Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#181

Post by paublyrne » Thu, May 31, 2018, 7:24 AM UTC

zeth___ wrote: post #172

randrose wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I ask this in the most serious of ways, could you explain what actual programming is?

The minimum ability someone needs to have for me to consider them a programmer is the being able to write a parser using yacc or something equivalent. Anything a person with that ability does is programming because they know enough to realise when switching to putting legos together it more efficient.

If not programmers, what are these people who spend their days programming, but who may not necessarily have ever written a parser using yacc because none of the jobs they've ever had have required that?

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#182

Post by aaronbrethorst » Thu, May 31, 2018, 7:26 AM UTC

Chyzwar wrote: post #166

meredydd wrote: post #56

Web frameworks are churn-y because they are incredibly leaky abstractions covering really awkward impedance mismatches. This means that they are never quite satisfactory - and that just to use one, you need to be capable of building a new one yourself. Think of a typical web app. Your data exists: 1. As rows in a database, accessed via SQL 2. As model objects on the server, accessed via method calls and attributes 3.…

That's good, in each cycle, sooner or later you get improvement: webpack over grunt, react over jQuery and npm over vendoring your jQuery plugins. OP forgot how life looked when your web app project was handcrafted HTML page with manually inserted scripts tags. When your form submission was multi-level backend API in PHP. jQuery plugins with 20+ options published randomly on the internet.

I feel like this is a false dichotomy. The choice doesn't have to be roasting squirrels over an open flame/handcrafting PHP pages vs. shiny futurism/Node+React. I have been getting along just fine with Rails, HTML, and a sprinkling of JS for over 10 years.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#183

Post by tracker1 » Thu, May 31, 2018, 7:31 AM UTC

outsidetheparty wrote: post #7

perlgeek wrote: post #6

> 2.5 years for the youngest isn’t that old in the scheme of things - it’s less than half the support lifespan of your typical desktop OS, for example - but it’s still a ways off our caricature. Let's compare it with some server-side technologies: Python/Django: 2005 Python/Flask: 2010 Nginx: 2004 Perl/Catalyst: 2006 Maybe I'm biased towards older software, but the difference to the popular frontend stuff is striking…

Node probably belongs on this list (2009, it's older than I thought).

I used it before then, but could see why a lot wouldn't touch it until well after 2013-2015 or so. Despite following and using pretty early on... it wasn't until 0.8 that a lot of the core issues were really resolved and it stabilized a lot at that point. The ensuing iojs split, joyent handoff, and node org was a lot of turmoil.

Add to that, the fact that NPM is its' own company, and not part of the Node Foundation could be mildly concerning.

Don't get me wrong, I love node/npm but it wasn't really a catalyst until a little later than 2009.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#184

Post by tracker1 » Thu, May 31, 2018, 7:33 AM UTC

megaman22 wrote: post #95

aaron-lebo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that the backend model has been around for 20 years if not more. You're locating lots of old-ish and stable libraries because that's when that stuff was made. Maybe you don't remember the days of Zope, Subway, Turbogears, Paste, Pylons, Werkzeug etc just within Python, but that happened. React is a relatively young model for the web. Wait 10 years and it'll look the same. I personally don't feel it'…

The front-end world is rediscovering lessons learned in the days of desktop thick clients from the 90s, if not earlier. I rage far too often that I have to jump through all these hoops to slam out some UI that I could have done in high school with VB6.

That said, most You can do a simple web app with straight HTML, and a light web server app pretty simply. Not as simply, but simply enough if you wanted to.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#185

Post by tracker1 » Thu, May 31, 2018, 7:37 AM UTC

mirkules wrote: post #146

keyle wrote: post #103

It's also very unstable and young because requirements keep moving, and developers keep figuring out more 'auto-magic' and simply better ways of implementing UIs. UI used to be simple, a page, a few links, click through to other pages. Then we needed templated pages, because we had a lot of pages. Then full blown 'applications' were ported to the web, and life was a nightmare of double-headed dragons and dark holes w…

To expand on your point, somewhere along the line, the web went from a content delivery mechanism to a full GUI + content delivery mehanism. The allure and advantages to developing a full GUI on the web are many, including portability and availability. But the downside is that you are suddenly developing to the lowest common denominator - the browser - which not only has to support the "old" web but complicated GUIs…

There are drag/drop APIs defined... but people make abstractions... This happens even in desktop UI development. There are LOTS of front-end libraries.. but it takes a lot of effort to make them, so there are still far fewer.

The web is easily flexible, and configurable in terms of how you deliver your UX... you aren't hamstrung into creating something that looks like it was made in 1996.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#186

Post by jexah » Thu, May 31, 2018, 7:37 AM UTC

digitalzombie wrote: post #163

eropple wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like React isn't even an application framework, though, it's a view library of compositional functions feeding into a tree diff. How does functional, side-effect-free code increase complexity ? What makes your side-effecting code more testable and verifiable than unambiguous in/out functional transforms?

Personally for me it's a trade off and it does increase complexity. With jQuery and such you just include a script and back then there were no package management system, glup/grunt, webpack, yeoman/brunch, etc.. Also the client side rendering make SEO hard. jQuery just get stuff done but at the same time the organization of your code is up to you and you do sacrifice some reusability but in general the trade off is c…

You realise there are SSR setups for React, and even better, isomorphic setups like Next.js?

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#187

Post by nostrademons » Thu, May 31, 2018, 8:04 AM UTC

bartread wrote: post #155

freshhawk wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is why it is so much more cost effective to spend your time marketing to those managers than writing code to market to the developers.

Ha! I'm not sure how serious this comment is in terms of how you choose to spend your time at work, but a person with that attitude isn't going to last long working for me. I expect them to deliver . I'm not a tyrant, and I avoid setting hard deadlines as much as reasonably possible, but I do expect concrete evidence of output that delivers customer and/or business value. Still, in many organisations I think you're r…

Someone with that attitude isn't going to last long working for you anyway: as soon as they're hired, they'll put your company on their resume, blog about everything they've learned, trump up their first project, and start looking for their next gig, usually getting a big pay increase in the process.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#188

Post by donkeyd » Thu, May 31, 2018, 8:20 AM UTC

> Imagine being a junior developer

The junior developer has it easy. Imagine being the tech lead for a startup that has to pick the framework that'll be used to build an application that needs to e maintained and that they'll need to hire developers for to maintain.

I was this person, I made a choice and now every single person is casting doubt on it. The choice wouldn't have even mattered, It's near impossible to find experienced front-end developers of any kind right now and everybody will always ask "why not [this framework I'm familiar with]?"

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#189

Post by mlsarecmg » Thu, May 31, 2018, 8:22 AM UTC

digitalzombie wrote: post #161

_bxg1 wrote: post #82

At some point, when modules get "micro" enough, the effort of managing them and learning their usage outweighs the effort of implementing the thing yourself. Most JavaScript projects seem to walk that line quite closely. I'm a React developer at work, but I recently gave Vue a try at home. This is one of the things that most stood out to me about it. React makes a selling point out of the fact that it's "just renderi…

Seriously, I feel the same way. I tried Angular1 5 years (?) ago and had to do ember for a gig. They were way too complicated, bloated, and terrible. Vue just works. One of the book suggest that if you like React JSX you can do it too in VueJS. I've never done React but the thought of mixing javascript with template sounds horrifying. VueJS default template system make sense and it is self contain to a file or compon…

The view and the presentational code that builds it are one, they belong to the same presentational layer and always have been. To artificially separate them was a major mistake of the old paradigm. Older approaches, like Knockout, Angular, Vue, etc., have to support presentational code as well, and obviously it is mixed into your html, but in a way that is severely limited and causes complications. Think of it, to be able to do your v-if, v-for, v-else, etc. an entire templating language had to be built, your view isn't part of the scope that that can access the data-model, so dependency injection had to be utilized, components in that model aren't components but directives that have to be registered to re-use one another. The complexity is actually mind-boggling.

These are the exact reasons why React came about - it removes that complexity entirely. It is tiring having to learn frameworks and arbitrary extensions, googling for framework-specific solutions for every trouble that surfaces.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#190

Post by _Tev » Thu, May 31, 2018, 8:37 AM UTC

chrisco255 wrote: post #79

I think this is a piece by someone who has not really been in front end web development as a career (or does not specialize in it) for very many years. The author's thesis is that 'poor choice architecture' is what drives churn in front end. I disagree. The churn in JS tech has reduced over the past few years. Some of the churn was in part due to limitations of the web platform. ES5 was limited in features. The web h…

It nicely shows HN bias when comment like this is downvoted into oblivion. "JS framework churn" is a thing of the past, with only a few I-hate-JS types trying to keep it alive.

and I'm not sure it even applied to people actually working with JS even in the past.