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Why can't I write code inside my browser?

tomcritchlow.com

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Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#271

Post by austincheney »

izacus wrote: post #139
kichimi wrote: post #96

I try to keep my comments nice on HN but in this case I can't, I've met this kind of person many times now and I just can't hold back. The author is lazy, and is channeling his energy into complaining rather than learning. He believes he is by default an expert on the 'user friendliness' of programming. His comments don't really make much sense, and come across as whining that should be ignored. "People hate command…

Programming COULD use a lot of simplification and removal of barriers. But still, just like you, I really hate the base attitude here. And for a different reason: I find that programmers who think like this, are also lazy when it comes to respecting the user. They're lazy when it comes to supporting accessibility. They're lazy when it somes to properly supporting i18n and making experience great for non-Americans. Th…

> Programming COULD use a lot of simplification

I so completely disagree. Writing JavaScript is already so simple that almost nobody knows how to do it any more. You can download a colossal framework and a billion NPM packages to write some completely unoriginal CRUD application and bitch about how hard life is. Fearing writing original code is the name of the game.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#272

Post by grumple »

You can literally code in most browsers by accessing their developer tools. It's a hotkey away. You can go write javascript right now.

Second, there are many tools like https://repl.it/ and https://aws.amazon.com/cloud9/ that let you code in browser. I have used a half dozen similar tools on educational websites that allow coding in browser.

Not everyone needs to know how to code, how to be good at it, or have the temperament for it. And the fault rarely lies with the environment around programming.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#273

Post by mypalmike »

rowanG077 wrote: post #214
user-the-name wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has nothing to do with visual programming. Which, by the way, is in massive, wide-scale use today. Game engines tend to use it, audio processing software uses it, and scientific control software also use them. But no, what I am talking about is all the tooling around the programming, which in turn relies on the massively archaic Unix command line.

Visual programming can work in specific domains. But I've never seen it used in large general purpose systems.

There have been some general purpose visual programming environments which have had some degree of uptake. Prograph is one (http://www.andescotia.com/products/marten/) - it is certainly niche but apparently there are users.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#274

Post by johannboehme »

catlifeonmars wrote: post #33
tidenly wrote: post #26

Not all documentation should be aimed at an absolute beginner - the authors point about $PATH seems moot to me, especially considering how easy it is to look up. Should a library also explain how an async function works in JS when introducing its feature that uses promises? Of course not. Any field requires technical knowledge, and we're lucky we live in a world where its increasingly easier to overcome any roadblock…

It’s all about reducing the barrier to entry. Many people find the command line daunting. Why not reduce these barriers to entry? Why require someone to understand $path to start coding in JavaScript?

you dont need to understand $path to start coding in javascript. Just open a textfile with .html ending in an editor and in your browser.. You don't have to set up anything to get going.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#275

Post by user-the-name »

lionkor wrote: post #255
user-the-name wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless it's -V for verbose. Or -i for infile. Or no flag for infile. Or no flag for outfile. Or...

fair, there are commandline tools by third parties that dont conform. From reading your other comments, though, I can tell that you likely don't enjoy learning complicated systems in order to leverage them for your advantage. Just like the author of the article, you complain on and on, without displaying any sort of passion for the good things this complexity brings.

All command line tools are by third parties. There is no first party.

And it brings no good things. This is entirely superfluous complexity. You could have all the benefits with far less complexity if you just put in the effort to build and design things.

But we don't. We've decided that it is impossible to do so. And many people have decided that knowing all of these obscurities makes them smart, and they will look down on anyone who doesn't.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#276

Post by toomanybeersies »

Gehinnn wrote: post #193

I don't know whether the path is the problem that makes modern web dev so hard to learn. I'm currently trying to setup the js testing library "jest" to use babel to transpile typescript and I get the most obscure error messages. This is painfully hard and I have years of experience with javascript/typescript [1]. I doubt there ever has been a more complex programming ecosystem than JavaScript's. No other system has m…

I had to do a take home programming task over a weekend for a job interview last year, the only technical requirement was that it had to be done in JS (both Node and browser).

It had been a few years since I had started a JS project from scratch (I spend 90% of my time doing Rails dev). I ended up spending more time figuring out what package/build/testing tools to use than I did actually writing code.

Looking up best practices for Express.js project structures, I found that every blog post/article had a different "best" structure.

I'm happy that my new job is still primarily Rails. I'll take convention over configuration any day.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#277

Post by xenocratus »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #248
user-the-name wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely pointless knowledge they have to acquire to use the pointlessly complicated tools they do, and they confuse that with being clever. It's not. It's really not. Nothing has to be this esoteric and annoying. We've just chosen to keep things like this because we th…

> The author is 100% correct on everything. The author is certainly correct on some things, but makes no good argument for why node.js should run in the Browser. I'm not even clear he understands what node is, or what he would gain from being able to use it in the browser, when it can already run Javascript just fine as is. No, Google should stop the show and bring node.js to his browser because he can't be bothered…

It's by no means an IDE, but Chrome does have Workspaces: https://developers.google.com/web/tools/chrome-devtools/work... . In any case, I remember using this (or something similar that maybe I forgot?) when I was doing frontend work, it was quite neat, especially if you had a local server recompiling things as you made changes.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#278

Post by yodelshady »

mrweasel wrote: post #154
user-the-name wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author is 100% correct on everything. Programming is massively over-complicated for no useful reason. Programmers tend to get very proud of the completely pointless knowledge they have to acquire to use the pointlessly complicated tools they do, and they confuse that with being clever. It's not. It's really not. Nothing has to be this esoteric and annoying. We've just chosen to keep things like this because we th…

While it's a massive simplification of programming as a whole, I think you're at least partly right. Programming is in some cases over-complicated, for no reason. If you dig deeper however, you'll sometimes learn that the thing you considered overly complicated, was actually designed that way, not to annoy you, but because the same tool has to support use cases you didn't consider or don't understand. That's not to s…

Perhaps we're bad at allocating tools to use cases, particularly for education.

Witness, say, beginner python tutorials that start with "These 15 tools let you set up a development/testing environment that ensures your code can be tested against every platform that has ever run python". Useful tools, but poorly matched to the 'I just want to *learn how to* print "Hello World"' use case. I suspect we're all a little guilty of that occasionally.

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#279

Post by phendrenad2 »

kichimi wrote: post #96

I try to keep my comments nice on HN but in this case I can't, I've met this kind of person many times now and I just can't hold back. The author is lazy, and is channeling his energy into complaining rather than learning. He believes he is by default an expert on the 'user friendliness' of programming. His comments don't really make much sense, and come across as whining that should be ignored. "People hate command…

> "People hate command lines - not only do they LOOK scary, they give weird unhelpful error messages and… you have to type everything. Ugh. "

Just for context: he'a talking about installing ruby/npm/node here, not about coding. Not about visual coding!

The next line makes it obvious:

> Can you imagine if the beginner version of Node.js came pre-installed with a GUI for managing and running your code?

Re: Why can't I write code inside my browser?

#280

Post by d3ckard »

user-the-name wrote: post #257
d3ckard wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do realize some of us use command line not because we have to, but because it’s usually easier to do so?

Yes, of course. Because your other tools are so bad that even the command line is easier. I am saying, the fact that those tools are bad is not a given. We could have better tools.

And do you have any proof of that? Because in my humble opinion, the command line is great solely because keyboard is (up to now) the best input device we have invented. Any graphical tool requires eye-hand coordination, which slows things down considerably. Using keyboard you basically only depend on your muscle memory and can input commands to the machine way more quickly.

What you seem to miss is that developers tools are the best tools created in computer science, period. That's because we use them and we usually are too lazy to deal with stuff that bothers us, so we improve over time(and much faster than we do with tools for our customers). The only real problem is the learning curve, which is hard to avoid. So no, those tools are not bad. They just require some learning first, as pretty much any tool on this planet.

And yes, we could have better tools and we will have, that's how progress works. You just didn't make any useful suggestions how to get there faster.

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