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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

#251

Post by LocalPCGuy »

konschubert wrote: post #169
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 ES…

Less automation may help reduce his complexity, but will lead to more instances of breaking things do to mistakes due to manually performed steps. In general, I agree with part of your point - only use what you need. But make sure you are using the things you should.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#252

Post by Dash1909 »

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 read all of this, made a 8 paragraph long retort about the stupidity of backend devs in this thread, then deleted it.

The reality is, if you don't currently serve a website 1,000,000 people want to use, just pick some terrible server side piece of crap and call it good.

If you want 1,000,000+ people to use your website, you better learn that a dynamic user experience is expected, and delivered with eloquent javascript and design.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#253

Post by [deleted] »

Dash1909 wrote: post #252
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 read all of this, made a 8 paragraph long retort about the stupidity of backend devs in this thread, then deleted it. The reality is, if you don't currently serve a website 1,000,000 people want to use, just pick some terrible server side piece of crap and call it good. If you want 1,000,000+ people to use your website, you better learn that a dynamic user experience is expected, and delivered with eloquent javascr…

[deleted]

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#254

Post by bitL »

dbrgn wrote: post #117
bitL wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for non-functional languages? Not everybody wants to spend next 5 years learning thinking bottom-up, mastering category theory, monads and all that for such a task like writing a silly webpage you wouldn't rather be doing. [rant] Frankly, I am not sure why is functional paradigm considered a savior and better approach for inherently non-concurrent web frontend technology. I program in Haskell/Scala but pushing fu…

Elm is the opposite. From this article: https://medium.com/@eeue56/why-type-classes-arent-important-... "Right now, any Elm developer can examine Elm code that another developer has written, and fully understand what is going on. I consider this a major thing that Elm has got right." And "Elm is targeted at the main source of users it has — Javascript developers. Javascript developers may be familiar with typeclasses…

Thanks! Do you know any good (Udemy?) course in Elm that won't take too much time and gets into important parts quickly and thoroughly?

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#255

Post by bitL »

pka wrote: post #144
bitL wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And for non-functional languages? Not everybody wants to spend next 5 years learning thinking bottom-up, mastering category theory, monads and all that for such a task like writing a silly webpage you wouldn't rather be doing. [rant] Frankly, I am not sure why is functional paradigm considered a savior and better approach for inherently non-concurrent web frontend technology. I program in Haskell/Scala but pushing fu…

> And for non-functional languages? I would recommend Typescript then. > Frankly, I am not sure why is functional paradigm considered a savior and better approach for inherently non-concurrent web frontend technology. True, FP excels at concurrent programming, but that's far from its only strong point. I'd propose that React-like architectures (which are based around a pure Model -> View function) and functional lang…

> I would recommend Typescript then.

Funny, all people using Typescript I know use it in functional way (computer vision/AR in a browser).

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#256

Post by collinmanderson »

graycat wrote: post #240
jccooper wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to do responsive design, and yes, that's a big change (and a big PITA) but that doesn't require flex or grid or React or whatever. You can't go all the way back to tables, but good ol' div-based design with appropriate CSS works just fine. The new stuff may make some things easier (or not), but if you don't feel like shifting paradigms, you certainly don't have to.

My Web pages are based on tables and have not even one DIV element! Why do I have to use DIV? Actually, I never saw any good explanation on what DIV did. What the heck is DIV good for? Why use DIV? Why can't I use tables?

> Why can't I use tables?

I think it's harder to make design changes to the page. You also end up doing crazy rowspan and colspan things. You end up with more html tags (though probably less css). It's probably fine. Though it's probably hard to make mobile-friendly. A lot of html emails use tables for layout because they can't trust the layout will work with divs+css.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#257

Post by collinmanderson »

Addressing the points in the article:

"How do I put two things next to each other?" - Just stick with flexbox. It's way easier than floats. If the older methods are easier, just keep using them no problem.

"Webfonts?" - 10 years ago we were using "swfir" (flash) for custom fonts. Way harder than font-face. Loading fonts with @font-face doesn't need to be complicated: just serve the woff file and be done with it. There are some optimizations that can be done to make them load faster, but they're not always worth it.

SVGs are really nice because you don't need to deal with any resizing. A huge win.

Yes, raster images are a little harder because of high-dpi screens. Just send 2x resolution everywhere. Phones are where bandwidth really matters, and they're mostly high-dpi anyway. A 3x dpi phone getting a 2x image is still pretty good. Any of the more complicated solutions are just to make things slightly faster in some cases, which is often not worth it.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#258

Post by jugularkill »

eitland wrote: post #151
jugularkill wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While it is certainly possible to understand JS it is - IMO - a waste of brain cycles that we have to live with. There's no doubth in me that even very good Javascript programmers can be significantly better in a better language. E.g. Typescript gives you literally all of JS - and a way to keep things tidy. Typescript which is a compile-to-js language in a weird way proves how lacking js is - while still buildiing on…

"very good Javascript programmers can be significantly better in a better language."

This is not how it works.

Take this idea that JavaScript is a "badly designed language" out of your head and understand that about 99% of JavaScript's behaviours are intentional.

The majority of gotchas in JS are shown by people who don't understand type coercion, prototypes or who expect it to behave like x language.

It is not just misunderstood by your average Joe JS dev, but also by many who claim to be pros and experts.

JavaScript is a language that doesn't tell you how to do things, there are no constraints. This is why so many people suck at it.

They want to use statically typed classical inheritance constraints on a language oriented around higher-order functions, coercion and literally everything being an object.

If you are somebody who is intuitive enough to create your own restrictions on what to use and what not to use in JS from the POV of the language's architecture then you will love it.

If you are convinced that there is already a holy grail structure to programming languages then you will always have problems with JS.

TypeScript is miserable. I see people building libraries in TypeScript and it's sad because they will never know how much better their performance could be or how small their lib size could be because the can only think in OOP.

OOP languages are already hugely problematic when it comes to complexities. So imagine how overly complex the JavaScript eco system is becoming due to a generation of developers who want it to be more like x OOP language it does not have the foundation to be like.

There is no defacto solution for software engineering everything still sucks, and nobody remotely has it figured out.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#259

Post by jugularkill »

naasking wrote: post #162
jugularkill wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A programming language is not supposed to match human intuitions. We are trying to take things from the physical world an represent them in the digital world.

A programming language should be modelled on physical life. But we still haven't figured this out yet.

I don't think many people understand what a poor language is, you really need to understand the spec fully and experiment with every paradigm in production to claim that JS is a poor language. Can you genuinely say that you have?

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#260

Post by ffang »

cc81 wrote: post #63
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 would argue that web development have never been as easy as it is now and that a lot of people just does not take it seriously enough to bother to learn it properly. People think that just because that they did some jQuery development 10 years ago they should be able to use to the same skills now and discard all new developments. Being able to use modern JavaScript and with linting/prettier will in practice make it…

Easy? No, I believe it's very hard to setup a frontend project.
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