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In web design, everything easy is hard again

frankchimero.com

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Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#71

Post by TeMPOraL »

skrebbel wrote: post #58
pleasecalllater wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, modern JS... it's just a joke, no integers, still funny effects with []+[] and {}+{} and []+{} and {}+[]. Good luck with writing anything serious using such a crap.

Both ESLint and TypeScript solve all that. In all honesty, if you're not using tools like that I'm not sure you're doing "modern JS development". It's like complaining that modern C++ is a mess while refusing to use references and RAII.

In C++, proper tools are part of the language. In JS, they're part of ecosystem of third party components that's changing on a weekly basis. There's a difference.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#72

Post by skrebbel »

grndn wrote: post #32
mattmanser wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Crikey, even the 'reasons' are circular. People were saying that was the problem 10 years ago. Those exact words. Apps aren't docs. All you need to do now is propose a new language and call it XHTML. Or maybe make markup extensible and functional, we could call it, ummmmmm, XSLT.

I came here to say the same thing. :) The fundamental problem is that you want one piece of (semantic) content to be presented on many different platforms with very different design approaches. The current approach uses if-then-else conditions in CSS, and when that fails, if-then-else conditions in JS, and when that fails, complex JS to transform the DOM. The XML/XSLT approach, although clunky, might actually be bett…

You can't honestly propose XSLT as a programming language in a thread where half the comments are about how shitty JavaScript is. I mean, JavaScript isn't God's gift to mankind, but XSLT?

I have a very hard time coming up with a worse programming language than XSLT, across all dimensions. INTERCAL, maybe? If XSLT had been proposed as a satirical esoteric programming language, people would've laughed and believed it. And probably made better tooling for it than the serious crowd ever did, just for the lulz.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#73

Post by [deleted] »

baq wrote: post #64
nawitus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern JavaScript is not a very badly designed programming language. It's a good, productive programming language. Most of the quirks can be disabled with a linter, and optionally a lot safety can be brought in with typing (using e.g. TypeScript). On the other hand, many developers don't know much about programming and JavaScript, and therefore tend to have unjustified criticism of the language. JavaScript was a perf…

this is all wrong, sorry. modern js is still js. the fact that linters are _required_ to keep code sane is proof enough. typescript is a different language, i'd wager it doesn't count, even though i agree it's a considerable improvement. au contraire, many developers know exactly what programming in js looks like, especially compared to other languages. i used to think that c++ and boost compilation was crazy. now i…

[deleted]

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#74

Post by Donzo »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #31

>simply npm your webpack via grunt with vue babel or bower to react asdfjkl;lkdhgxdlciuhw >[...] >I had to install a package manager to install a package manager. And that's coming from a designer, not a programmer. A few years ago I had to take over a project that required installing something like 6 different package managers, 2 build systems, and a dozen different languages (counting things like jade and coffeescr…

One of the best things about working for myself is that I write all my web stuff in vanilla JS.

While I occasionally make errors, they are easy to identify, understand, and debug because the native features of JS are well-understood by modern browsers.

Sometime in the last decade, modern web development moved on without me. I can no longer recognize what people are doing with all of these package managers and why they are doing it.

I guess from a corporate stand point, it makes sense. You'd want your developers to be like widgets or sprockets, easily replaceable. Hot swappable. Otherwise these guys might build Daedalus-like spaghetti-code mazes and no one will ever be able to replace them.

As a one-man operation, I'll stick with vanilla. It's easy to understand and it works forever.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#75

Post by TeMPOraL »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #67
nawitus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern JavaScript is not a very badly designed programming language. It's a good, productive programming language. Most of the quirks can be disabled with a linter, and optionally a lot safety can be brought in with typing (using e.g. TypeScript). On the other hand, many developers don't know much about programming and JavaScript, and therefore tend to have unjustified criticism of the language. JavaScript was a perf…

It's getting frustrating how much these discussions get dominated by people who self-admittedly haven't used a technology very much and then rant about it. Besides what you brought up, the package manager thing doesn't even make sense. I'd suggest that inexperience/ignorance isn't a great place to analyze anything from. Some of the "major" issues that dominate these discussions are not problems in practice.

A counterpoint is that people develop Stockholm syndrome over especially broken technology, and immersed long enough will no longer register just how ridiculous some aspects of it are.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#76

Post by cc81 »

Falkon1313 wrote: post #31

>simply npm your webpack via grunt with vue babel or bower to react asdfjkl;lkdhgxdlciuhw >[...] >I had to install a package manager to install a package manager. And that's coming from a designer, not a programmer. A few years ago I had to take over a project that required installing something like 6 different package managers, 2 build systems, and a dozen different languages (counting things like jade and coffeescr…

That is because there was an explosion of possibilities with web development and a lot of different solutions where created at the same time.

These days things have settled more and most technology stacks have one preferred package manager (almost always npm) and one build chain (webpack being the most popular).

Yes, there have been confusion but there is a reason why and it has brought along web development that is so much better than it used to be and it is usually not very complicated these days. If you pick a stack you will usually have a cli that handles everything for you.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#77

Post by skrebbel »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #71
skrebbel wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both ESLint and TypeScript solve all that. In all honesty, if you're not using tools like that I'm not sure you're doing "modern JS development". It's like complaining that modern C++ is a mess while refusing to use references and RAII.

In C++, proper tools are part of the language. In JS, they're part of ecosystem of third party components that's changing on a weekly basis. There's a difference.

ESLint was released in 2013. TypeScript in 2012. People keep complaining about this "weekly basis" stuff but really the pace has been pretty slow lately.

If you want to use constexpr in C++ you're going to have to upgrade your compiler as well, right (and, if you're unlucky, "migrate your project files" and all that mess)?

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#78

Post by TeMPOraL »

BjoernKW wrote: post #70
usernam wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I've seen any "user interface innovation" done with HTML. Pick a book on GUI interfaces of the 80ies (for example: Computers Graphics by Foley & al), and see that pretty much all UI paradigms themselves were pretty much explored back then. The concept of the "hypercard" was already there. HTML just improved on the presentation of it, often worsening everything else. Somehow web apps lowered the expectati…

I'd say that the web page itself is a pretty innovative concept. The concept might've existed before (Apple's HyperCard dates back to 1987 for example) but the web expanded on that by making use of resources distributed across the network. There have been many smaller improvements, too. Google's Material Design for instance.

> There have been many smaller improvements, too. Google's Material Design for instance.

Could you elaborate on that? I.e. how this is an improvement, and over what? Serious question.

My overall impression is that it promotes dumbed down interfaces that maximize wasted screen space while minimizing amount of useful information displayed. But I might have just bad luck and constantly encounter applications using Material Design wrong. How does a good Material Design application look?

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#79

Post by cc81 »

Donzo wrote: post #74
Falkon1313 wrote: post #31

>simply npm your webpack via grunt with vue babel or bower to react asdfjkl;lkdhgxdlciuhw >[...] >I had to install a package manager to install a package manager. And that's coming from a designer, not a programmer. A few years ago I had to take over a project that required installing something like 6 different package managers, 2 build systems, and a dozen different languages (counting things like jade and coffeescr…

One of the best things about working for myself is that I write all my web stuff in vanilla JS. While I occasionally make errors, they are easy to identify, understand, and debug because the native features of JS are well-understood by modern browsers. Sometime in the last decade, modern web development moved on without me. I can no longer recognize what people are doing with all of these package managers and why the…

Sure that works, especially if you tend to write more web sites than advanced web applications. But that is true for back end as well, a one man operation can write Python or Java in a style and using libraries from 10 years ago and it would work perfectly fine. But depending on what they are doing they might not be as productive as they could be.

If you want to try for example React it is incredibly easy to get started. Just if you want to check out what the fuzz is about.

https://reactjs.org/tutorial/tutorial.html

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#80

Post by tonyedgecombe »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #75
aaron-lebo wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's getting frustrating how much these discussions get dominated by people who self-admittedly haven't used a technology very much and then rant about it. Besides what you brought up, the package manager thing doesn't even make sense. I'd suggest that inexperience/ignorance isn't a great place to analyze anything from. Some of the "major" issues that dominate these discussions are not problems in practice.

A counterpoint is that people develop Stockholm syndrome over especially broken technology, and immersed long enough will no longer register just how ridiculous some aspects of it are.

It's very easy to take that knowledge you built up over years for granted and assume anybody who doesn't grasp it immediately is an idiot.
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