Why is modern web development so complicated? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#201

Post by benbristow » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

chrshawkes wrote: post #134

castis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It most certainly is actionable advice, but it's usefulness depends on how well you take blunt advice.

Unhelpful advice. Typical programmer up his own ass bullshit really. Oh that ways not good. Well what's good? I don't know, just not that. Look at how many clowns criticize jQuery these days as an example of garbage software.

jQuery isn't garbage as per se. It's a great library for directly querying & manipulating the DOM.

Trying to make web applications with it is another story though. The lack of any state management is a nightmare, hence declarative frameworks/libraries such as React/Angular(JS)/Vue/Svelte etc. etc. came along.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#202

Post by FussyZeus » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

chrshawkes wrote: post #134

castis wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It most certainly is actionable advice, but it's usefulness depends on how well you take blunt advice.

Unhelpful advice. Typical programmer up his own ass bullshit really. Oh that ways not good. Well what's good? I don't know, just not that. Look at how many clowns criticize jQuery these days as an example of garbage software.

I think jQuery got a bad rap because so many script kiddies would drop the entire damn framework into a page when they just didn't feel like writing a standard selector to do a mobile menu.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#203

Post by nfgu » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:07 PM UTC

whiteopinions wrote: post #121

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…

This sounds like you wrote something extremely limited. The client will inevitably ask for some modification to it, and if you're not there to do it the next developer is going to curse at you for writing such a brain dead application. I've seen comments like this on HN and then I've seen these types of applications in the wild. I call it the most dishonest form of consulting you can do. You've put a real shine on so…

I've seen countless unmaintainable applications written using popular MVC frameworks that required simple modifications, but the next person in line wasn't able to understand what the hell was going on.

Popular frameworks are not silver bullets, but apparently it's popular on HN to think so.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#204

Post by gameswithgo » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

madeofpalk wrote: post #155

afarrell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

But "Javascript makes you build shit software" isn't actionable in the sense that its definitely incorrect.

There is some truth to it. The whole ecosystem encourages a lot of things that are bad for developing simple, stable, good performing systems. I don't go anywhere near that world unless I have to for these reasons. You get all the downsides of dynamic language ecosystems, with worse compile times than Rust (webpack etc).

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#205

Post by benbristow » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:08 PM UTC

ct520 wrote: post #119

avgDev wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree as I build some terrible applications in .Net MVC, which is a decent framework. I think you have to build shit software not to build shit software. First, professional web app I developed 3 years ago is still being build upon now. Even though it is pure garbage and I hate touching it, because I "made it work". As I gained experience and got burned because I did something a certain way I slowly but surely look…

" am I gonna use it once and forget it? " Always comes back to bite me in the a$$. Also taking over projects that were built this way always a pain. Now and days I just refuse to do the work if they pushing to cut corners.All in all I say my quality of life and the sense of being proud of work has increased.

"am I gonna use it once and forget it?"

Isn't the saying, YAGNI (You're not gonna need it)?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#206

Post by ng12 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:11 PM UTC

goatinaboat wrote: post #63

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

> Someone else mentioned SPAs. I 100% guarantee that no user in the world ever wished for their “back” button not to work as they expected.

This opinion invalidates the rest of your post. If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#207

Post by lacampbell » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

benbristow wrote: post #201

chrshawkes wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unhelpful advice. Typical programmer up his own ass bullshit really. Oh that ways not good. Well what's good? I don't know, just not that. Look at how many clowns criticize jQuery these days as an example of garbage software.

jQuery isn't garbage as per se. It's a great library for directly querying & manipulating the DOM. Trying to make web applications with it is another story though. The lack of any state management is a nightmare, hence declarative frameworks/libraries such as React/Angular(JS)/Vue/Svelte etc. etc. came along.

The lack of any state management is a nightmare

What makes the lack of state management a nightmare in the javascript world, but a complete non-issue when doing .NET or Qt apps?

As someone who started with desktop apps and then moved into web dev, I never really understood why Javascript developers wanted a library to help them manage state.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#208

Post by root_axis » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

goatinaboat wrote: post #63

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

Masterfully condescending. I also appreciate the dig at JS via C++, which is perhaps the most complex programming language still widely used in the industry.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#209

Post by tluyben2 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #166

reaperducer wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also I'm 97% sure I could own your site in under a day, based on how home-baked you just said it is, and I'm garbage at pen testing. The internal and external security audits already performed by the billion-dollar healthcare company in question disagree with you.

Is it bad that the more spent on the audit and the larger the company the less I trust the results?

No, they just had to check that box to make sure that they did ‘everything in their power’ to make it secure.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#210

Post by Jach » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:12 PM UTC

cannedslime wrote: post #108

jonplackett wrote: post #83

Why has no-one made a tool that worked like Flash. I get that the flash plugin sucked and was a battery hog. But the development environment was quite decent. I'd love to be able to make HTML5 content in the same kind of way.

The problem with that, is that flash even as an IDE was not really suited our new responsive web. Its not really good for content or development of anything other than games, animations and ads.

Did you ever develop with Flex? MXML and CSS + ActionScript was a great way to design webapps, and if phones actually ran flash, apps and components could be just as responsive as anything modern. The closest JS ever got to it was Angular 1, but then the Angular folks changed course and whatever version it's at now is very different.

My current favorite is the ClojureScript ecosystem, but it's even more different than either still, and really only suited for apps. For a plain old website composed of several pages, mostly static content, it's hard to beat plain old HTML with maybe a light sprinkle of JS for a couple things.