I can only think that modern front end development has failed • Hacker News Board

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#141

Post by slt2021 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:02 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #96

ickelbawd wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The measure of what is better in all these companies is determined internally and generally by the business. So it ultimately serves the business and only serves the user indirectly—-if at all. Obviously you optimize for different things—-performance, reliability, simplicity perhaps. And the business has more stakeholders who want different things, more metrics, more integrations with their third-party tools, etc. Th…

I appreciate your comment. But isn’t my conception of quality the only one that matters? If a doctor saves money for her employer by skipping some expensive test, and my health outcome is worse, her employer may be happy, but we don’t say that she is a good doctor.

here is proper doctor comparison: imagine you are a plastic surgeon and patients comes in with stack of cash and demands you make a surgery that is not medically necessary and is high risk for him - and you do it anyways and then the patient leaves happy. if you refuse, the patient would just go to the doctor next door and pay him.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#142

Post by martinald » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

darkhorse13 wrote: post #110

caseymarquis wrote: post #25

I'd like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It's all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provide…

>Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure I think this is the important thing here. Everything feels less stable, and more prone to breaking, on the modern web. You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is…

This is a really rose tinted view of the world. Writing JavaScript works ok now the language and browser support has matured. 10 years ago it was a complete nightmare.

Regardless without a framework it ends up with you reinventing core framework features anyway. Yes, a framework driven app is more complex if the page/app is extremely simple. But if it is of any complexity a framework driven app is going to be far easier to maintain and reason about in 99% of situations.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#143

Post by ocimbote » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:04 PM UTC

selfmodruntime wrote: post #118

caseymarquis wrote: post #25

I'd like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It's all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provide…

I love modern frontend development. I can build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users. They are fast where they need to be fast, and building components means complexity lives only where it's needed. Static parts are rendered statically, dynamic parts are rendered dynamically. I can write all code for the entire stack in Javascript. The entire workflow is streamlined in a simple way (webpack really…

> build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users

I don't understand this.

Frontend dev is about writing a portable software to run on as many runtimes as there are users. There is literally nothing to prevent any frontend software, good or bad, to "scale", because scaling in terms of users is nonsical for frontend dev (unless you consider browser compatibility as scaling, to which statement I'm orthogonal).

Note: meanwhile, back end dev is about writing a program that accepts as many users as possible, which make front and back nicely yin-yang together. But maybe I'm overstating things here :shrug:

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#144

Post by ryanSrich » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

And yet, “performance improvements” are often the excuse for making every single site and web app look the exact same. Dull, flat, ugly, homogeneous design has sucked all the life out of the web. Remember flash? Remember when websites were cool? Where it was fun and exciting to go to certain sites simply because of how they were designed? Remember the early days of CSS 3 experimentation?

But but but! Skeuomorphism is slow! We need fast sites. We need accessibility! We need to improve our performance!

Now look. The web is both ugly AND slow.

The big question is why? To me, it’s all about commoditization and making money.

Why spend money on expensive artists, designers and engineers to make sites look good If we can band together (big tech) and make flat design the norm? Everyone will forget that the web didn’t used to suck as bad. Instead, we’ll absolutely decimate performance with loads and loads of ads and nonsense JavaScript. We’ll hire product managers to track every single interaction imaginable so user’s experience sucks and we can invade their privacy!

Basically big tech ruined the web. They ruined design and everyone pretends like this never happened.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#145

Post by mitchdoogle » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:05 PM UTC

This diagnosis needs more precision. What/who, exactly, has failed? What needs to be changed, specifically? You look at the comments here and you see many different people are taking this different ways.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#146

Post by okareaman » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

selfmodruntime wrote: post #106

okareaman wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just checked. You're right. So maybe it isn't React but something else Facebook is doing.

How about editing your above comment that was badmouthing react then?

Because I don't know it's not React. Twitter could be using a stripped down minimal version of React with limited functionality. Standard React could still be a bloated mess.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#147

Post by vikingcaffiene » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #136

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #132

People trot this one out every now and again and what they mean is “front end used to be the easy part of the stack”. If you lived in the bad old days of jquery spaghetti and in-line php templates you’d realize what a bad take this is. Yes it used to be that anyone could jump into the front end. And the front end _sucked_ because _anyone could jump into the front end_ and so they did. There was no organization. No ar…

> I think it’s fair to say that we often put too much business logic into the front end. As a back-end dev, this reminds me of the time I used our own product and saw a read-only field on the UI. It was some interesting bit of data that only existed in the database (we didn’t expose it in the API) and I brought it up how cool it was that we were doing that now. The front end dev said, “oh, it’s not from the database,…

Yeah I generally think the UI should only manage stuff like that cosmetically. Stuff like form validation etc. The real work should happen on the backend and not care about UI stuff. So it just throws if the user tries to get cute. IMO that is a nice separation of concerns and keeps the client thin and presentational in nature.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#148

Post by jefftk » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:07 PM UTC

ocimbote wrote: post #143

selfmodruntime wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love modern frontend development. I can build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users. They are fast where they need to be fast, and building components means complexity lives only where it's needed. Static parts are rendered statically, dynamic parts are rendered dynamically. I can write all code for the entire stack in Javascript. The entire workflow is streamlined in a simple way (webpack really…

> build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users I don't understand this. Frontend dev is about writing a portable software to run on as many runtimes as there are users. There is literally nothing to prevent any frontend software, good or bad, to "scale", because scaling in terms of users is nonsical for frontend dev (unless you consider browser compatibility as scaling, to which statement I'm orthog…

Doing most of the work on the client instead of the server can often make scaling much easier.

I read your comment as assuming that the division between the server's job and the client's job is fixed, but as the browser has become more powerful many things have moved to the client.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#149

Post by baron816 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

If I were to just look at the bookmarks in my browser, I'd get the impression too that frameworks are useless. They're all a bunch of sites that render pretty static content.

But the app that I work on in my day job (that I don't personally use) could not possibly be built without a framework.

td;dr: a lot of things don't need a framework, but they are still very necessary in many cases. Likely not ones that regular consumers are exposed to though.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#150

Post by slt2021 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:09 PM UTC

tffgg wrote: post #125

tazjin wrote: post #47

HN seems to be pretty split on this issue. I concur with the linked tweet. Using the web beyond very simple pages like HN feels like wading through garbage. Everything is slow, laggy, loads ridiculous amounts of stuff (I live in a country where traffic is very expensive at the moment, so this becomes more noticeable). Things are also flaky and need reloading whenever they get into broken states. The only way I use th…

Why would you want server side rendering? As a user it's painful if you have to wait after each click

is it painful for you to click on HN? I find this website rapid fast. Also because you dont have long running JS processes the RAM consumption is low and everything feels very quick, unlike most SPA garbage