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

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#241

Post by PunchTornado » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:26 PM UTC

renke1 wrote: post #148

goatinaboat wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers who don’t care if anyone thinks they’re real developers, I guess!

For what it's worth, I can confirm that a lot of backend developers look down to frontend developers, but if you dig a little deeper you often (not always) see that frontend development is simply intimidating to them and they rather stick to what they know. At least in my country/region this leads to a lack of good frontend developers; good developers being those that apply well-known and established (backend) practi…

really? for some years I haven't noticed any difference between frontend and backend. that is because both frontend and backend are in js probably...

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#242

Post by wlesieutre » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:26 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 like this guide for flexbox: https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/

Breaks it down into simple pieces and explains with clear diagrams.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#243

Post by reroute1 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:26 PM UTC

heyoni wrote: 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.

To be fair you can have most of this on the front end also

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#244

Post by alkonaut » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:27 PM UTC

jandrese wrote: post #4

The downside of using a code converter is that when something does break, the browser is going to show you the generated code and you have to map that back into your original code. If the generated code is ugly (hint: it's always ugly) then this can be a real problem. The generators can also do things in really dumb ways that make it slow or resource intensive and you'll have no clue why your elegant solution is runn…

So that's one source of complexity/difficulty: our "debugger" is a bloody web browser. And there may be transpilers between what we write and what the debugger sees as the source.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#245

Post by ehutch79 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:28 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.

It's not....

Yet there was a post about how specifically to do that on dev.to because their users couldn't tell their modal was a modal, and the solution they came up with was to hijack the back button.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#246

Post by cwp » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:29 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.

It's not Javascript that makes you write shit software. It's trying to write software that runs correctly on a wide variety of platforms that you don't control.

reaperducer's rewrite was an improvement, not because he replaced Javascript with PHP, but because he moved all the logic to the server, which is a single environment he controls. He could have used Node instead of PHP and achieved the same thing.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#247

Post by lghh » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:29 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…

> So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated

This is funny because C++ used to be considered a shining example of this. Software is a flat circle.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#248

Post by keithnz » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

johnchristopher wrote: post #190

gen220 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know this was probably meant as tongue-in-cheek, but I think this is a powerful idea. I think it should be a more widespread idea that people should aim to leave a company with a net-negative `cloc` contribution.

Actually, that's a well know mantra: the best code is no code.

no code is also the fastest thing you can do!

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#249

Post by relativeadv » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:29 PM UTC

renke1 wrote: post #100

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…

Who is considered a "real" developer these days?

The person who is writing their own game engine and doing everything from the ground up. They haven't shipped anything yet. They're five years into this with a few more to go.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#250

Post by vcanales » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 9:30 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #226

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…

> they come from people who aren't really front end developers I think web frontend development transitioned from "acceptably complicated" to "way too complicated" some time around that time the first person wrote "Front End Developer" on their business card.

Software Developer who mainly works in the frontend is too long. I do agree that calling yourself either backend or frontend is not great.