Because people with degrees brought their backend complication to the frontend when they realized they could only get money as a web developer. Now we're all fucked.
Why is modern web development so complicated?
261–270 of 731 posts
Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?
#262Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
All the state management stuff seems to be tied up in (=synonymous with) attempts to purify JS frameworks and codebases, as in "purely functional". It's... kinda silly and far removed from either the problem at hand, or the strengths of Javascript (such as they are) much of the time.
Meanwhile objects representing various parts of the view, and plenty of models that don't look much like "modern" JS state management, remain the norm elsewhere, and the sky is not falling. I do not know what to make of it. I go along with it when in that sort of company—when in Rome, and all that—but the evangelism can be pretty funny.
Anyway a bunch of the stuff isn't half as special as you'd think reading about it through the usual channels. Redux? A data cache and a so-so local event bus with somewhat awkward semantics and a few really bad terminology choices thrown in. Whee. There's your "state management". Not that it's useless, but you'd swear it's black magic reading all the blog posts about it.
Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?
#263well, programming is hard. It has always been hard. regardless of the field. classic web development is complicated as well.
Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?
#264Webdevs 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…
> Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex
Well, that sure is an arrogant way to present stereotypes as fact. At first, I read this as satire.
You can follow the history of web development and see exactly why the current stack is as it is. It's people building solutions to problems.
For example, nobody thought "I should create a front-end build process to impress my peers!". What happened instead is that repetitive tasks were programmed out of existence.
The web industry is young, you can trace every single steps of it without much research. To claim something as ridiculous as "responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys" is silly at best.
Sure, this may be accurate for some of the junior devs. you worked with in your career. However, this is not representative of the industry as a whole.
Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?
#265The answer to "why is ___ so ___?", is very nearly always best when phrased as the question, "what was supposed to stop __ from __?" The answer is nearly always...nothing.
There was nothing, technologically or organizationally, preventing web development from becoming so complicated, such that websites whose desired functionality would be satisfied by static html are now several meg of thousands of lines of javascript on top of a few dozen included libraries. There was nothing preventing that. Therefore, it happened.
Developers don't really feel like pointing out, "you should get rid of me and just pay for someone to do html". Managers don't really feel like pointing out "the project I'm managing doesn't really deserve a team of developers, you should take them away from me." The designers don't feel like pointing out "all we really need is to put this well-formatted text on a page with the company logo on the top and one or two image files, and that will communicate the information just fine, you can get rid of me." The even-higher-ups don't really feel like pointing out "I don't need to hire all these people, you can take this VC money and return it to the original investors". The VC's don't feel like pointing out, "there's not really a use for this much money in the tech world right now, so you can just stick it in a bank account and wait for a real need."
So, it doesn't happen, because there was nothing to prevent it.
Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?
#266Earlier 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 actionable in the sense that it's definitely^Woften correct.
Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
In my opinion, the biggest complicator there is in javascript land is Webpack and similar loaders. They do absolutely everything in the name of optimizing performance in production, things which even the "development mode" don't simplify.
I developed my own custom scaffolding for Vue projects[0], which is a lot simpler and customizable. It even allows you to develop Vue projects without a build step/tool, you save and reload. Yes, there are tools that reload the page when you save, but I don't think they're worth the complexity.
It could be further improved to actually compile/build when you actually want to deploy, I hadn't the time or a strong need for it yet. But when you are developing, things need to be simple, I think you need to know everything that is happening in the browser so you can resolve any bug with much more speed and confidence.
Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?
#268Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
What I meant was, initially there were frontend designers and backend developers (because there was no code on the front end at all).
Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?
#269Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
if you don't use sass then it's not maintainable or scalable.
Oh? Why's that?
Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?
#270Because "innovation"