12" mentality is that people come to it thinking that it should be easy, but it really isn't, and it's not going to be anytime soon.

Trying to build applications for multiple browsers to be used on multiple devices on multiple OSs that look good and work well isn't an easy job.

No, it's not perfect, but if you pay enough attention and do things right then it's quite a nice experience.

If your CSS sucks, maybe don't blame your tools before you blame yourself.

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

#406

Post by simonhamp »

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…

When you build a better language, server platform, viewer application, development tools and ecosystem that can create, render, transmit and load dynamic user interfaces over the wire - even rapidly on limited bandwidth connections - please let me know ;)

I'm not saying it's the best thing ever, but we're not doing too badly all things considered.

The web is still young. Let's work together to make it what we want it to be - what it should be - instead of moaning about what it isn't.

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

#408

Post by jordanlev »

GrinningFool wrote: post #390
jordanlev wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

CSS is not impossible to manage if you keep things modular and avoid specificity issue (basically, use something like BEM and pretend the "C" in "CSS" doesn't exist). re: HTML: layout and positioning is the domain of CSS, not HTML. HTML's purpose is to provide semantic structure to the content and non-semantic styling hooks (divs and classes) for CSS. It's true that layout has sucked for a long time (more accurately,…

The thing that makes me dubious of this claim is the number of years for which we've been reading variants of, "the upcoming (grid/flex/canvas/css3/html5/ecma spec/etc) will make things much better".

I was talking specifically about layout (because the comment I was replying to mentioned layout specifically). I don't think any of the things you listed promised to improve layout, except flexbox and grid. And flexbox does improve one-dimensional layouts -- vastly so. I suppose the jury is still out on the grid spec, but it is in the process of being implemented by all the browsers and you can actually play around with it (behind feature flags).

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

#409

Post by marpstar »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #370
rtpg wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really square pegs for round holes? I don't think that the web as a mechanism for distributing applications would look much different even if it hadn't gone through the HTML stage. If not JS, it would have been Java applets. If not HTML, then some weird XML layout schema. There might have been a time where the web as a platform for applications was beyond silly, but this is not htat time. The platform is decide…

It's, but not by design.

...and? There are plenty of things that were "designed" for one thing and used for something totally different.

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

#410

Post by eksemplar »

There isn't much of a difference between web and application development in my eyes. Both should be build on a service backend, with a common architecture making different systems work together through APIs or MOX-agents.

In that world the "view" part of your system might as well be web based. Making front end look and feel good, is terrible in everything anyway.

Post reply on HN