131–140 of 339 posts
It would be interesting to see the graph of the careers stages with happiness overlaid.
Source: http://www.bennorthrop.com/Essays/2016/career-stages-program...
I get where the guy is coming from, I'm right there as an old guy. On the other hand, I think there is a bit too much fatalism in the article. Sometimes the kids are being stupid, and they need to be told so. The vast majority of web apps could be built in 1/10th the code with server-side rendering and intercooler.js. All this client-side crap is wasted when you are trying to get text from computer A into data-store…
I can vouch for Intercooler. We're rewriting large parts of our app (used to be a complex flux beast) and it is now way more maintainable and indeed around 1/10th the code. We now keep most of our app state within the server, instead of spread throughout client and server. Of course, it is not end-all-be-all: it solves simple interface problems, those that should't require 200mb of JS dependencies to solve. Once the…
But to further your point, intercooler is just a tool rather than an ideological shift in how we execute web applications.
The reason I see the whole front end JS infrastructure mess as unintuitive is precisely because my needs are served with back end code and a sprinkle of Ajax.
If I were building a complex SPA like an in browser photoshop, I might see more use in the complex ecosystem and try and tackle it. But, from a not-so-outside view it still looks like a mess.
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What's the last truly new thing you can think of? I'm interested because I am young (22) but have studied programming language paradigms and history and I also agree a lot of "new" stuff is old.
New stuff: Machine learning that works. Rust's borrow checker. 3D SLAM that works. Voice input that works. Lots of image processing stuff. Machines with large numbers of non-shared-memory CPUs that are actually useful. Doing non-graphics things in GPUs. The webcrap world is mostly churn, not improvement. Each "framework" puts developers on a treadmill keeping up with the changes. This provides steady employment for m…
Just a week ago I made the startling discovery that FB's mobile web app it's actually worse than a lot of websites I used to visit at the end of the 90s - early 2000 on Netscape 4.
Case in point, their textarea thingie for when you're writing a message to someone: after each letter push there is an actual, very discernible lag until said letter shows up in the textarea field. So much so that there are cases when I'd finished typing an entire word before it shows up on my mobile phone's screen. I suspect it's something related to the JS framework they're using (a plain HTML textarea field with no JS attached works just fine on other websites, like on HN), maybe they're doing an AJAX call after each key-press (?!), I wouldn't know. Whatever it is, it makes their web messenger almost unusable. (if it matters, I'm using an iPhone4).
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I've never built a web application of any description. As a user, what are the improvements that I should be looking for that have been introduced over the past 10 years? It was longer ago than that that AJAX started getting big, and as far as I can tell, that was really the last key innovation for most apps: Being able to asynchronously load data and modify the DOM when it becomes available. I'm aware of other thing…
There's actually a fair number of new features in the web today that you couldn't do in 2006 - offline access, push notifications, real-time communications (without a hack that breaks on most firewalls), smooth transitions, background computation, the history API, OS clipboard support, accelerometer access, geolocation access, multi-touch, etc. Few websites use them effectively yet, at least in a way that benefits th…
Hm. The author works for a web/mobile development agency and uses React Native and GWT as examples of the new and the old, respectively. I hope it isn't news to anybody here that this sort of work is a race to the bottom and has such turnover precisely because it's mostly being done by junior developers. Linux systems programming arcana, for instance, doesn't disintegrate so quickly as the ten years the author cites.…
But one of the downsides of doing Linux systems programming is that it is much more niche and really restricts your options for employers as well as where to live.
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New stuff: Machine learning that works. Rust's borrow checker. 3D SLAM that works. Voice input that works. Lots of image processing stuff. Machines with large numbers of non-shared-memory CPUs that are actually useful. Doing non-graphics things in GPUs. The webcrap world is mostly churn, not improvement. Each "framework" puts developers on a treadmill keeping up with the changes. This provides steady employment for m…
Hasn't improved websites much? I remember the days of iframes and jquery monstrosities feigning as web "applications". The idea o a web-based office suite on the web would have been laughable 20 years ago. My guess is you haven't actually built a real web application. The progress we've made in 20 years is astounding.
And yet "open mail in new tab" in Gmail has been dead for at least a couple of years now. In fact, I'd say that "open link in new tab" is dead on most of the new web "applications", I'm actually surprised when it works. The same goes for the "go back with backspace" thingie, which Google just killed for no good reason.
Copy-paste is also starting to become a nuisance on lots of websites. sometimes when I try to do it a shitty pop-up shows up with "post this text you've just copied to FB/Twitter" or the app just re-directs me to somewhere else. It reminds me of the Flash-based websites from around 2002-2003, when they were all the rage.
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The Webpack story is interesting because its author isn't (well, wasn't) even a JS developer in his day job or was part of the JS community. I don't hate Webpack but I really have no idea where it came from. Browserify was made by one of Node's ecosystem top contributors, so at least that makes sense.
And webpack's documentation is the spawn of Satan. Going outside the typical use cases is downright impossible. While it has the widest feature set out there, it's incredibly difficult to believe in its reliability. That said, since you can always QA your bundle, reliability isn't as much of an issue I guess...
An insult to our Master, Satan would never create something so awful :P
That's the key quote, I think. There seems to be far too much focus on 'programming knowledge' being about new frameworks, languages etc. That's just ephemera. Picking up React Native takes what, a couple of weeks? The basics are still the same, and still far more important.
I'm a bit older than the author. Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; or you can tell they didn't learn from the previous solution and this new one misses the mark, but it'll be three years before anyone noti…
> Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; But that is only for the 'abstractions' they implement; the details are another thing. I feel the only thing that really changed is that now big companies with PR / mark…
It's not all that innovative, it's just very easy to use, and very well put together.
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> Every time I feel like I'm "out of touch" with the hip new thing, I take a weekend to look into it. I tend to discover that the core principles are the same, this time someone has added another C to MVC; or the put their spin on an API for doing X; But that is only for the 'abstractions' they implement; the details are another thing. I feel the only thing that really changed is that now big companies with PR / mark…
What about Go? I like go a lot because I feel like they did hit the mark and they did learn from their predecessors. Strong standard library. Clean syntax. Easily compiles to every major platform and architecture (all you need to do is set an environment variable). Everything statically compiled (as a software distributor, this is super nice!). Phenomenal testing framework. It's not all that innovative, it's just ver…
