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In web design, everything easy is hard again

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Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#161

Post by jgsimmerman »

Jedi72 wrote: post #113

By chance I ended up at the Berkshire Hathaway (Warren Buffets company, more like mega-conglomerate) website today. http://www.berkshirehathaway.com If that site is good enough for one of the worlds most valuable corporations, maybe we're just massively over-doing the entire web? Side note, I laughed really hard when I saw that they had a god damn ad hard-coded on the page hahaha. That's how you end up one of the ric…

I came across that site probably seven years ago when I was going through Fortune 100 websites and looking at how they were approaching mobile web design, and I had a good laugh at this one. Glad to see they still haven't changed. :)

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#162

Post by naasking »

jugularkill wrote: post #139
randomsearch wrote: post #9

This is my experience of web development, every time I return to it. I’m really not an expert in web dev, but it _feels_ like web dev has been badly engineered. JavaScript is a very badly designed programming language (yes, even in its modern form), which I think has caused a lot of problems. Many JS developers don’t know much about programming language design, so they can’t see how bad it is, and they make matters w…

You said it. You're not an expert. You are comparing a prototype based language to oop languages. You're basically putting the wrong fuel in a car and blaming the car. You are lazy in my opinion because yes there are few resources that teach you how to use the language properly but plenty that compensate for those who want to make it familiar to back end devs. If you looked for good resources you will slowly discover…

> It's a highly misunderstood language due to human stupidity.

Or maybe it's a highly misunderstood language because it doesn't match human intuitions. That makes it a poor language, like the OP said.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#163

Post by mratzloff »

Much of the JavaScript ecosystem can be cringeworthy, but recent versions of JavaScript are far better than the days of ES3, and libraries like Babel are high-quality.

With modern improvements to XMLHttpRequest, the URL object, and JSX (actually quite easy to use without React), I suspect that creating a fast, modern website using only Babel, Yarn, and a few polyfills (mainly for IE) is quite easy and enjoyable. Of course, if you want a styled date field, autocomplete field, etc., you'll want to use a library, which may have its own dependencies.

As for CSS, everyone agrees that flexbox is a godsend.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#164

Post by skrebbel »

kolinko wrote: post #88
skrebbel wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both ESLint and TypeScript solve all of that except the integer thing. But I'd wager that the "no integers over 2^53" is seldomly a problem, and in most other languages there's a similar problem at 2^64. If you reasonably expect to get integers above 2^53, you probably want to think about how to deal with integers above 2^64 as well. So really it's the exact same thing except JavaScript's numbers are easier to compla…

Actually, in Python integers have no upper limit (sic!). I did some Ethereum front- and backend development in both Python and in JS, and this made a lot of difference in the readability of the code. In Python, the only problems we encountered was when writing into ndb, which has 64 ints by default, whereas in JS, we had to use BigNumbers everywhere.

Oh wow, really? I feel pretty stupid now. All languages I've used in anger have an upper limit for integers so I'd just assumed this was pretty much general. I see now that it works in Ruby just like in Python.

Pretty cool! Learn something new each day :-)

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#165

Post by victor106 »

root_axis wrote: post #42

html, css, and jQuery work just about exactly the same as they did a decade ago, nothing stops you from using tools you already understand. If it was up to facebook then react would be the only framework used on the web; problem solved right? In reality, there are different tools for different needs and if you don't understand the specific problems a tool was made to solve then of course you're going to find it confu…

“The most baffling part is the strange sense of entitlement as if people releasing their work for free on the internet is a burden to some because now they have to decide if they should use this free option.”

Agree with this 100%. I keep hearing coworkers trash a particular open source project/framework with no understanding of what kind of problems it solves.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#166

Post by saas_co_de »

dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #34
BjoernKW wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the often-heard premise that HTML is a somehow inferior tool for creating GUIs that we somehow ended up with despite better choices beings available. Yes, native GUI frameworks and widget toolkits like Swing, Qt, Cocoa and MFC have their place but it's precisely the nature and features of HTML (most notably: The link) that enabled most of the innovation we've seen on the web. If building web apps was…

> However, web applications today are so much more than their desktop equivalents from the 80s and 90s both in terms of what's possible with them and as to how accessible they are to developers. Could you elaborate on that? From the point of view of the user, an app from the 90s works much faster than Google Docs. From developer's point of view, using a visual widget in an app was as simple as dropping it on a form,…

> an app from the 90s works much faster than Google Docs

This is not really a technology limitation as much as it is a product and economic limitation.

Google docs works like it does because it is "good enough" from an economic perspective. Improving the performance would not increase profit so it is not done.

Much of what people complain about with web software being crap is the same issue. Crap is more profitable so that is what companies make.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#167

Post by gambler »

nawitus wrote: post #54
randomsearch wrote: post #9

This is my experience of web development, every time I return to it. I’m really not an expert in web dev, but it _feels_ like web dev has been badly engineered. JavaScript is a very badly designed programming language (yes, even in its modern form), which I think has caused a lot of problems. Many JS developers don’t know much about programming language design, so they can’t see how bad it is, and they make matters w…

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…

>Modern JavaScript is not a very badly designed programming language.

JS fans said the same thing years ago, claimed that it didn't need classes, more extensive core library, or better syntax. Then came ES6, almost a different language, and they magically changed their opinions to match. Apparently all those features they dissed were needed and good. After seeing this kind of switch-a-roo several times I realized that most of JS community have no fucking clue. They will gladly consume and defend absolutely anything they currently consider "theirs" and "modern". It's a matter of fashion and identity rather than language and tooling quality.

JS was and is a horribly designed programming language. The Web would be lightyears ahead of its current sorry state if the core language was a dialect of List of Smalltalk.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#168

Post by victor106 »

adventured wrote: post #152
tonyedgecombe wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do wonder how much of the problem is that most of the tools and libraries comes out of organisations like Facebook and Google who have completely different constraints to the majority of us. React might suit Facebook but it probably isn't a good solution for someone who's application only gets a few hundred hits a day.

It's a complete bifurcation of the Web's technology underpinnings. That will keep getting more dramatic. Developers and their pay will bifurcate similarly more and more as time goes on. AWS has 150 services or so now. How many of those does a 12 employee small business need? None most likely. That business's site gets maybe 1,000 or 3,000 or 10,000 hits per month. It's an absurdity to throw all the new tools, librari…

“Does my insurance agent, who operates his own small business, need machine learning? No”

If he has a fixed mindset you are right. But if he has a growth mindset and has the intellectual curiosity to learn what ML is and if he can apply it to his business and finds out that he could maybe he can increase his business 10 fold. Even if you take a stance that he is not interested in growing just the fact that living in this age and time gives him(or his kids) the option to learn/play with powerful tools at a click of a button is worth appreciating on so many levels

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#169

Post by konschubert »

randomsearch wrote: post #9

This is my experience of web development, every time I return to it. I’m really not an expert in web dev, but it _feels_ like web dev has been badly engineered. JavaScript is a very badly designed programming language (yes, even in its modern form), which I think has caused a lot of problems. Many JS developers don’t know much about programming language design, so they can’t see how bad it is, and they make matters w…

I feel like everyone is picking up on your language complaint, but maybe that is not your biggest concern.

It seems like you give JavaScript as an example, but what really worries you is the complexity of the front end ecosystem.

Here are a few ideas to reduce that complexity:

Don't use a package manager, you can copy dependencies into folders.

Remove steps from your build pipeline unless you really need them. Use ES16 to get native promises and imports. Or don't use ES16, so you can remove that step from your build pipeline.

Use as few dependencies as possible. Whenever you can, make use of native browser behavior and CSS.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#170

Post by victor106 »

mratzloff wrote: post #163

Much of the JavaScript ecosystem can be cringeworthy, but recent versions of JavaScript are far better than the days of ES3, and libraries like Babel are high-quality. With modern improvements to XMLHttpRequest, the URL object, and JSX (actually quite easy to use without React), I suspect that creating a fast, modern website using only Babel, Yarn, and a few polyfills (mainly for IE) is quite easy and enjoyable. Of c…

“As for CSS, everyone agrees that flexbox is a godsend.”

If flexbox is a godsend CSS Grid is God.

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