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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

#221

Post by johnfn »

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…

It's kind of like saying that you as an amateur chef can out-cook the line cook at a cafeteria who prepares a thousand meals because your best-prepared meal is better than their offering. That actually may be true for that specific case. And sure, your site works great when a couple of people look at it. But what happens when you direct the entirety of the NYT's traffic to it to see how it does?

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

#222

Post by JMTQp8lwXL »

1337shadow wrote: post #135
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 think modern FE won over is primarily because it provides with Decorator OO, which has been recommended for GUI development including by the GoF for ages, which also matches perfectly with a tag-based declarative language such as HTML. As such, ditching the "HTML templates" paradigm was a no brainer for OO devs to start with. For many, "templates", their performance, their restricted mini language and all the boile…

If you adopt microfrontends, you can ship your app as N number of smaller bundles, instead of one monolithic bundle. The Webpack performance in this setup brings me joy. It's not 10ms to bundle, but 2-3 seconds cold boot in dev mode is completely acceptable, with rebuilds nearly instantaneous.

This setup is described in more detail in single-spa's documentation.

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

#223

Post by onli »

have_faith wrote: post #190
onli wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That might change the limit on how big the UI can be, but it changes nothing fundamental. As far as I'm aware of what Figma can do (we use it at work but I use it seldom directly), you could implement the same thing with DOM elements or simply with SVG. It's not fundamentally different to the Pipes UI I did implement with Raphael.

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

#225

Post by scruple »

tjpnz wrote: post #82
peanut_worm wrote: post #11

It makes me really angry when a simple informative site is a bloated SPA app for no good reason.

In many of the cases I've seen the company would've been better off with server rendered markup and perhaps some light client side validation (vanilla JS or jQuery). I'm at a loss as to how they ended up with this instead.

Where I work it's because we have all of these frontend developers and they need work to do. We keep sticking with ReactJS as the default because we have these folks and theres a snowballs chance in hell that they'd go, from their perspective, backwards in terms of the technology they use to do their jobs.

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

#226

Post by tazjin »

christophilus wrote: post #216
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.

Nope, that's not it - I block all of that.

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

#227

Post by kragen »

zepto wrote: post #196
radicalbyte wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The size too: there are far more songs released now than in the 1960s. So it makes sense that the "creme" on the top is more homogenised.

Why does that make sense? More available music should imply a more varied range of good music to rise to the top.

It happens in some simplified models. Suppose a thousand tracks get released every year, and these tracks are evenly divided among 50 different types of music, 20 tracks per type. Some of these types of music are very popular (4.95 stars), some are slightly less popular (4.90 stars, maybe because they offend some powerful group), and some are much less popular (4.00 stars). So the most popular 100 tracks will be the 20 tracks from each of the 5 most popular music types.

If we increase the number of tracks to ten thousand, there are a couple of ways we can go. We could increase the number of types of music to 500, and in that case, we'd see better music rising to the top. (Or at least more popular music, which may or may not coincide with being better.) Or we could increase the number of tracks per type to 200, in which case a random half of the tracks of the most popular 4.95-star music type will be the "top 100" for the year.† Or we could go for the middle of the road: maybe now we have 150 types of music and 67 tracks of each one. Or we could have musicians and record companies that respond to incentives by trying to produce more music of the popular types, somewhat handicapped by the fact that those popular types change every year, and however much Nickelback might try it, recording the same song under twenty different titles doesn't actually give you twenty top-ten hits.

Regardless, there are a lot of ways that more published music could both provide more variety and less varied top hits.

______

†Of course the Billboard Hot 100 is per week, not per year, but that's the least of the oversimplifications in this model!

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

#229

Post by Drew_ »

q-big wrote: post #164
Drew_ wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is essentially a black box, ready to break (or misbehave) any time. Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks.

> Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks. But the frameworks get out of fashion faster than you can obtain deep knowledge of them.

Being concerned with a technology "falling out of fashion" is a personal problem not a problem with any framework. In any case, this is not a concern when using mature technologies which are the ones you should be using.

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

#230

Post by krrishd »

notjustanymike wrote: post #26
antirez wrote: post #4

Regardless 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…

I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…

OTOH, i think you can actually measure the quality and accessibility of tooling based on how abundant the long tail of mediocrity/low-quality output there is.

in music’s case, one of the replies to this comment describes decline in musical complexity/sophistication, which i’d personally attribute to democratization of the tools (which are also much more powerful, allowing kids w computers to do what took whole teams and studios full of equipment before).

so i think only seeing high quality UIs in the wild is more of a mixed bag than is intuitive to us — a world absent of shitty soundcloud rap is a world with worse music tooling.

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