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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

#211

Post by WickyNilliams »

devit wrote: post #195
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

Which framework?

If my memory serves me right, it's Python/Django. I contracted in that department a few years ago.

Edit: Just remembered it's all open source too! Look here and search for repos beginning "eq-". Survey runner is the app I believe. When I was there the plan was to use that, though perhaps they eventually wrote a fresh app. Anyway the code should all be there https://github.com/ONSdigital?q=Eq&type=&language=&sort=

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

#212

Post by [deleted] »

avl999 wrote: post #97

Hacker News and the old reddit is the pinnacle of user experience for a site of its "genre". The new reddit perfectly exemplifies what @antirez is saying. It's amazing to me that hundreds (thousands?) of people who work at Reddit thought that that user experience was an "improvement" over the old reddit.

[deleted]

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

#213

Post by tpict »

okareaman wrote: post #153
Trasmatta wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

A React component has no obligation to add a div or any other element to the DOM tree.

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

#214

Post by u801e »

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

I've also found that it results in a non responsive webpage. For instance, text taking multiple seconds to render in an input box (Slack, Facebook, amongst others) and times where the browser tab process ends up allocating a signficant percentage of system resident memory and/or CPU resources, which makes the computer itself slow to respond.

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

#215

Post by runawaybottle »

mrweasel wrote: post #133
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…

The reason I’m interested in Hotwire is because the Javascript frameworks are confusing. Every new Javascript framework I’ve looked into has been impossible to figure out. There are simply to many moving parts for me to be able to figure out where to start. It may be a bad example, but it the latest I’ve attempted to use. It took me maybe an hour to get an Angular project started. It somehow managed to install 1000+…

It’s happening for a very particular reason imho. Frameworks like React create infinite ways one can structure and compose components. What once used to be a can now become

And or

And or

.

Then you can compose all of those together into:

} replaceWith={ >

^ That’s where all the complexity is coming from. I will not even attempt to demonstrate my point by adding context and global stores into this.

Small bit of bitterness:

Then you make a nice little storybook component, and a jest snapshot to show that this is a nice ‘testable’ component, you know, like really dot your I’s and cross your T’s.

Back to my point:

This is powerful in the purest sense, as it’s super flexible, but also powerful in a way that can create insane amounts of complexity with different mindsets contributing. Not everyone sees a regular , some see all kinds of things.

I think a lot of the fragility (perhaps the better word is instability) comes from this power (chaotic, out of control power). I hope web components at the very least creates a standard list of UI components (the browser doesn’t even have a default modal yet, still rolling with alert(), and if you leave it to the wider community to make it, we will end up with ).

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

#216

Post by christophilus »

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…

To be honest, I think it's browser-specific. I use Brave, and everything is snappy. Occasionally, I use someone else's computer w/ stock Chrome or stock Safari, and it's a total shitshow. Decent ad / tracker blocking makes a massive difference. I don't think it's frameworks as much as it's all of the other analytics and bloat.

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

#218

Post by jayd16 »

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…

Frontend dev usually includes dev of backend components that serve the frontend. Even serving static html files has to scale to every user.

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

#220

Post by jariel »

Some things that have changed:

1) We've gone from function to content mostly.

'Apps' used to mostly deal with files, like Word, otherwise, hey were standalone. Now we deal with an incredibly variety of content.

2) We've traded consistency and reliability for speed to market, and rapid evolution.

App releases were once a year, web releases can be daily.

In other words 'the web' is not 'about apps', it's about something slightly different.

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