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I can only think that modern front end development has failed

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

#201

Post by crazygringo »

fctorial wrote: post #198
crazygringo wrote: post #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 vir…

> And all software gets "slower" as hardware grows faster Quoting a statement doesn't make it good. It's bad.

I'm just saying it's not specific to the web. It's not some specific failure of front-end technology compared to others. It's not a failure at all, nor is it amazing, it's just par for the course.

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

#202

Post by Drew_ »

okareaman wrote: post #146
selfmodruntime wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Standard React could still be a bloated mess.

React is ~6KB (even less g-zipped). React is very performant and its performance was one of it's original claims to fame over previous frontend frameworks like Angular.

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

#204

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

jefftk wrote: post #148
ocimbote wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Doing the work on the client can sometimes be the right choice, but I'll share a converse point. I was tasked with implementing a bulk record upload feature. The UI was to accept up a CSV file with up to 1 million records. The API provided by the backend team accept max 1,000 records in JSON.

So now I have to convert CSV, for which there's no official specification, to JSON, and then make (up to) 1,000 HTTP requests via HTTP 1.1 -- and a different back end team owns rate limiting for all ingress. I end up using a package called 'promise-limit' to ensure only N number of requests are open at a time; firing 1,000 simultaneous XMLHttpRequests is a bad idea. I end up fielding bug reports concerning the translation to JSON for edge cases. And collating the 1,000 network responses for any individual record that failed to persist was something we didn't get to building. So users were uploading 1M records, had some proportion fail, and had 0 visibility into what data the system had, and what data didn't make it.

Eventually, we gutted all of that and the backend team added a file upload endpoint. But explaining why this shouldn't be a front end feature, to folks who primarily or exclusively do backend work, it's tough to communicate (1) all the pain points of dealing with the complexity in the front end and (2) the scalability issues. "Can't you just do it on the front end" is such a frequent retort I receive, for things we truthfully should do on the backend.

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

#206

Post by cardamomo »

michaelt wrote: post #80
okareaman wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It appears to be an app for a phone? I have no throttling problem on the phone in case that wasn't clear, but I don't care to look at the small screen and want to use my desktop.

I think they mean https://m.facebook.com - a lightweight web version.

There's also https://mbasic.facebook.com, which is even more lightweight and still allows you to send and receive messages.

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

#207

Post by slt2021 »

leephillips wrote: post #152
slt2021 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

plastic surgeons usually perform procedures that are not medically necessary, but only improve appearance to boost patient's self-esteem (boob job, facelift, butt job, etc)

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

#208

Post by jasonlotito »

leephillips wrote: post #40

I am not an expert chef. I can cook pretty well, and my guests enjoy my food. But it doesn’t compare to what a professional chef can do. I am not an expert abdominal surgeon. If we are in Antarctica and your appendix becomes inflamed, I will try to save you by cutting it out. But you will probably die. I am not an expert front-end developer. I make sites for myself, for others, and have even been paid for it a few ti…

> There is something very strange in the WWW, when a self-taught amateur like me can make a site that is better than the New York Times

Would love to see something that does everything the NYTimes does that is clearly and obviously "better."

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

#209

Post by the_dice_wizard »

I've been working over a year as front end dev and my main complain is that I feel the whole thing is a bit unstable. How do you choose the right tool when it comes to JS? You can go vanilla, use jQuery, Angular, React, Vue, Svelte... and that's just talking about the big ones. CSS seems a bit more stable with BootStrap still having the biggest share and Tailwind coming as a strong contender. I'm pretty sure we all thought about JS frameworks first when we read 'front end development has failed'. But how about UI/UX? We had 4 designers so far at work. One of them was really good and left. The others were good designers, but not good web designers. Modern design is bloated, sometimes not intuitive because we all want good looking things, who cares if they aren't as functional. And after all, when you visit a website, not as a programmer or a designer, as a consumer, what do you want? Speed, usability and content. You don't care about animations, parallax effects or if the company used jQuery or React. My opinion is that there are use cases for certain technologies but sometimes we overdo things.

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

#210

Post by okareaman »

Drew_ wrote: post #202
okareaman wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Standard React could still be a bloated mess. React is ~6KB (even less g-zipped). React is very performant and its performance was one of it's original claims to fame over previous frontend frameworks like Angular.

As I said, it's not the size of the React library that's the problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26691150
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