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A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

williamyaoh.com

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Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

#71

Post by lhorie »

seangrogg wrote: post #57
cousin_it wrote: post #4

I think a simple web stack should aspire to the simplicity of the PHP stack, twenty years ago: 1) Create a directory "foo" on your server 2) Make a file called "bar.php" in that directory 3) Write "Hello World!" in the file 4) Open http://localhost/foo/bar.php in the browser and see "Hello World!" Lines of code or configuration so far: zero . 5) Add some actual code to bar.php 6) Reload the page and see the result Nu…

While you can theoretically get to this level of simplicity with various tools I think the difference isn't so much "can it be this simple?" so much as "does this level of simplicity fit my needs?" and that can be harder to quantify. The same thing you wrote in PHP done in Node.js in an arbitrarily named file served from root: require('http').createServer((_, res) => res.end('Hello World')).listen(80); Zero configura…

Eh, that's not a great example. It can be hard to appreciate the simplicity of PHP when one's fully bought into the stockholm syndrome of another language/framework :)

Consider this: a hello world in PHP requires no knowledge of programming whatsoever: a file saying "hello world" is enough to get the text to show on a browser. Having two different pages requires no knowledge of if statements, nor of 404 handling.

On top of that, PHP silently manages a lot of plumbing for you: it will also do caching and streaming out of the box and it won't crash the server due to OS ulimit errors when you have a high number of concurrent requests hitting the same file.

Heck, you could stream result sets from a database to a streaming HTML document in like a dozen lines of PHP with no libraries 10 years ago. The equivalent machinery to achieve something similar in e.g. the latest Next.js today is beyond abysmal in comparison.

Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

#72

Post by rawoke083600 »

invalidusernam3 wrote: post #18
cousin_it wrote: post #4

I think a simple web stack should aspire to the simplicity of the PHP stack, twenty years ago: 1) Create a directory "foo" on your server 2) Make a file called "bar.php" in that directory 3) Write "Hello World!" in the file 4) Open http://localhost/foo/bar.php in the browser and see "Hello World!" Lines of code or configuration so far: zero . 5) Add some actual code to bar.php 6) Reload the page and see the result Nu…

I agree that software development has become (often) pointlessly over complicated in the past few years. For my personal projects I usually develop in Yii2, vanilla JS, SCSS, on MAMP. Source lives in Git, deploy via FTP. I track my progress on a simple kanban. I can push out really complex web applications in days. At work, currently we use headless Drupal 8 as an API layer, React/Angular frontend, automated deployme…

"vanilla JS" - yea that is a big no-no for me these days..

I'm not a fanboy of frameworks, but I would not touch a project without some "published framework".

If you DON'T pick/use a framework.. you STILL are using a framework. Just a framework that YOU invented, that doesn't come with documentation, examples, best practises and 1000 questions on StackOverflow. Ever worked on a JQuery project with more than 3 people or one that took longer than 6 months !? Its a nightmarish mesh !! Since there are no std ways todo stuff.

Thats what the frameworks gives you, documentation, examples, Q&A and std practises (some are even best practises).

I'm sure once you start asking around for the experts and their opinion they will tell you why the framework xyz is wrong but honestly at least everyone on the team and the poor consultants that comes after you, can be "consistently wrong" and know where to jump into this project.

Rant-over sorry :) But "VanillaJS and/Or Clean Jquery" Yea no just no.

Php: Yea its a mess but a simple mess to get going :) As per first comment.

Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

#73

Post by seisvelas »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #65
cousin_it wrote: post #4

I think a simple web stack should aspire to the simplicity of the PHP stack, twenty years ago: 1) Create a directory "foo" on your server 2) Make a file called "bar.php" in that directory 3) Write "Hello World!" in the file 4) Open http://localhost/foo/bar.php in the browser and see "Hello World!" Lines of code or configuration so far: zero . 5) Add some actual code to bar.php 6) Reload the page and see the result Nu…

It is intriguing that nobody's replicated PHP's ease of deployment. Every other language does require downloading some sort of runtime and setting up some sort of templating/page serving system. Would be an interesting experiment to start with essentially an HTML generating DSL like PHP, but with more modern language design.

I think that to use PHP embedded in HTML documents (the classical way, with tags) is effectively just using mod_php for Apache as your templating/page serving system, right?

I haven't used PHP in many many years, and even then only lightly, so forgive me if this is plain wrong. I do somewhat miss how easy it was to add a small amount of dynamic content to a page in those days without having to drastically alter how anything else worked. I used PHP in a lot of projects without ever really needing to learn it well, much the way I see a lot of web developers 'learn' SQL today. Perhaps that's why so much PHP code back then was a clusterfuck.

Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

#74

Post by egeozcan »

lhorie wrote: post #71
seangrogg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you can theoretically get to this level of simplicity with various tools I think the difference isn't so much "can it be this simple?" so much as "does this level of simplicity fit my needs?" and that can be harder to quantify. The same thing you wrote in PHP done in Node.js in an arbitrarily named file served from root: require('http').createServer((_, res) => res.end('Hello World')).listen(80); Zero configura…

Eh, that's not a great example. It can be hard to appreciate the simplicity of PHP when one's fully bought into the stockholm syndrome of another language/framework :) Consider this: a hello world in PHP requires no knowledge of programming whatsoever: a file saying "hello world" is enough to get the text to show on a browser. Having two different pages requires no knowledge of if statements, nor of 404 handling. On…

Depending on what's serving PHP it can also get complicated. Everybody can't stop talking how easy it was to cobble up something in shared hosting days, but don't forget that back then only option was pretty much Apache and even that was enough to give you headaches because of different modules being activated, your htaccess file being incompatible and so on.

Also: You are a kid, wanting to program something on your new (typically) windows pc you got for your birthday, is it easier to get started with PHP than other alternatives? What about html and js?

Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

#75

Post by lhorie »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #72
invalidusernam3 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that software development has become (often) pointlessly over complicated in the past few years. For my personal projects I usually develop in Yii2, vanilla JS, SCSS, on MAMP. Source lives in Git, deploy via FTP. I track my progress on a simple kanban. I can push out really complex web applications in days. At work, currently we use headless Drupal 8 as an API layer, React/Angular frontend, automated deployme…

"vanilla JS" - yea that is a big no-no for me these days.. I'm not a fanboy of frameworks, but I would not touch a project without some "published framework". If you DON'T pick/use a framework.. you STILL are using a framework. Just a framework that YOU invented, that doesn't come with documentation, examples, best practises and 1000 questions on StackOverflow. Ever worked on a JQuery project with more than 3 people…

I keep hearing this "no framework == homegrown framework" argument and it's starting to feel overused and, frankly, not indicative of reality.

I find that there's a lot of resume padding when it comes to the web industry and "modern stacks" these days. My job involves managing a large monorepo, and I'm in contact with dozens of projects and teams daily. From my experience, I found that when people actually inherit someone else's React thing, it typically agonizes a slow death with minimal amounts of updates until it finally gets thrown out or rewritten.

Also, I've seen some seriously over-engineered stuff that honestly just boiled down to 95% static content and a handful of dynamic elements (e.g. some form validation). Many of these don't need to be a SPA and often can be architected to require very little JS in the first place.

When people say they use vanilla js, the assumption should not be that they have the same amount of JS code that a React codebase does: it typically means that the vast majority of what would be React code is simply not written in JS at all.

Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

#77

Post by numlock86 »

cousin_it wrote: post #4

I think a simple web stack should aspire to the simplicity of the PHP stack, twenty years ago: 1) Create a directory "foo" on your server 2) Make a file called "bar.php" in that directory 3) Write "Hello World!" in the file 4) Open http://localhost/foo/bar.php in the browser and see "Hello World!" Lines of code or configuration so far: zero . 5) Add some actual code to bar.php 6) Reload the page and see the result Nu…

> Lines of code or configuration so far: zero. Which zero-conf server was serving PHP back those twenty years ago? I remember using LAMP (and WAMP) installers for local development back then, but getting everything to run on production was always a nightmare.

> Number of steps to rebuild or restart: zero.

This just made people not debug or test at all. Also it had the side effect of people coding directly on production or just overwriting everything via FTP on the fly.

Yes, those were the simple times. But also the dark times.

Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

#78

Post by lhorie »

egeozcan wrote: post #74
lhorie wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, that's not a great example. It can be hard to appreciate the simplicity of PHP when one's fully bought into the stockholm syndrome of another language/framework :) Consider this: a hello world in PHP requires no knowledge of programming whatsoever: a file saying "hello world" is enough to get the text to show on a browser. Having two different pages requires no knowledge of if statements, nor of 404 handling. On…

Depending on what's serving PHP it can also get complicated. Everybody can't stop talking how easy it was to cobble up something in shared hosting days, but don't forget that back then only option was pretty much Apache and even that was enough to give you headaches because of different modules being activated, your htaccess file being incompatible and so on. Also: You are a kid, wanting to program something on your…

Sure, PHP deployment could run into some issues back in the day - remember magic quote configuration issues in rando hosts? But even that was something you could get around relatively easily (mostly thanks to the stupidly beginner friendly docs). These days, hosts can easily drop in a PHP hosting pre-packaged solution, so you'd be hard-pressed to find a PHP host without a reasonable configuration.

As for pure beginners, if your goal is to get pretty things on screen, HTML + CSS is fine. But if you asked me to pick between PHP and Node.js (or any other language, for that matter) for teaching a kid about server-side web programming, I'd pick PHP in a heartbeat. You can't even get past posting a form in Node.js without having to reach for NPM :)

In fact, PHP is how my brother (who went to business school) converted to a programming career.

Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

#79

Post by _hardwaregeek »

seisvelas wrote: post #73
_hardwaregeek wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is intriguing that nobody's replicated PHP's ease of deployment. Every other language does require downloading some sort of runtime and setting up some sort of templating/page serving system. Would be an interesting experiment to start with essentially an HTML generating DSL like PHP, but with more modern language design.

I think that to use PHP embedded in HTML documents (the classical way, with tags) is effectively just using mod_php for Apache as your templating/page serving system, right? I haven't used PHP in many many years, and even then only lightly, so forgive me if this is plain wrong. I do somewhat miss how easy it was to add a small amount of dynamic content to a page in those days without having to drastically alter how a…

Yeah I don't actually know. I don't write or really like PHP. But I do begrudgingly admit that PHP advocates have a point when they mention ease of deployment. I don't think any other language has really tackled that properly. Perhaps there's some dead simple Ruby ERB integration that works with a server? I'd love that a lot actually.

Re: A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

#80

Post by numlock86 »

lhorie wrote: post #71
seangrogg wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you can theoretically get to this level of simplicity with various tools I think the difference isn't so much "can it be this simple?" so much as "does this level of simplicity fit my needs?" and that can be harder to quantify. The same thing you wrote in PHP done in Node.js in an arbitrarily named file served from root: require('http').createServer((_, res) => res.end('Hello World')).listen(80); Zero configura…

Eh, that's not a great example. It can be hard to appreciate the simplicity of PHP when one's fully bought into the stockholm syndrome of another language/framework :) Consider this: a hello world in PHP requires no knowledge of programming whatsoever: a file saying "hello world" is enough to get the text to show on a browser. Having two different pages requires no knowledge of if statements, nor of 404 handling. On…

> a file saying "hello world" is enough to get the text to show on a browser

Wrong. A file saying "hello world" does not even serve its contents through HTTP on port 80, contrary to the node.js-example you are arguing against. Good luck setting up that Apache monstrosity (as it was common back then) without any "programming knowledge whatsoever". But yeah, I guess your mentioned stockholm syndrome is a thing for PHP people, too.

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