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

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#211

Post by nfgu » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

jjbiotech wrote: post #99

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…

Mangling back button functionality isn't inherent of SPAs.

Funny thing: in the last couple years I've seen way more back buttons broken because of backend idiossincrasias than anything else.

It is super common to see "Don't use your back button" messages after placing orders on e-commerce websites.

On the other hand, most frontend developers writing SPAs just use react-router or something like that (instead of reinventing the wheel) and it just works.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#212

Post by justinmeiners » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:13 PM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #60

It isn’t. With modern frameworks (e.g. React + Typescript + some CSS framework), it is surprisingly straightforward to build the front ends for highly complex applications.

What does your react setup look like?

Do you use webpack? Just babel? What about grunt/gulp? How often do these things change? If you left your project for 12 months, would it still work?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#213

Post by wasdfff » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

chiefalchemist wrote: post #182

I'm not blaming the tools, but too often, at least (for me) based on multiple interactions with various devs/engineers - yes, sometimes on Twitter :) - tools are proudly spoken of as a proxy for quality product. That is, I'm using the latest wiz-bam shiny new object tool so the users of the product must be overjoyed. Nah. Nobody cares. I think that bears repeating...Nobody cares. My mum has __never__ said to me "I lo…

You see that everywhere. In my field unless a dedicated statistican was a coauthor, chances are they picked the wrong test to use for significance. And if you look through their past papers you might find that they only use that one test that they always run, despite whether or not its relevant for their data.

In any field you can find people putting blind trust in tooling without knowing how the tool works or what its even intended for.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#214

Post by benbristow » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

heyoni wrote: post #40

hajile wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I know...and I kind of got the gist of it except I had a lot of trouble developing an intuition for it by trying to understand the history, other methods and just basically copying source code from existing websites...it's just my process for learning new things and it quickly gets overwhelming with front-end development...

I see what you mean. I've been using flexbox for a while now and still get muddled up if align- or justify- is vertical or horizontal

Thankfully with modern browsers nowadays you can open up their dev tools and use them as a 'scratchpad' to play about with CSS.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#215

Post by whiteopinions » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:15 PM UTC

nfgu wrote: post #203

whiteopinions wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one said they were silver bullets. No one.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#216

Post by ng12 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

Supermancho wrote: post #80

the-pigeon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Web development today is easy (compared to 15 years ago) once you know this toolchain Web development is harder for the simpler tasks that were common 15 years ago. It's harder so the harder (or impossible) tasks of yesterday, today and beyond, are easier for some values of harder and easier related to time and custom coding.

Uh, it's not like PHP and jQuery don't exist anymore. Use the right tools for the job.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#217

Post by dsego » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

wolco wrote: post #195

Townley wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recognizing the right tool for the job landed you job security for the next two years (and you're deserve it!) But it could have very easily gone the other way. If your website had complicated validation rules on multi-page forms (not unheard of in healthcare) the site would be better off for some basic state management interacting with a standardized authentication/authorization framework that you didn't have to wri…

If it is just validation a js framework would be overkill. jQuery would fit well here.

You missed the multi-page forms part. As soon as you have state of some fields affect how other fields or parts of the page display it becomes complex really quickly. There is an explosion of possible states. If you've ever seen code like this, you know why more modern js frameworks were invented:

    onSomethingChanged() {
      $('#foo').prop('disabled', true);
      $('#spinner').removeClass('invisible'); 
      $('#error-1').prop('hidden', true);
      $('.buttons').hide(); 
      if (value) {
        $('#btn-2').show();
      } else {
        $('#btn-2').hide();
        $('#btn-3').show();
      }
      // etc ...
    }

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#218

Post by geegoo » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:17 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #116

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.

I'm sure it's possible. Someone may come along who is all into DrupalPress and Agilereactboxqueryhack and think it's primitive. But they won't be able to say it's not maintainable, upgradable, or scalable. And it's documented out the wazoo, all the way down to the CSS both in code and in the accompanying PDFs. The last developer gave zero thought to who would come next. I've given great thought, and included the occa…

There are pros and cons to this. One con is that the next developer might have to spend considerable time buying into your ecosystem to be productive. A pro is that it is easily maintainable by you since you built it; which is also a con since it's not generally feasible for a single developer to cover all the in's and out's of a web ecosystem. Lets say you pass away tomorrow, and a week from now a major security vulnerability is announced that affects your system. If you had used a mature framework (Such as Laravel) with a auto update system in place, the issue might be patched in 1-2 weeks. Whereas in this hypothetical the company has to hire a developer that now has to ramp up on your software, be familiar with the security vulnerability, know how to patch it, and have some guarantee that your system will behave as expected. This puts the burden on both the employer who might not know how to screen the applicants because it's not their domain, and the developer.

Saying software is clean because it is untangled from a larger code base is misleading for most use cases, but especially so for web development. It is also not fair to treat front end and backend code in the same context as you can easily decouple both without (since you didn't mention if the backend itself is custom built by you or not, but it seems implied)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#219

Post by crispinb » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:18 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…

Well I'm not primarily a web developer, but I've worked alongside many. This neither describes any of them, nor would it be tolerated (or even possible to pull off) in any workpace I've seen. Self-puffery is admittedly endemic to contemporary tech/con-preneurism, but this is a quite ludicrous 'explanation' of a complex reality.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#220

Post by vcanales » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:18 PM UTC

sedeki wrote: post #120

vcanales wrote: post #82

These "i hate debugging wandering pixels" and "i don't want to figure out why my css doesn't work" opinions sounds like they come from people who aren't really front end developers; like they come from the kind of dev who would sit and complain about the frontend devs on their company, thinking that they're a lower class of people. I've been working on the server- and client-side of the web for about 10 years now, an…

I believe I am one of the devs that complain a lot about frontend devs, generally speaking... Don’t get me wrong — being a skilled developer (in the traditional sense) with significant competence in frontend development is extremely attractive. But this profile is actually quite uncommon imo. I have to ask, do you really think the problem with frontend development is about performance? That FE is hard because of the…

Neither are the 'problem' with frontend development, but the reason why it has become a harder thing to do; that, IMO, is not necessarily a problem or a bad thing.

FED is now about solving harder, 'more real' problems, and performance is one of those problems. Writing performant code for -potentially- old machines, mobile devices of various kinds and in the end different browsers, requires a different level of expertise. This is why I'm a bit triggered by the 'wandering pixels' and 'cant do css' comments, and I do apologize for getting a bit intense.