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

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#381

Post by redhale » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:28 PM UTC

tyingq wrote: post #311

jjcm wrote: post #84

Because it had to play catch up to native apps feature wise due to demand, while building upon a base that wasn't intended for that, while serving the same app to literally thousands of different environments and expecting it to work perfectly. Thus, growing pains and overly complicated frameworks/plugins/other bits slapped together to address the core issues which ballooned the complexity. But we all knew that. What…

"What's more impressive is that things are getting less complicated." Over what timeframe? While it certainly had its own issues, the HTML5/jQuery pairing easily fit into your head. Notwithstanding the benefits, React, packers, routers, and the 10 other things you bundle, is a cognitive load. Doesn't help that the routers and 10 other things don't come with React, and so, choices vary across teams.

If you use a framework (like Angular) rather than a library (like React), things become WAY less complicated.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#382

Post by tiborsaas » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:30 PM UTC

burlesona wrote: post #344

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.

Logic in the templates... are you describing PHP or React? To be fair the parent comment isn’t saying everything about his stack is perfectly elegant, but if you can deliver a website that works without stateful client side JS and associated build tooling, then it certainly is simpler, and most of the time simpler is better.

I'm 90% sure it's Twig (or Jinja in Python land)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#383

Post by Jach » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:31 PM UTC

temac wrote: post #336

Jach wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm not sure you understand the amount of embedded software that runs the world -- or at least think about it appropriately. 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 rid…

I didn't forget about them (my own degree is in CE) and did say I was being somewhat contrarian... And started off impugning on the notion of jealousy (possibly driven by economic value -- I'm not making professional use of my CE degree in part due to $$$) rather than inferiority or even competence in those who stir up the "ugh webdevs am I right?" rhetoric. We probably don't disagree much on the value of people, generally speaking, or the lack of recognition of types of excellence including all the great volunteer work going on in free and open software.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#384

Post by ativzzz » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:32 PM UTC

bgdkbtv wrote: post #355

mixmastamyk wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PHP, MySQL Agreed in general, but there are better free/libre choices. I don't recommend these for greenfield projects.

What would you recommend instead of those?

Rails + postgres!

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#385

Post by arkh » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:35 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…

You know there's Symfony between "my homegrown php" and "DrupalPress" which gives a lot of facilities for simple HTML based websites?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#386

Post by bmniotjoti » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:36 PM UTC

I think part of the reason so many of this type of article exist is because it seems the common expectation is that things should automatically make sense to us on first glance. So many products and tools are this way. But they are that way by design. The builders / inventors of those things hide you from the reality behind the scenes. People seem to get openly frustrated if they can't learn overnight all there is to know about a discipline that has taken some people years and maybe even decades to master.

We as a civilization haven't really had a need to reconcile this I think on the scale that we do today. Nothing was "out in the open" so much so as it is today. But now that I can see it somehow my expectation is that I should immediately understand it.

As more and more information becomes available to the masses we all need to start recognizing that just because we can see it doesn't mean we should expect to be able to understand it.

Real knowledge about how to solve complicated problems takes time and discipline to get to the place we want to be individually and collectively.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#387

Post by crimsonalucard » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:36 PM UTC

It's complicated because nobody knows how to fix it. There's no formal definition for a "good design" or a "better design", so people keep iterating over the designs not knowing whether the new design is actually better or worse.

If there was a way to quantify a good design vs a bad design through an algorithm then people can iterate in ways that properly and categorically makes things better rather than in ways that are opinionated, vague and possibly even in the wrong direction.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#388

Post by asark » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:37 PM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #377

asark wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the JS devs drove it, at least not primarily. I think they're largely eager to exploit the enthusiasm of others (and probably they should be) and I've seen it happen. I do think it's peculiar to the web. Most other GUI app ecosystems are content not to invent their own visual vocabularies over and over or twist every mundane little program or UI element into an "experience", for instance—I think that ha…

> Your manager or project owner or whoever says "we want a webapp" are you gonna stick your neck out and argue against it? The question is: what are you going to argue for instead? Not using the web at all is a non-starter, especially in the retail space where you'd get killed by a web-based competitor. I don't know what your experience is, but historically my bosses haven't given half of a damn what tech stack I use…

I mean SPAs and near-SPAs. "Web apps". Web sites as in mostly server-rendered sites with HTML, CSS, and some JS sugar on top could sub in for an awful lot of "web apps" and improve UX, performance, maintainability, and development cost.

[EDIT] incidentally I notice you keep arguing against things I've not actually written.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#389

Post by arkh » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:37 PM UTC

avgDev wrote: post #74

anthony_doan wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even use a backend rendering framework? MVC PHP frameworks are very nice and they don't move as fast as those javascript frontend rendering. Also the ORM deals with any security problems and most framework deals with other security deals too including session handling.

This seems odd to me. I have been working in .Net MVC/Core and while I could write an application that is simply HTML/CSS/C#, I would think it would be insane to do so. It takes a massive amount of resources to develop your own security, your own data access without any ORM tools, not cause memory leaks, properly disposing of resource. I'm all about creating reliable applications, but a good framework is a great tool…

> properly disposing of resource

It's php. Everything is trashed once the http request has been served.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#390

Post by shams93 » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 11:38 PM UTC

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…

Yeah everyone assumes you have to build out an SPA and then you need a rest or graphql service behind that. It rapidly gets out of hand for the benefit of having a native like experience you wind up serving sites with 1 gig of us framework content per page.