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Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

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Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#61

Post by PrimHelios »

baybal2 wrote: post #3

>Why is Front-End Development So Unstable? Because on average, the skill level in the whole webdev community is low. Below that of "a dev with average schooling, and average industry experience" Webdev has close to no barriers for entry, and is under the strongest influence from the fact that the evaluation of deliverables is not done by another tech professional out of all software development jobs The combo above m…

>Webdev has close to no barriers for entry

How does something like regular desktop development have any more barriers? I picked up Python at 14 and that had absolutely no barriers for entry other than installing IDLE on a laptop. If anything, webdev has more barriers for entry because you need a webserver and a backend of some kind.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#62

Post by Omnius »

pavlov wrote: post #39

This part puzzles me: > "Put yourself in the shoes of a junior-to-mid-level JavaScript developer, writing a new application for the first time. > "It starts innocently enough. You have a completely clean slate and want to keep things simple. You are a devout Agilist and YAGNI is your watchword. So you begin with a ‘simple, barbones framework’. That sounds good, doesn’t it? (Even if it did not, that’s often the only c…

> How did it happen that junior JavaScript developers feel so insecure about using the standard stuff?

I know a lot of "developers" that are learning frameworks and not javascript. When you start in a black box then you look for other black boxes to fill in the gaps you need.

I am not even opposed to that. I strongly believe in never re-inventing (unless its academic) what can be used and has been tested, but when the developers are not javascript developers but react, vue, angular developers. Then you get this gap where the inexperienced are afraid to outside of what others have built.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#63

Post by reitanqild »

carapace wrote: post #27

Programming industry is the only one more fashion-driven than the fashion industry. This is a known issue going back to the dawn time. The big secret is that for most of us this is "works as intended". We like to program. Imagine being a mountain climber who loves climbing and gets paid (well!) to climb mountains. With real mountains, eventually you get to the top and you have to stop. With programming, the act of cl…

The first part of your post is brilliant and then comes this:

> If you just want to get shit done use Elm-lang and get on with your life.

If this was sarcasm it would make sense but there's little else in the post to suggest that.

Elm is one of the hippest languages right now. It also depends on a single maintainer AFAIK, and also has a limited community.

I'd also like to program Elm but suggesting to move to that from React or Angular? I'll leave that to my 10 years younger self.

A better description might be: use whatever you know and try to keep code on the server side as long as possible.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#64

Post by rhapsodic »

quxbar wrote: post #52
rhapsodic wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> jQuery is great for small snippets of code, but encourages a quick and dirty style that collapses for larger applications. I keep hearing (well, reading on HN) criticisms of this sort about jQuery and they are absolutely not supported by the years of experience I have using jQuery for front-ends that have in many cases been quite complex. I use it because it greatly simplifies DOM manipulation and event handling. (…

The fact that you're keeping track of your actual DOM and event handling at all? That's what I got sick of. Going from jQuery to React was a huge breath of fresh air.

> The fact that you're keeping track of your actual DOM and event handling at all? That's what I got sick of.

Not me. I call it "writing software."

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#65

Post by collyw »

michaelchisari wrote: post #58
dustingetz wrote: post #5

It's because of all the icky data-sync for the client/service round trips. An async, slow, failure-prone concern wired throughout the entire codebase. I/O hurts everyone in subtly different ways and it's hard to solve so you see a lot of churn. service/database has this problem too (the ORM flamewars of the 00s) but to a much less degree because it is in a happier place on the latency chart: https://gist.github.com/j…

Related to this is the idea that people believe front-end software development is easy. In reality, it's one of the most challenging, chaotic and difficult parts of the development chain, especially when talking about web development.

Its difficult but not in a "satisfying to solve" way.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#66

Post by rhapsodic »

underwater wrote: post #50
rhapsodic wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> jQuery is great for small snippets of code, but encourages a quick and dirty style that collapses for larger applications. I keep hearing (well, reading on HN) criticisms of this sort about jQuery and they are absolutely not supported by the years of experience I have using jQuery for front-ends that have in many cases been quite complex. I use it because it greatly simplifies DOM manipulation and event handling. (…

In my experience the app tends to evolve around jQuery selectors and event handlers, rather than having a well defined structure. This is not a fault of jQuery, as it never intended to solve those problems. Like you said, it is purely meant to solve the DOM issue.

>In my experience the app tends to evolve around jQuery selectors and event handlers, rather than having a well defined structure

What does that even mean?

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#67

Post by spc476 »

carapace wrote: post #27

Programming industry is the only one more fashion-driven than the fashion industry. This is a known issue going back to the dawn time. The big secret is that for most of us this is "works as intended". We like to program. Imagine being a mountain climber who loves climbing and gets paid (well!) to climb mountains. With real mountains, eventually you get to the top and you have to stop. With programming, the act of cl…

Nice idea, but some hipster developer at a company we query decided it would be A Good Idea (TM) to switch from using DNS to query their data to a REST API over HTTPS that returns JSON. Normally, this would be a "whatever" type thing, but see, the code I work on is in a critical, real-time path (as a phone call is being made). We were promised that Java client code would be provided, but see, we don't use Java.

Sigh.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#68

Post by freedomben »

Fifer82 wrote: post #45
freedomben wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but it seems many developers frown upon it these days This is sadly very true. jQuery is almost used as an insult these days. Having code be called "jQuery Spaghetti" is about the worst epithet that can be hurled at a javascript codebase these days.

I am one of those people. It isn't that I don't understand it's purpose. What I hate is when people like my boss, who haven't read a text book on the subject for 13 years pull Jquery out automatically and force it into everyones face before any actual purpose for doing that is established. It really winds me up.

We can definitely agree on that. I tend to think about what the actual JS needs will be. If it's going to be relatively simple then I can hack it together in lighting speed in jquery and it stays easy to work on. If the complexity is going to be higher or needs to do more than a few fetches or xhr calls, it's time to consider something else like React.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#69

Post by dustingetz »

rubber_duck wrote: post #57
dustingetz wrote: post #5

It's because of all the icky data-sync for the client/service round trips. An async, slow, failure-prone concern wired throughout the entire codebase. I/O hurts everyone in subtly different ways and it's hard to solve so you see a lot of churn. service/database has this problem too (the ORM flamewars of the 00s) but to a much less degree because it is in a happier place on the latency chart: https://gist.github.com/j…

Not really - those things exist in native frontend as well but it's more stable than js. Writing GUI is not trivial, people take stuff like data binding/templates/MVC etc. for granted nowadays, go check out early desktop UI libraries like say win32/MFC/winforms/gtk+. Took a long time to get to stuff like WPF, Qt quick, etc. With browser there were several constraints : ES5 is extremely error prone and scales very poo…

Native frontend on desktop and mobile have in-memory database and sync out of band. Web browser tab is too resource constrained to run a in-memory database, and less secure as well (you don't have root on your iphone so Facebook can restrict your data access patterns, prevent scrapers, prevent mass-delete of all those old posts, etc)

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#70

Post by collyw »

ozim wrote: post #24
aaron-lebo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They really shouldn't. Modern browsers have lots of the selector magic built-in, and frameworks that are very, very small can handle the rest without the spaghetti.

What if I tell you, you can write spaghetti code in vanilla javascript, small framework or big framework. You can also write decent code using jQuery.

I can confirm. I am trying to refactor an Angular monstrosity at the moment.
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