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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#461

Post by james-mcelwain »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #429
nostrademons wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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. Sure they can. At Google there was an internal cheat sheet of "numbers every engineer…

It's awesome that Google did that. This is the first I've heard of it. But: > The thing is that the overhead for this process really only makes sense at Google scale. The software industry is far larger than Google. If we want to claim that software is a discipline of engineering, we all need to have access to that kind of reference data, rather than trying to feel our way around in the dark in comment threads about…

I’d argue that the multiplicity of different programming languages and programming language paradigms suggests there likely isn't a teleological trajectory towards some single standard for programming.

Part of this is because many systems are evolving, because business needs have human inputs and are not always "logical." At the edges where this human interaction happens, we expand the domain of programming to that of human psychology. There definitely are empirical claims we can make human-computer interfaces, but it begins to get a bit messy.

To be clear, I am personally interested in becoming more rigorous about empirically justifying claims I make about the code I write. But I’m also interested in code because many of the problems it attempts to solve map the very complexity of the real world. In many ways, abstraction is a properly philosophical exercise, and I think it’s impossible to separate a pure engineering discipline from this broader context.

Programming is multi-disciplinary, and I think that’s a strength.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#462

Post by buboard »

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…

that sounds absurd to be true, even though it is also absurd how monstrous the javascript train has grown. And come on, C++ is not that complicated, i think ppl used assembly when they wanted to be obscurantists

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#463

Post by buboard »

hajile wrote: post #23
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.

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

i love tables. in fact tables can be more responsive than "responsive" layouts. They were from the start. Pity that some purists ostracized them

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#464

Post by TylerE »

bgdkbtv wrote: post #411
bsder wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PostgreSQL is my database choice under practically all circumstances. I'd replace PHP with practically anything written by grownups. (Django, Rails, etc.)

Agreed with PostgreSQL. But I'd go with Laravel rather than Django or Rails. More modern, more features, active development and constant new features are guaranteed for Laravel, in addition to growing community and abundance of learning resources.

Five years ago, I decided I was never going to touch PHP ever again.

I have been much happier professionally since that day.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#465

Post by bpicolo »

mirimir wrote: post #423

> Why is modern web development so complicated? Although lots of cool stuff is possible, I suspect that very often, it's about profiling and tracking users, and not about delivering content. That's certainly my experience as a user. I routinely browse sites that call resources from numerous sites, and want to run multiple scripts. And all they're ostensibly doing is displaying some text and images.

Ironically, many actions are drastically easier to track on the server side. Frontend pageview tracking is trivially knocked out by ad block. Backend pageview tracking is impossible to block.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#466

Post by buboard »

pojzon wrote: post #156
mort96 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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..

try adsense / adwords / google search console if you think gmail is slow. will be an interesting experiuence

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#467

Post by buboard »

TurningCanadian wrote: post #330
projectileboy wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This, this, this. Users didn’t ask for magazine websites - which should be serving up, y’know, images and text - to sit and spin on my phone while all the Javascript libraries load. Users didn’t ask for these things; we as a community just decided to foist it on them.

A lot of the slowest stuff on websites are trackers that are being foist on developers to foist on the users (if the developers even have control over the trackers, like with GTM)

so you say, but i get the same when using ad blockers or visit sites without ads.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#468

Post by nullwasamistake »

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…

Eh, not using popular frameworks is a recipe for unmaintainable sites. You're missing a lot of features these provide for free.

Accessibility Cross browser polyfills Easy translation support Automatic mobile view Developer mindshare

The lack of polyfills is VERY concerning. Your site probably doesn't work on 10% of browsers. And getting from 90-99% is an excercise in futility.

If you used a popular UI framework and transpilation you could easily write a super modern site that works on practically everything back to IE6. And with Vue or React the whole thing could be a few hundred KB, probably smaller than some of your images.

If I was brought in to work on your site, I would immediately rewrite it if it's more than a few pages. Plain HTML with PHP becomes an unmaintainable rats nest if you try to do anything complicated.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#469

Post by buboard »

ayushgp wrote: post #37
eswat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think we’ve done a great job of convincing each other within our tech bubble than everyone wants a SPA. Not sure the general public cares for our enthusiasm though.

Everyone(well almost) wants a SPA or at the very least non reloading pages. No one wants to reload the page with every action they perform or if only a part of the area on screen needed to be updated and the page was reloaded anyways.

> no one wants to reload the page with every action they perform or if only a part of the area on screen needed to be updated and the page was reloaded anyways.

well not 'no one'. When 90% of the page is to be replaced, a full reload gives better feedback and synchronicity.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#470

Post by SquishyPanda23 »

dhruvkar wrote: post #393
nostrademons wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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. Sure they can. At Google there was an internal cheat sheet of "numbers every engineer…

>> internal cheat sheet of "numbers every engineer should know" which included the cost in dollar terms Would love to see that. For companies determining what's worth what, this would be great to see, even just for the format.

The Jeff Dean version is public, but does not include cost in dollars

https://youtu.be/modXC5IWTJI?t=3548

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