331–340 of 731 posts
So... let me get this straight. You are making a website. You do need to load some changing data into it, so just a static site will not cut it. But we want to keep things simple. All we really need are a few AJAX calls and some DOM updates. And just like the author mentioned we don't want to write old clunky JS, we want to write beautiful ES6 code. So we install babel for ES6. And we install jQuery to do our AJAX an…
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> 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.
> If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated. Hi. I have a fundamental understanding of what people are building. Most of it's overcomplicated and the "web app or not?" decision's very often made due to hype, résumé padding, or making a project look more impressive to other internal folks. Some of it's justifiable as a "webapp" is truly a decent choice but stil…
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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.
You talk to one software engineer, and they'll say, "that's built in PHP, so it sucks; it should have been built with npm, obviously." Then you talk to another and they say, "I can't believe they built that with npm, the package management system is just terrible and the whole mess is bloated and there have been a ton of security issues. They should have used a static generator instead." And on, and on, and on.
Now compare this to a mature industry with real engineers who are able to say things like, "sure, that material might not be the most durable on the market, but unobtainium would have added $35 million to the project cost and ongoing maintenance costs would have gone up by another $5 million / year."
That right there is a comparison that developers can never, ever offer anyone that's writing the checks for a project. Nobody's bothered to do that work. We can't even accurately estimate the cost of a complex project given our choice of tools, let alone talk about costs and ROI with different toolchains for the same projects.
This is absolutely shameful IMO, and the reason why I cringe a little inside whenever I see the words "software engineer".
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Just don't build software and then we won't have shit software
Having bad software or a bad website is very often not an existential threat to companies, but having no software or no website is very often an existential threat.
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For example, React isn’t an MVC framework. It’s a library. It allows rendering DOM declaratively based upon a state/props. jQuery just changes the DOM. It gets very difficult to keep the DOM in sync with the JavaScript backed data when there’s multiple moving parts.
jQuery just changes the DOM. It gets very difficult to keep the DOM in sync with the JavaScript backed data when there’s multiple moving parts. Again I don't understand this argument. What's difficult about it? People have been doing it with win forms for well over a decade now.
And yet it's recognized as a problem there, too, and one of the more recent solutions is state management libraries inspired by those used in Web apps, e.g., there are fairly direct copies/adaptations of React and Redux for .NET specifically to address this issue.
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…
I might have agreed the inferiority complex existed in the early 2000s, but I don't see it anymore. Rather I think the negative thoughts go the other way, maybe not inferiority from non-webdevs, but jealousy. You can find n00bs who graduated a coding bootcamp and are now making a significantly larger amount of money doing webdev stuff than a bunch of middle aged guys working on legacy native applications who studied…
And the amount of system and infra software that is needed to even let the web exist.
An "application" is not just a cute GUI that a consumer or an office worker can interact with. Nor is the interface the most complicated parts in some systems. I found your projection and generalization as ridiculous as if you said: even the EE needs to master the web technology, and they are not very valuable if they don't.
Hey, they are web devs of various levels. It is ok to be one, especially a good one. It is also ok to be, I don't know, a compiler expert, a kernel hacker, a baseband FW engineer?
The thing is: you often forget about what works pretty much correctly and silently, even when you use it all-day long... :P
I'll tell you why it's so complicated, but first let me update my 8,000 node_modules for my single page Hello World app
Or maybe non-JS developers are just upset that they had to wait for Docker to be invented to do it themselves.
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 am reminded of the Picasso story where he meets a woman in a park and makes a 30 second sketch. The woman asks how much it would cost to buy it and he replies something like $1000 (insert large amount of money for 30 seconds of work). She asks him why so much money for 30 seconds of work and he replies that it took him 30 years to draw that sketch. It's easy to build a simple website with no frills that does exactl…
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"Everyone wants a SPA" is such bullshit. GitHub used to just load for a hundred milliseconds and then show me everything I needed; now it loads for a hundred milliseconds and shows me a spinner while it does another roundtrip for some javascript, then parses and executes that giant truckload of code, then does _another_ roundtrip to get the JSON or whatever describing the data I actually want to see, then executes it…
The worst example I can think of right now is: GMAIL.. God it went downhill lately. It can take 20 seconds on a decent machine for it to load all the shitty plugins i dont even need but still block me from using a mailbox.. Loading "html only" version is pretty much instant and has everything I need to use the demn mailbox..