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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?

#451

Post by soundwave106 »

frostymarvelous wrote: post #397
meredydd wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Honestly from the programmer's perspective, it's really just one framework: .NET. I know that .NET abstracts away other frameworks such as the Win32 API, but generally you don't need to know any Win32 API etc. to make a Winforms / WPF / etc. application. With modern "web application" style development, it seems these days you need to know multiple frameworks by default, for better or for worse.

More to the point, .NET was designed from the get go as an enterprise programming language. The web was not designed from the beginning to be a universal application platform, it was designed to display formatted hyperlinked text. Much of the hack-y feel of today's web development -- as well as other aspects such as the rather poor security -- springs from this. If the web were designed from the get-go to be a universal sandboxed application platform, I feel that many things (ranging from the scripting language choice to the DOM model) would have looked a lot different today. Standard, non interactive HTML + CSS (what the web was designed for) certainly doesn't feel too hacky after all.

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

#452

Post by RussianCow »

reitanqild wrote: post #244
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…

Maybe for web applications . There should be something in the license of JavaScript frameworks & libraries to prevent them from being used in blogs, newspapers, trade publications etc :-/ For now all innovations in JS just seems to provide us with even heavier web sites for no real benefits. I feel I'm starting to dislike JS the way I disliked Flash which would be quite a feat.

I think it's completely fine to write a website/blog/newspaper in React, provided you make it isomorphic and keep it as light as possible. Then you get all of the advantages of using React with almost none of the disadvantages.

Of course, nobody does this in practice.

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

#453

Post by ng12 »

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…

> In web programming each of the browsers is slightly different in about a hundred different way

Is this actually true? There are stable, well-tested shims for just about everything out there. CSS strikes me as the only tricky bit, but generally if IE8 users don't get to see an animation I don't really care.

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

#454

Post by vonmoltke »

fsloth wrote: post #139
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.

anyone can come on board and contribute. The corollary to that is that the system uses components that target the lowest common denominator. I'm not sure "anyone can contribute" is a good foundation for any complex technical endeavour - if we are speaking specifically of implementation.

That is not a corollary. While I disagree with the person you are quoting as far as web frameworks are concerned, this is about organization and documentation, not "components that target the lowest common denominator".

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

#455

Post by webXL »

Ah, yes. Another round of grumpy 'ol "why can't I pick/control every aspect of my application environment in the languages I love" developer whining. I swear some people just love saying "hacks on top of hacks". It's the new pejorative of our industry, despite the unparalleled success of what it's intended to dismiss. The hacky-ness we're observing is just an evolutionary byproduct of the "power vacuum" of software decentralization and democratization. Yes, it's inefficient and ugly in some places, but it's an amazingly practical way to distribute software. Just remember your perfect system is only perfect for you or your financials. To state otherwise is sophomoric and unscientific.

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

#456

Post by ng12 »

brlewis wrote: post #445

Lately I've been doing some web development on a fairly long-lived and large code-base Therein lies the problem. I've been doing web development for 22 years and it's only just now getting good. React-like apps (I actually use Mithril) give you a much better understanding of how the app gets into a particular state when compared to jQuery. Web programming on your typical long-lived large code base really is that bad,…

Absolutely. I feel like we're on the cusp of greatness -- between evergreen browsers, flexbox, Typescript, React/Redux, and Webpack my frontend experience has never been better.

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

#457

Post by andrewmcwatters »

The cleanest and most efficient methodologies for web development today are largely unpopular.

The people who know how to write efficient websites, web pages, and web software in general are going to be either the people who have been doing it long enough to remember the old ways, or those who wade through enough of today's bullshit to understand how to do things with less code, and faster rendering times.

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

#458

Post by atoko »

GrinningFool wrote: post #380
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…

I'm coming up blank trying to think of web sites and chrome based apps that provide a look and feel consistent with - and as performant as - what is offered by the native platform.

Visual Studio Code

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

#459

Post by johncolanduoni »

talmand wrote: post #427
johncolanduoni wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can programming with others be the reason, if the OP is saying they find programming for the web with others is much harder than applications development with others?

You cannot assume that the others with web programming is the same others with application programming. The result of one doesn't have to match the other.

Okay, but then how can an observer uninformed on the composition and dynamics of either group conclude that's the real reason it sucks? Unless they're slandering web developers but didn't make that clear?

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

#460

Post by webXL »

niccaluim wrote: post #115
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…

I agree—I loathe frontend development, but React made it tolerable to do for limited periods—but it's still a hack on a teetering Jenga tower of hacks.

loathe? I loathe public speaking and flossing, but these things are good for me, and I'm sure you wouldn't be doing frontend dev if there wasn't a big upside that it made possible.

> teetering Jenga tower of hacks?

How is any programming language not capable of being brittle?

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