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

#151

Post by findjashua » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:10 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…

I think gp meant that you don’t have to send a server request to handle every user interaction. The server has to handle much fewer user requests, and only return data (instead of generating the template as well).

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

#152

Post by leephillips » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:10 PM UTC

slt2021 wrote: post #141

leephillips wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is clearly a terrible doctor. Am I wrong? Isn’t this doctor violating the Hippocratic oath?

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

#153

Post by okareaman » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

Trasmatta wrote: post #86

quonn wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After minification and compression, React is about 100kb and can be cached for a long time. With all the images, videos on social media etc. it seems rather small in terms of bandwidth.

I thought it was actually around 30kb, after being minified and gzipped?

It's not the size of the React library that is the problem, it's the nesting of components with components within components that is the problem. If you've ever shown source and seen divs 20 to 30 deep, you're most likely looking at html that React produces.

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

#154

Post by mycologos » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:13 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #68

throwawayfire wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Not "just" survival bias. I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers. Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot…

I think you've got that completely backwards. 2000 is about the time that the "long tail" exploded, where Youtube and Spotify made non-top 40 music a lot easier to find. In consequence there is a lot more really good music available today than there was pre-internet and it's a lot easier to find. It's not on the radio, but that's always been the case.

> In consequence there is a lot more really good music available today than there was pre-internet and it's a lot easier to find.

Tangentially, if (like me) you find this "long tail" interesting but don't know where to start, I've enjoyed going through Ted Gioia's "100 Best Albums of [previous year]" [1] each year. It's obviously subjective and subject to whatever biases he has, but the sheer diversity of the list is quite cool. Listening to a few albums per week is a pretty easy way to sample -- most of the albums are on YouTube or Bandcamp for free.

[1] http://tedgioia.com/bestalbumsof2020.html

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

#155

Post by Drew_ » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:14 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…

Got to agree with everything but

> Debugging modern front-end code is a breeze

Is still hit or miss every once and while depending on the use case. For example debugging service workers is still a bit of a nightmare. And I've also had some issues debugging a chrome extension written with Vue CLI + the browser extension plugin.

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

#156

Post by bit_logic » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

What upsets and concerns me the most is when I see poorly developed SPA on really important sites. For example, government service application websites. If reddit or nytimes has a bloated, intermittently failing SPA site, that's an annoyance. When it's a form to apply for unemployment, ACA health care, DMV, or other critical services, it's a critical failure. Especially since these services are most often used by exactly the population most impacted by bloated SPA (they tend to have slow or unreliable internet and slow computers, maybe even a cheap android phone is all they have).

Such sites should be using minimal or no JS. These aren't meant to be pretty interactive sites, they need to be solid bulletproof sites so people can get critical services. And I haven't even mentioned how SPA sites often lack any accessibility features (which is so much easier to implement if sticking to standard HTML+CSS and no/minimal JS).

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

#157

Post by onli » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

martinald wrote: post #139

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…

I agree entirely. The worst sites are imo the ones not using modern frontend technologies. I think people are forgetting how bad it used to be. Loads of jquery spaghetti code everywhere rerendering the page 1000 times with a nested for loop. Also, web applications have became so much more complex than they were (but still work!). Things like Figma would be unthinkable even a few years ago. And - even though it's runn…

What aspect of Figma do you mean? Placing elements on a canvas has been possible almost forever...

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

#158

Post by withinboredom » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:14 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

I’m living overseas and this happens with my phone from the US. It’s unbelievable how many apps time out. Why an app has implemented a timeout is instead of relying on the network stack is beyond me.

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

#159

Post by robertoandred » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:15 PM UTC

okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

React is not inherently slow. The sites you use are slow because they're bad sites, not because they use React.

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

#160

Post by goostavos » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 5:16 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

Your comment made me legit chuckle. Rather than "waiting" after each click, we get an instant 'page load', half of which can't be interacted with (looking at you, Amazon.com), and then a sea of loading spinners -- all under the guise of 'not waiting'. I'm not sure which of those I prefer, tbh.

I'm partial to good ol' fashion SSR sites these days, as I do most of my casual couch browsing on an old chromebook running Ubuntu. The number of heavy-weight SPAs that I just can't run on the hardware anymore seemingly climbs by the day. :(