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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?

#411

Post by avisples »

Application development on a web platform meant for documents is inherently a hack, but the evolution of the ecosystem is reaching a point where many of the hacks are quite good. There's just a lot of inertia from existing codebases and developers used to the previous ways of doing things, and FUD from places like Google with Angular and Polymer.

Web development seems to be particularly suited to the model of building a hack, then pouring concrete over it, then building the next layer of hacks on top.

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

#412

Post by zeveb »

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…

> Node allows you to run isomorphic JavaScript that runs on both your server side and client side

But then you're writing JavaScript on the server side, and I think I'd rather shove live weasels down my trousers than write one line more of JavaScript than I absolutely must.

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

#413

Post by contingencies »

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 forgot something for the mobile strategy, something for web stats, something for monitoring, something for source control, something for issue management, something which shall remain nameless for team communication that breaks store and forward and interrupts you constantly, something for 'social', etc. Oh wait, and your infrastructure automation solution. And your third party DDoS protection/web cache integration... and all of this is TRULY NORMAL. We are underpaid.

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

#414

Post by d_rezzer »

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…

Isomorphic Javascript. A shitty idea with a fancy hipster name. Ohh but it minimizes the context switching and congnitive overhead of blah blah fucking blah shut the fuck up. Javascript was a language miraculously invented in 10 days by the great Brendan Eich and 20+ years later it's still basically the same hack of a language.

ORM. an even worse idea. Let's make data access slow except for the most brain dead example code while removing the important aspect of understanding the basics of a database. Awesome.

Webpack. Only seems like a good idea because every thing else before it is so much shittier. It's still an over-complicated hack.

Forcing JS on the server so that front end people can write crappy backend end code with a shitty SQL abstraction layer! It still doesn't solve the problem that the web is a system of hacks. It only adds to it! The backend was the one fucking place that was doing just fine without javascript.

Christ, if that's the best choice then we're all fucked. /rant

Who knows, maybe WebAssembly will turn out to be something.

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

#415

Post by astrodust »

wvenable wrote: post #163
astrodust wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages, we built entire operating systems in C which is notorious for quickly becoming unreadable, and we've somehow built an entire world of content using HTML and CSS. JavaScript is just a language, and while improvements to it are being made constantly, the biggest obstacle is not the language, nor the way browser makers support it, but the absurdly slow p…

> We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages The computer for the Apollo missions had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz. My wrist-watch is many orders of magnitude more powerful than that. But the programming effort that went into it was huge (literally: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*qJnPOGdtk1q7dq17tx... ). If we were stilling coding things that way, we might…

JavaScript, unlike C#, is intended to be easily implementable. The team that built Mono had a mountain of work to do before that was a useful product.

Meanwhile a college-level student can probably write a JavaScript interpreter that passes all the specification tests in six months. It won't be fast, but it will work.

Yes, there are better languages, but stop freaking out. If you're such a fan of C# then work on getting C# to transpile down to JavaScript, asm.js, or WebAssembly and ignore the ugly parts of the JavaScript language entirely.

JavaScript is both amazing and ridiculous all at once. Deal with it.

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

#416

Post by astrodust »

circlefavshape wrote: post #231
wvenable wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages The computer for the Apollo missions had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz. My wrist-watch is many orders of magnitude more powerful than that. But the programming effort that went into it was huge (literally: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*qJnPOGdtk1q7dq17tx... ). If we were stilling coding things that way, we might…

> 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 Erm ... we actually don't have self-driving cars

Google and Tesla beg to differ.

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

#417

Post by zeveb »

emodendroket wrote: post #394
tempodox wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's kinda the problem, though: Unix really is worse than VMS or Lisp Machines, when measured on certain axes (and I love Unix!); rather than fix it, or replace it with something even better (e.g. Plan 9), the computing industry has instead decided that POSIX is the end-all, be-all of OS evolution, and collectively ignored all the ways that life could be better.

It's very difficult, as I get older, not to survey the computing landscape and be profoundly bitter about our absolute and utter refusal to use better tools in order to achieve greatness. It's like people choosing to eat McDonald's when they could have an affordable home-cooked meal prepared for them, for essentially the same cost.

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

#419

Post by Bartweiss »

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) .…

"A framework to make Foo bearable" seems like a huge portion of the issue here. We have a bunch of tools so hideously unfriendly to everyday development that we have to pile framework on framework in an attempt to actually get something built in a timely manner.

And the result, of course, is an unmaintainable stack of dependencies and inefficiencies. Any time anything changes, anywhere, the whole thing falls apart again.

Security folks talk about "threat surface" - I wonder if it would help to have an idea of "development surface" to signify the risks of bloat and dependency chaining?

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

#420

Post by pjmlp »

Yes.

It should have stayed as hypertext documents, just plain HTML + CSS, with everything else just covered by network protocols.

Instead it is a pile of hacks of trying to bend HTML + CSS + JavaScript to behave like native applications, but not quite, because the browser is in control of the L&F leading to yet another pile of hacks to make the already existing hacks to behave the same across all required browsers (including different versions of the same browser).

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