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

651–660 of 688 posts

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

#651

Post by IanCal »

flushandforget wrote: post #196
IanCal wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you need any new APIs for that? Sounds like you just need a shared template.

I appreciate that a web shop could want for more than basic html representation. Although arguably there is something already like this: http://schema.org/Product . A search API? But yes, good templates go a long way.

Hmm, interesting ideas. I particularly like the search one, it'd be interesting if I could generate a search index that conforms to a particular spec and just store it as a static file which your browser can grab.

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

#653

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #631
soundwave106 wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, .NE…

I'm not sure what sre you talking about, if you program with c# and wpf, you need to know xaml and their weird syntax, you need to know prism which is a framework to properly organize your UI, you need to know a server language like asp. Net if you want to deal with backend code. Prefer winform? That's much like react without using jsx, and if yoy want fancy graphics is much more complicated than html. Now sure you c…

True it's a single framework, my point was only the size... I mean, the amount of knowledge you need is probably the same you need to work with web stack.

Also, if you need a backend even if it's written in same language, is still a different thing, much like node and web javascript. Choosing a different backend languages usually is made because of the advantages it brings (Rails for prototyping, Erlang or Elixir for stability, Java for performance and so on)

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

#654

Post by jinfiesto »

dcherman wrote: post #481
jinfiesto wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Similar situation here, but it depends on your level of experience as well. Can you structure an AngularJS app so that it's (relatively) sane? Absolutely. It's also very easy to make a mess of things so that it's hard to reason about control flow; frameworks that are doing a better job of embracing unidirectional dataflow definitely help with this, but I don't blame Angular as it predates the wide adoption of that as…

Oh totally agree. There are some really nasty bugs we've had to deal with because of the lack of strictly controlled data flow. Still not all that bad.

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

#655

Post by jinfiesto »

clentaminator wrote: post #444
jinfiesto wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Over half a million lines of Angular? May I ask what the application is and how that's broken down language-wise?

Angular front-end, C# "middleware" to Java services layer. I was actually guessing when I tossed off 500k. I went and looked and it's actually closer to 250. Still pretty big though.

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

#656

Post by jinfiesto »

alexbanks wrote: post #532
jinfiesto wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Have you ever worked with a JS framework that wasn't angular? Ember, React, Vue, etc?

I've used react personally and like it rather well. I think it's much better than Angular, but I still don't think that Angular represents the 9th circle of hell, as seems to be implied above.

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

#657

Post by rpeden »

bbcbasic wrote: post #155
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

You can create controls in WIN32 or MFC that would simply be impossible in HTML for a reasonable level of performance

True, but it should be possible to create high performance UI controls inside an HTML5 canvas element.

With canvas, every browser has hardware accelerated immediate mode rendering that could be used to create UI toolkits. Looking around the web, there are some attempts to make this happen, but none of them seem to be hugely popular.

Last time I looked into this (years ago), a big blocker was that nothing inside a canvas element is visible to accessibility APIs, so UI rendered in a canvas would be invisible to people using assistive technologies like screen readers.

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

#658

Post by diyfund »

sgt wrote: post #273
richardw wrote: post #135

I use GWT for anything serious. It's not what the cool kids like, but it feels super-solid compared to the flake that I experience when working with a heap'o JS libs. And debugging it years later is awesome (barring a couple gotchas) because it makes sense. I've always thought GWT has a crazy learning curve until we did a project in Angular2 on top of ASP.net core, using a customer-selected template that required ton…

Maybe it has changed since I last used GWT, but I remember GWT compiles taking a very long time, steadily increasing with the size of your app. Has this been fixed? I have some not-so-very-fond memories of 2 minute long compile times.

It has changed a ton. there is now super dev mode (I don't know when you last used it), so it no longer requires that java applet plugin. Also after the first compile, you only need to recompile changes. I agree with others after going to Angular, etc, I continually scratch my head on why GWT is not universally used more.

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

#659

Post by diyfund »

prohor wrote: post #191
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.

The first two paint points are perfectly solved by GWT[1]. But for some reason it isn't picked up by web community, even though you can still make really cool web apps with it. 1. http://www.gwtproject.org/

GWT has been continually approved upon. Compilation is super fast now, and developing is a breeze with super dev mode. You can even debug your Java (precompiled) code within chrome. as a GWT user, I don't have to worry about all those things that trouble Javascript developers. Refactoring is easy as it is just Java.

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

#660

Post by pjmlp »

emodendroket wrote: post #639
pjmlp wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because most likely you never spent time using or learning the technical details of the OS developed at Burroughs, Xerox, ETHZ, DEC, MSR,.... Also I didn't mention just C#.

I just mentioned it because I'm familiar with it and I am excited about the .NET Core stuff letting you use it in more places.

Ah, then you should check Joe Duffy posts about Midori and his talk at InfoQ.
Post reply on HN