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Why is modern web development so complicated?

vrk.dev

21–30 of 731 posts

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#21

Because web developers have massive a chip on their shoulder about not being """real""" developers. So now we have meme frameworks and transpilers and hysterical build toolchains all for a platform for sharing documents.

I disagree with the first part (they are real developers!), but agree with the second. We have grafted an application platform on top of a document delivery platform.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#22

Because web developers have massive a chip on their shoulder about not being """real""" developers. So now we have meme frameworks and transpilers and hysterical build toolchains all for a platform for sharing documents.

I've been working as a full stack web developer for the last 15 years during this transformation and this couldn't be further from the truth. No full stack developer feels they aren't a real developer. But I think more than anything the full stack's have been the drive of a lot of this complications because all these complications make everything way easier for us. Web development today is easy (compared to 15 years…

Chris Coyier did a fantastic talk recently that covers how "front-end" development has ended up subsuming a lot of functionality that was traditionally "back-end". Highly worth reading the slides:

https://full-stack.netlify.com/

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#23
post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

Flexbox? That's way easier than float design and both of those are way easier than designing everything with tables.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#24
It is corporate politics.

Modern web development is not about making things more efficient or easier to do.

It is about proving you have a job title or knowledge that makes you more hire-able, raise-worthy, title-superior than Junior Devs.

Web dev is actually easy if you want it to be, avoid the hype and use simple tools that work out of the box.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#25
post #11
post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

Heh. I kinda felt: "hey, I agree with that", so I started asking myself why. What's the difference? Somehow, it looks like the difference is that on one side you have a very complicated problem but in a potentially well defined and bounded environment, and on the other you may have "smaller" problems, but on an environment so vast and complex that's kinda impossible to assert that you are doing things "properly". The…

For me, having come from robotics/digital imaging/signal processing and now doing web dev, I feel exactly this. My old problems were far more technical, but I could always form a complete mental model of what was happening.

Now I feel like I have little hope. I'm under the foot of 117 leaky abstractions which all have their own opinion as to how things should work. It's near impossible to peek too deeply inside, so I just try shit until it works and then attempt to figure out why.

Some of my happier moments are when I get to add to one of our older sites that use server side generated pages. Even then though... not the same as debugging an errant pixel.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#26
post #11
post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

Heh. I kinda felt: "hey, I agree with that", so I started asking myself why. What's the difference? Somehow, it looks like the difference is that on one side you have a very complicated problem but in a potentially well defined and bounded environment, and on the other you may have "smaller" problems, but on an environment so vast and complex that's kinda impossible to assert that you are doing things "properly". The…

And everything carries over too. Parts of the DOM are historical or there to fix historical incompatibilities, there are 18 different ways to create your CSS grids, many of which are outdated...oddly enough, I had no problem understanding how/why observability works, but really disliked writing JavaScript :\

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#27
post #15

It's complicated because the bar in terms of user experience went up (or so they say) and now everyone wants a SPA. Because of this you now have a generation of devs that only knows how to build SPA. I'm actually thinking to move some stuff from Django to Gatsby/React setup just because everyone knows React, and a lot of our new devs don't know Django/Python.

I think we’ve done a great job of convincing each other within our tech bubble than everyone wants a SPA. Not sure the general public cares for our enthusiasm though.

This, this, this. Users didn’t ask for magazine websites - which should be serving up, y’know, images and text - to sit and spin on my phone while all the Javascript libraries load. Users didn’t ask for these things; we as a community just decided to foist it on them.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#28
post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

Really? I mean sure maybe the solution to your race condition is a thread safe queue... but if that’s not it then I definitely think fixing an issue with css is way easier... also The DOM api is finite and pretty well documented... MDN has done a pretty good job. Maybe something with WebRTC is trickier?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#29
Because building and deployment are not straight forward. 10 years ago you could have some PHP script, some HTML templating... Upload the whole thing via FTP onto some LAMP hoster, and you could show it to people. And the hoster even had an MySQL database preinstalled if you needed it.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#30
post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

I'll take flexbox then.

And while my upstream devs will be happily accepting my patch because it quite obviously visually fixes the problem, you'll still be explaining to your upstream why their "perfect" ad hoc threading abstraction is indeed broken.

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