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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?

#601
post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you even read what I said? "anywhere from UI down to the bare metal" I've done a lot of frontend work, including iOS, Android, MFC, OpenGL, Qt (with and without QML), etc... My UI work has often been praised, and I've salvaged many failing projects, including fixing completely broken UIs. I'm not sure where you got "not having to keep up with new UI technologies" or "downplaying the skills of front end programmer…

I'm curious, have you looked at Meteor? https://wiki.dandascalescu.com/essays/why_meteor

No. I have no control over the software stack for this project, so for now I'm focusing on what they use first.

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

#602

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you! So many people here blaming the tools for bad software when people have been using horrible tools to write good software for decades. I think one major part of why React + Redux are successful is because they sort of force you into a way of thinking that results in a better creative process and ends with better code.

>they sort of force you into a way of thinking that results in a better creative process and ends with better code. That's the first time I've heard that about React, can you elaborate?

Maybe it's just me, but when I'm working in React it really forces me into a more "modular" way of writing things. Sure, I'll write something as a huge file that's a couple of hundred lines but React makes it _incredibly_ easy to step back and refactor to start pulling things out into modules.

I guess it doesn't quite _force_ you into thinking a certain way, it just encourages writing code in a more modular and reusable way. Refactoring is easy enough to say "yes, I should pull that out into its own component" vs "it would take me a day to pull this out into its own component".

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

#603
post #594
post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows might have its own baggage, but with Windows 8 they have brought the original design of .NET from the ashes and assuming the current path is to maintain, those of us that like Windows will have a nice OO ABI alongside safe languages compiling to native code. All the mobile OS relevant APIs don't have anything to do with UNIX. All the Objective-C, Swift, Java, JavaScript, C++ APIs available on those OSes don't…

>alongside safe languages compiling to native code. Which ones do you mean? F#, ..., ??? >All the Objective-C, Swift, Java, JavaScript, C++ APIs available on those OSes don't depend on being implemented on top of an UNIX kernel. Interesting point.

I mean .NET Native and the lessons of Midori finding their way into C# 7+ and C++/CX, alongside with emphasis on the C++ Core Guidelines, which started at Microsoft before Bjarne got involved.

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

#604
post #500

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the…

Or move to the back-end, where things move at a more survivable pace. Here's the dirty secret, too: for the most part, the work you do there is actually easier than front-end work, since you have better tooling and frameworks that don't shift under you like quicksand. And building a CRUD backend to a REST API might be a tad tedious, but it's a whole lot less fiddly than mucking about with CSS and trying to make web U…

Honestly I would if not for the fact that backend interviews always test Crack the Coding Interview style data structures & algorithms knowledge, which I have no interest in spending my limited spare time preparing for (I didn't major in CS).

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

#605
Web developer is not ideal. That is more of a people issue than it is a technology issue.

Whatever our collective gripes about JavaScript, HTML, and CSS, we all know how to use them. We know how to handle cross-browser compatibility and different screen sizes. What we need to do a better job at -- and I think this is the root of the problem you're describing -- is pushing back on businesses wanting to ship features too quickly.

We've all been at places where no one values good work on the client. The C-levels want to get things out the door as quickly as possible. They complain that our work has bugs and we tell them "Well that's what you get for telling me I had 3 days."

Because of this heat, front-end engineers rarely engineer their software. As you put it, they hack it together on top of libraries that have been hacked together by others. The solution is to take the time required to do things correctly. That means testing. That means not shipping features so we have time to refactor and upgrade frameworks. That means paying attention to performance and developing tools for debugging errors in production. If we want web development to get better, these things can't be afterthoughts. They must be considered before we say something is "done" and ship it to production.

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

#606

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything, this understates the problem. A modal web application today takes an absolute minimum of five programming languages If you're going to call HTML a programming language than when you talk about server-side work you must include XML as a programming language (I see markup far different, more simplistic than a programming language). CSS is simply properties applied to the same markup but I digress; I coul…

> If you're going to call HTML a programming language [...] CSS is simply properties [...] Whatever they are, they're complicated . They've each got syntax, enormous sets of tags/keywords to learn, and quirks coming out of their ears. There are even people down-thread pointing out that HTML+CSS is Turing complete. > God, you don't need any of these [abstractions] With respect, almost everyone else in this thread seem…

> Whatever they are, they're complicated. They've each got syntax, enormous sets of tags/keywords to learn, and quirks coming out of their ears. There are even people down-thread pointing out that HTML+CSS is Turing complete.

Just like with C++ you don't have to use all of those fancy features. You can use CSS as simply properties on many web applications. They can be as complex or as simple as need be.

> With respect, almost everyone else in this thread seems to disagree with you. I'd challenge you to find a major public-facing web app written with - let's be charitable - fewer than two of the frameworks on that list.

I actually work on one during my day job that is used by millions of people :). Though in fairness we're transitioning to a single framework rather than the hand rolled one.

Frameworks have their use cases. Native also has its. For whatever reason people today are taught they have to use at least one otherwise they're throwing their time away or they can't interoperate with others which are both not true.

I'm beginning to think I need to work on a web series around creating web applications without frameworks.

> I do tend to agree with you on the merits of SQL, though. We built a very simple database for Anvil, that doesn't do anything except store and retrieve tuples of data, and for anything more complicated, we say "great, SQL is over there" :-P

This seems to be the exact type of scenario I've seen played out countless times in my career but the easy start of ORMs sucks people in every time (though I honestly think starting without an ORM is also super simple but I think many of them abstract away schemas which, if you just want to jump into something, can seemingly get in the way.

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

#607
post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that "ironic?" I don't see how it disproves his point.

Firefox was a significant improvement over the status quo in browsers when it was released.

Who's to say that Netscape wouldn't have been just as good, or even better, if they'd devoted all that time to working on it instead?

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

#608
post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has its own legacy baggage and I wonder about the proposition that the mobile OSes' Unix underpinnings aren't relevant. Depends on what you're doing, I'd think.

Windows might have its own baggage, but with Windows 8 they have brought the original design of .NET from the ashes and assuming the current path is to maintain, those of us that like Windows will have a nice OO ABI alongside safe languages compiling to native code. All the mobile OS relevant APIs don't have anything to do with UNIX. All the Objective-C, Swift, Java, JavaScript, C++ APIs available on those OSes don't…

I mean, I like C#, but that stuff seems to me to be sitting several levels above the OS anyway.

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

#609
My view is exactly contrary coming from system development experience. I cannot think why would anybody handcraft MVCish frameworks in js, jquery etc. I have programmed MVCish UI frameworks and middleware in c for AV products 10 years ago. And as a UI dev u want a working MVC. Now I'm using angular and totally feel at home. I think sans these new frameworks web must have been really dark place.

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

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And no doubt this layering will continue... "Look how I easily render this document decription into react primitives".

Yes, we write web browsers in JS, simply because our browsers let us write nested browsers in JS. I'm only waiting for an OS written in JS so we can use its editor to write an OS in JS.

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

also

http://www.windows93.net

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