171–180 of 335 posts
There is a difference between web design and web application development. If you are a designer making brochure sites for small business, you don't need the modern frameworks and toolkits, and you are over-engineering it if you use them. Everyone needs to take a step back and ask why they are building a web site in the first place. My local hair salon really just needs a brochure, and maybe a scheduling widget. A doc…
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…
> blah blah blah The real problem here is that all these comp sci "geniuses" want to make a name for themselves with a "real" project and so they create all these garbage tools (compilers, pre-processors, etc) that make things worse by introducing and encouraging more complexity when just using plain JS would work better. A lot of them are Java/C++ people with no experience in web development who see the simplicity o…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's lazy loading the images - when the page initially loads, it only loads one small image (trans.gif), and the file specified in the data-src attribute isn't loaded until you scroll near to the img tag. Specifically, it's using this plugin: http://luis-almeida.github.io/unveil/
The given use of that on frankchimero.com is bad. If I use uMatrix then even enabling scripts for the site won't show the images. Moreover, if the javascript is turned off completely, the proper approach for the given task is having the and the images properly specified. One of the images is just a PNG of an emoji U+1F632 (my guess). Another of the emoji of the cake. He could have saved on these two completely. That…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree. While Python, for instance, certainly has its quirks, it doesn't have multiple ways of declaring a function, each with their own scope and hoisting gotchas. In Python, self isn't ambiguous the way this is in JavaScript. Python's datatypes are straight forward, unlike JavaScript, where 1 + "1" produces a valid result. In Python, 9999999999999999 is precisely 9999999999999999, however in JavaScript this is…
I've been a professional Javascript dev for over 5 years and never once run into a bug due to any of these problems. I agree that they are problems, but their impact on day to day use of the language is zero. If you want examples of real problems that give good front end devs hell day in and day out, start looking at some of the libraries, tooling and abhorrent "best practices" that get thrown out and cargo culted to…
The lure of web apps was serving them from a centrally controlled location thus eliminating the problems that existed with pushing out and updating software on many computers.
However, that problem was solved many years ago and I point to iTunes as that inflexion point. It's been easy to push updates to desktop clients for years so the main problem web apps were attempting to solve hasn't been a problem for, like, 15 years.
The ultimate irony... The phone app eco-system and how it dwarfs mobile web apps.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
E.g. a particular technology feature might cost $100k to implement in your business and get you a 10% revenue increase. For a large business, doing so is a no-brainer; for a one-person business doing the same thing is clearly a waste of money and effort. And there are many things like that, causing the bifurcation between the needs and common practices in large companies vs small.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Debugging is one of the biggest problems with FP, and when you hear some prolific Haskell hackers talking about no longer being capable of understanding code they produced 10 years ago at the peak of their mental performance, it's difficult to commit to it exclusively.
> Debugging is one of the biggest problems with FP I don't see why that's a problem with FP and not just the lack of tooling in most FP languages. Debugging in F# via Visual Studio is a breeze, and OCaml's time travelling debugger looks pretty good.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Box-sizing is not a good example of a standard that was poorly engineered: it actually fixes a poorly engineered standard instead. I understand the box model, which is precisely why I think one should not have to perform mental padding calculations just to know how wide an element will be on screen. Content box sizing (the original standard) also makes CSS less composable (since the results of combining multiple clas…
I said nothing about poor engineering. >one should not have to perform mental padding calculations just to know how wide an element will be on screen This, and the paragraph, falls directly into my comment about not wanting to think or do the work. >The tag also forces the browser to "do something it doesn't do natively" (enter standards mode) Bad example. Using a doctype was not originally required and was only forc…
Re: "not wanting to think or do the work": why would anyone want to think more or do extra work that is not required, except perhaps for fun? Computers were created precisely to automate and abstract away mundane tasks (such as adding padding measurements mentally). Only at Google/Facebook scales the extra bytes/CPU cycles added by setting box-sizing for all elements might perhaps make a difference. For everyone else the maintenance, time benefits of reducing the mental overhead imply on actual reduced costs, since you can ship your page/app faster.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
“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…
A major difference here is simple economies of scale. E.g. a particular technology feature might cost $100k to implement in your business and get you a 10% revenue increase. For a large business, doing so is a no-brainer; for a one-person business doing the same thing is clearly a waste of money and effort. And there are many things like that, causing the bifurcation between the needs and common practices in large co…
If you zoom out and think about it for a second what most technology is doing today is making a small guy look big
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I have a very hard time coming up with a worse programming language than XSLT What a straw-man argument. He clearly says "[t]he XML/XSLT approach", which is not advocating that XSLT is the best thing ever, but that we ought to consider that the people who developed XSLT had a similar problem to solve, thought hard about it, and came up with that. Many years later, it isn't out of this world that we could come up wi…
> What a straw-man argument. He clearly says "[t]he XML/XSLT approach", That's a good point. I think I'm so scarred by how much I dislike XSLT that I fail to read comments that are positive about it in good faith. Clearly a mistake on my part, thanks.