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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

#241

Post by csbartus »

I'm designing and developing web sites and apps since 2005.

First with PHP (Wordpress, Laravel, Yii), then with Ruby (Rails, Sinatra), now with Javascript (Gulp, Gatsby, Next, React, Lodash, Immer, Typescript). I also do / did static sites with Jekyll, or my own framework.

Among all Javascript is far the worst experience. In all areas like the language, the types, the state, the hooks, blogging engine, toolbelt, hosting, packaging, publishing, documenting, the community.

The situation is so bad that I quit. It eats my nerves. Instead of creating I'm patching and fixing bugs all day.

That's why the web is what is it today. It's Javascript driven, and Javascript is totally flawed.

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

#242

Post by rabuse »

bit_logic wrote: post #156

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 exa…

I honestly hate SPA's. They're not necessary in almost every single use-case, yet everybody is shifting their shit into one.

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

#243

Post by estaseuropano »

bit_logic wrote: post #156

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 exa…

Completely agree. And yet, were there ever better days? In the past simply fewer websites were online. I think a bad website is better than none.

At the same time the real question is why lots of governments wouldn't need to reinvent everything. That is maybe the original sin.

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

#245

Post by tomc1985 »

bit_logic wrote: post #156

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 exa…

Why do these things even need to be an SPA? What function does that serve when the standardized and infinitely more compatible form-with-a-bit-of-javascript approach works just as well if not better?

I work on one such project and it absolutely drives me nuts -- it's a rails app, but the customer front-end (which is literally just a form to fill out) is a React SPA. There is nothing there that couldn't be done with Turbolinks and some light JS for validations/popups.

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

#246

Post by [deleted] »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #222
1337shadow wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#247

Post by leephillips »

slt2021 wrote: post #207
leephillips wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

You moved the goalpost. You stipulated high risk in the comment I was replying to. And who cares what plastic surgeons “usually” do? A doctor who gives boob jobs to women who are already “normal” (not to reconstruct after a mastectomy, for example) is a scourge who is exploiting society’s bad attitudes and exploiting his patients. Not a good doctor. Or are you suggesting that if a lot of people do it, that makes it good?

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

#248

Post by macintux »

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…

> My users are happy.

Are they? I'm skeptical we can know that for any given website; specifically, accessibility is a huge pain point for so many sites, and it would seem difficult to know how many people are turned away from a site because it isn't set up to serve them.

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

#249

Post by taeric »

I want to agree with this, but I do have reservations.

The competing priorities of anything are hard to balance. Try building a physical store sometime. Even a simple garage sale. Layout for navigation and perusal is not a trivial problem. Especially if you don't have the space to make comfort a priority.

To that end, how much is actually broken, versus you notice the maintenance costs? Ever looked at public restrooms? Are they broken, it just under funded?

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

#250

Post by zokier »

criddell wrote: post #120
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…

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?

Java Web Start was a thing, and had some nice aspects to it. JVM startup time has been a problem, and the UI toolkits maybe had some issues? And of course the early JVMs were notoriously full of security holes, which is something browsers somehow managed to avoid.

But nevertheless I think Java/JAWS got basic stuff still right: run applications directly from network (with auto-updates), have security controlled sandbox, be fully cross-platform and portable, and have useful stuff built-in, and even had the PWA-like thing that you could have desktop shortcuts to JAWS applications.

Regarding startup time, I do wonder what would be the startup time of your typical Electron app on a late 90s-early 00s PC hardware. Somehow I'm imaging JVM might not be that bad in comparison...

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