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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#171

Post by Accacin »

goatinaboat wrote: post #152
Accacin wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? No C++/C/Python developers ever over-engineer anything? I mean, you only need check out all the vulnerabilities in said C++ software for verification of that fact :) I think what you're trying to say is that you don't consider 'webdevs' to be "real" developers.

I consider people getting real work done, without caring what anyone else thinks of their chosen tech, even in Excel VBA to be just as “real” as anyone.

To be honest, even if you appear a little 'elitist', I agree with your basic premise in that it's overly complicated for little reason and I do hope that one day we come to our collective senses.

I however disagree with the fact that I'm not a developer, and although I do it professionally I have little interest in the web outside of work.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#172

Post by mstipetic »

reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

I don't think you're being fair. I certanly agree that a lot of things that should be simple are over-engineered simply for the sake of it, but there are a lot of things that are made possible by modern frameworks. I'm really not trying to plug our thing now, but if you look at this [1], a short tech demo of the platform we're building, there's no way it could have been built without modern frameworks with the amount of people we're building this

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkjMUY_cAmw

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#173

Post by jeoeo0md »

TotempaaltJ wrote: post #65
orf wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment: > It replaced a site that was pretty much a home-grown PHP framework written by a single developer. Random mixed logic in templates, hard to update CSS and a poorly designed 'not-an-ORM' ORM. Not to say that your rewrite is like that, but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

And here's the trick to not building shit software: don't build shit software. It's a crude way to put it, but the reality is that you can build bad websites in any framework (including old PHP stuff and new JavaScript hype). You can also build good websites in any framework. It depends way more on the organisation or team developing it than on the libraries you use.

Agreed. Doing things in a computer is just organizing the information you have at hand.

That could be files or symbols in files that defined a set of operations a computer should run on symbols in another file/db.

This isn’t magic. But it’s susceptible to social behaviors and those are “growth every quarter, demand, demand!” so we latch onto buzzwords or trends because some VC funded dork thinks their way of laying out a todo app is best. IMO anyway.

Having gone freelancer and flipped the bird to corporate life, I’m way happier and write little code: not having to learn new frameworks makes when to write more generic, re-useable, dependency less, code way more obvious. And I don’t have to worry about a Github repo going inactive.

We’re making it harder with tent pool frameworks due to information overload. When the work is information organization, less is more.

A parallel to all that “more data is just a bigger security liability.” theme that popped up a couple years ago. It’s also a progress liability.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#174

Post by chrshawkes »

Simply put, the web and all it's related technologies move at a much more rapid pace than Java, C++, .NET etc.

We can complain about it all we want but if you drop out of this for a few years, good luck. I know tons of senior dev's who have no idea what modern tools to use. They don't understand modules, loaders, config files.

Trust me on this, the front-end guys like myself, hate the backend guys that come along and criticize everything they know nothing about. They also get in the way as they bumble and stumble over concepts UI guys already know. There is a huge distinction these days with backend and frontend web development. Each should avoid criticizing the other.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#175

Post by crumpets »

diminoten wrote: post #161
pojzon wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can assure you "owning" a home-baked software is 10 times harder than anything that is popular. Thats from someone who does that for a living. Modern web-devs move faster than they think, leaving so many doors open. Someone who works on the same system plenty of years had time to patch the doors.

I believe you, I do not do this for a living! But am I not right to have red flags fly when someone says they built a home-baked web service for managing health care information? Isn't that nuts, from a security perspective?

No, you're not right. How you render CSS and the page have very little to do with how secure your app is.

SQL escaping, session handling, etc all come easily with standard php libraries. So "I didn't bother with any PHP frameworks" doesn't mean the dev wrote an SQL connector.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#176

Post by jfaat »

afarrell wrote: post #73
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's the trick to not building shit software: don't build shit software. It's a crude way to put it, but the reality is that you can build bad websites in any framework (including old PHP stuff and new JavaScript hype). You can also build good websites in any framework. It depends way more on the organisation or team developing it than on the libraries you use.

The trouble is that "don't build shit software" isn't actionable advice on how to avoid building shit software. For someone seeking to be a more skillful web software engineer, there's no information there.

Sure but for that person is “use a no-nonsense lamp stack” going to result in a better outcome than them just starting with react?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#177

Post by tluyben2 »

orf wrote: post #59
reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment: > It replaced a site that was pretty much a home-grown PHP framework written by a single developer. Random mixed logic in templates, hard to update CSS and a poorly designed 'not-an-ORM' ORM. Not to say that your rewrite is like that, but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

> but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

Not entirely related, but there is usually the incentive to at least say this for a new person/team coming on because money. Especially for frontends, the new person/team we talk to when going into an existing project, says that it has to be redone because it's 'not up to standards'. That is not because it's not fine and maybe even beautiful; it makes more money to rewrite it. And job security perhaps too. So when someone says something is garbage, I need to assess the reason why; is it garbage or does the person saying it benefit from a rewrite somehow.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#178

Post by codegeek »

orf wrote: post #59
reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment: > It replaced a site that was pretty much a home-grown PHP framework written by a single developer. Random mixed logic in templates, hard to update CSS and a poorly designed 'not-an-ORM' ORM. Not to say that your rewrite is like that, but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

Not necessarily. If the new developer rewrites in a modern framework again but the user experience becomes terrible (looking at you modern reddit), then the new developer cannot really say that. As a developer, I understand the hard to update CSS etc but that is far better if the user experience remains great.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#179

Post by Yaa101 »

Simple answer: Because the stupid hipsters try to change a simple concept of a state machine into MVC hell.

More complicated answer: The weak side of the open source world is that it attracts a lot of developers with big egos who think that their fancy solution to a situation without problems is the best one. And they all compete with their too big egos and complicate our open source world.

Real answer: too much memory, this causes people to come up with too complex systems as there is hardly a limit to their dreams, real inspiration comes from dealing with limits. That is why programs from yesteryear are often so good when looking at what they do within their constraints.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#180

Post by fiss »

This sentence explains the issue in modern web development: "Browsers are only capable of executing JavaScript, so when there are limitations in the JavaScript language, it’s not like you can just use a different language; you have to work with what you have."

Yes, you can use a different language. You can use a back-end language and let the server do what it does best. PHP, Ruby .Net, Python (and more) are still very much alive and relevant.

I understand what the writer meant to say with the sentence, and the specific limitations to JS. But the real issues are in a notion that JavaScript is the one language to rule them all. That is very misguided view (IMHO) that took over the web.

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