Javascript being enabled by default motivates developers to include javascript in their site by default. It was a mistake.
I can only think that modern front end development has failed
181–190 of 521 posts
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#182Given that a lot of people have the title “front end web developer” of course there’s going to be backlash. Most people aren’t unbiased enough to hate on the thing they’ve spent years mastering.
Frankly front end web development is a huge mess if you look at it from an unbiased perspective. HTML wasn’t designed for multimedia, JavaScript was designed in a week. Now the entire modern industry of web development are a series of endless hacks built on top of the old framework. React, typescript, css are all skin grafts on top of technology that was designed for something else. Of course the end result is going to be inefficient. The entire web is new tech patching up old tech. It’s like the 737 max, all of modern web development is an MCAS on top of html. It’s not even a single thing. It’s like hundreds and hundreds of MCAS’s with some MCAS’s built to patch up other MCAS’s.
The fix of course is to start from scratch. Given all of our knowledge of Modern web GUIs design a singular native api that can achieve what we need with significantly less complexity and better performance.
Of course some front end engineer with 10 years of experience isn’t going to openly embrace a new api that is not only better but can possibly mastered in a month by any average dev. If you’re primarily a front end developer I have to say that I cannot trust your opinion. I do not believe any person has the impartialness to deride the very thing that defines their career and expertise. Literally front end developers are just experts at navigating a universe of patches and hacks and no such dev wants to admit it.
I’m interested in peoples opinions though, it’s just in a thread like this it’s impossible to get an unbiased opinion.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#183Regardless of my tweet, that is a personal opinion based on my feelings, background and experiences, the discussions in the replies are interesting from the POV of understanding what different people think in the programming community. Some will say that critiques are only from old people, in the style "when I was young we had only zeroes! You now have ones and zeroes". Others say that the web is slow because of ADs…
If ECMAScript, HTML, and the DOM didn't exist and you were asked to create a specification for applications where the client UI is remote, possibly very resource constrained with a connection to the back end that may be slow and only mostly reliable, what would you invent? Is there a better model already out there that isn't used because Javascript + HTML has sucked all of the oxygen out of the room?
X Windows was an option back in the 90's, and with frameworks like Motif++ it was kind of ok.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#184Earlier 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.
And before, soulseek.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#185What 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 exa…
I am going to :+1: the UK census site - built on code developed by the gov.UK digital service, it has been apparently bulletproof at taking 20 million plus individual households through a moderately complex survey.
sometimes it can be done right.
And it uses a framework :-)
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#186> sites that are unable to obey the most basic rules of navigation and usability, terribly slow despite the hardware progresses. And I can only think that modern frontend development has failed.
We have more information and services available than ever before. And it's never been cheaper or easier to start something new.
I don't know what "basic rules of navigation and usability" the author is referring to, but I virtually never come across a site that can't be navigated or isn't usable. And all software gets "slower" as hardware grows faster [1], it's not anything specific to the web.
The web is amazing, nothing has failed, sheesh. Yes there's always going to be room for improvements both in speed and usability -- developers are human, nothing will ever be perfect -- but the idea that the most popular digital interface technology of all time has "failed" is ludicrous.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#187Counterexample: Figma.
Figma is written in C++ and compiled to wasm, and it's amazing, you're right.
But that approach represents maybe 0.001% of modern front end development. The curent popular path is React/Vue and the endless JS toolchains to compile these horrible bloated broken apps.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#188I started out working primarily on the front end when React was still in its v0 days, and it still amazes me how many options there are to build a simple form, how often it’s done wrong, and how often what could be a 2 hour MVP turns into sprints worth of bike-shedding on the tools to use. I now work pretty much exclusively on backend systems and I’ve never felt better.
That is why I am so happy to have mostly focused on Java and .NET and their SSR stacks.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#189People 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,…
> I facepalmed. Like, just ask to expose that data, it’s a single line of code! Instead we made 7 API calls... :sigh:
The reality here is that this person who worked in your company, along with everyone else who saw that code and deployed it, all thought it was easier to do what they did then ask you to expose that data with one line of code.
Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
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...
Figma makes heavy use of WASM, WebGL and Web Workers it’s much more complicated than just rendering some shapes on a canvas with a scene graph.