621–630 of 731 posts
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…
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I would add one word to this: > There was nothing anymore preventing web development from becoming so complicated The early web was much simpler because of the resource constraints of the 90s and early 2000s. Pages only started serving 10 MB of JS when browsers got to the point where they could chew through 10 MB of JS at a barely acceptable pace. Also: > Managers don't really feel like pointing out "the project I'm…
Resources are allocated to their constraints. You spend as much money as you have, as much time as you have, you hire as many people as you can afford, and so on. It may be because people don't think on an absolute time scale but rather a relative one; if you make 1 million in revenue and you only have 3 employees, you might feel like you should hire more. What happens if you start making one billion in revenue? Read…
Also the name of the little funny book where you will find the origin of "bikeshedding".
More pleasant and timelesd a book than "bullshit job", IMHO.
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…
Could you point me towards some modern-looking websites that don't use JS?
The 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 javascrip…
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 one of those guys who were "left behind". I used to code in ASP and PHP back in the day, and that approach made a lot of sense. You'd have things that run on the server, and then those things throw out a website for the user to interact. If there's a need for reactivity, use some JS, but basically it all goes back to the same server program. I always found that this approach was good enough. You could do a lot,…
For my current project I needed a GUI that I initially planned to implement in the browser, but then I started to question this assumption that web development is simpler, and decided to try to refresh my C++ and use Qt instead.
So far it's not a disappointment.
I wrote a bit recently about that here, if you are interested and can bear poor English:
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This is fundamentally because our industry is built on opinions, not standards. 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.…
Likely in that other industry the engineer built 100+ other basically identical items that are two or three orders of magnitude less complex and where all the costs and techniques are pretty well known. Also, those mature industries routinely overrun by millions of dollars and months or years, event though they are dealing with a fraction of the complexity and the costs and techniques are well known. Software is the…
Anyone engineering hypersonic missiles would easily dispute that.[1] Or submarine-capable quantum communication systems.[2] [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/magazine/hypersonic-missi... [2]https://www.realcleardefense.com/2017/11/04/quantum_communic...
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sorry, but if a front end interface is not easily understood, it is bad. its entire purpose is to have usability attributes, like predictability. SPAs break back buttons , new tab buttons, scrolling positions etc, the most basic stuff of web navigation
I think SPAss are much like special effects in movies: You only notice them when you bad. I build SPAs as part of my job. Good SPAs do not break the back button. Insisting they do is silly.
The 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 javascrip…
This seems demonstrably untrue. Basic html development is vastly cheaper than “modern JavaScript” which would give any company w an HTML-only strategy a huge advantage. Why aren’t HTML-only companies dominating in every market?