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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

#251

Post by rabuse »

csbartus wrote: post #241

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, host…

It's just so easy to write horribly structured code in JS. It's where PHP was years ago, where everything was just slapped together, and you just pray for no errors.

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

#252

Post by toss1 »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #118
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 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…

This entire read seems to be that things are much better for YOU, the front-end developer.

And yes, that makes a difference, you can deliver more features, faster, more reliably.

But, if those sites just bog down and take double-digit seconds to load, even when properly deployed on scaleable delivery architectures, with fiber-optic speeds, and CAD/gamer-level power machines, they are junk.

And I increasingly see exactly this junk been over the last few years. Even (and often especially) the major sites are worse than ever. For example, on the above setup, I've reverted Gmail to the HTML-only version to get some semblance of performance.

Sure, some of this could be related to Firefox' developments to isolate tabs and not reuse code across local containers and sessions, but expecting to get away with shipping steaming piles of cruft because you expect most of it will be pre-cached is no excuse.

Your site might have the look and features of a Ferrari, but if it has the weight of a loaded dump truck, it will still suck. If you are not testing and requiring good performance on a rural DSL line and mid-level laptop (or similar example of constrained performance), you are doing it wrong.

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

#253

Post by tpmx »

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?

The reason it's so hard to come up with a feasible alternative at this point is that we have done ~15 years of browser wars with perhaps an average of 3k "core" contributors (browser company employees etc) since "we" moved into this direction... pretty much by chance.

My understanding from working at Opera at the time (2004 and onwards) is that the "senior" (experienced) people were busy implementing stuff in the browser engines and various GUI platforms. We hired very young (often like 17-18) and very smart people who had experience actually writing HTML/CSS/JS to work on developing web standards. They naturally typically had very little commercial software development experience.

After a while it kinda became a competition - which browser company's web standards people would be leading in terms of ideas/innovations. How many web APIs could browser company A do, vs browser company B. That's when the complexity really started accelerating. Then Safari and Chrome happened.

I wish we had spent more time working with these web standards people (we had so much experience building GUIs, for instance). They were really friendly and approachable, but we were all so busy with actually building the browsers, during these browser war times. It feels like a missed opportunity, in retrospect.

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

#254

Post by joduplessis »

It has?

I can think of very few areas in software development where there is this much innovation & diversity in frameworks & approaches to building something. Maybe our approach to usability has failed with all our "necessary" popups & cookie dialogues - there I agree. But to say "front end development" has failed simply because its evolved is a bit myopic IMO.

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

#255

Post by bobthepanda »

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.

Not necessarily. That might be true if the top X you're tracking is also expanding along with the size of the catalog, but isn't true if X is fixed, like a top 100 music chart.

More common variants of more popular genres could easily crowd out moderately popular genres. The long tail has been a long noted issue at Spotify with several attempts at fixing.

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

#256

Post by Drew_ »

okareaman wrote: post #238
Drew_ wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no additional overhead in nesting React components vs normal HTML elements. React-rendered and normally rendered HTML are identical.

Dan Ambramov has stated the reason hooks was created was to avoid nesting hell that was used to manage state. I may be misunderstanding him. I am not s React expert.

React hooks are just Javascript functions. The layout of your application is unaffected by the shape of your application state. Instead the shape of your application's state is typically governed by its layout.

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

#257

Post by criddell »

pjmlp wrote: post #183
criddell wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Does X scale? Can you have thousands or even millions of simultaneous clients hitting a server?

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

#258

Post by mattwad »

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…

this isn't just a problem with SPAs. The quickly-built vaccine registration site I was using kept giving me 500 errors from Heroku.

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

#259

Post by cuddlecake »

anthk wrote: post #169
sdfhbdf wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The articles you're linking are proven to be misrepresenting. They for example look at a really small subset of music "Million song dataset" and only analysed basic metrics that could be automatically measured. To be honest I think the linked Spanish paper and the senationalist "Science proves modern music is bad" should be retracted since the methodology is flawed. Don't take my word for it, take Tantacrul's - compo…

>(synths, electronic, hip-hop) Synth began in the 70's, and Moroder/Jarre is far better than the 90% of today's crap.

If it's better than 90% of today's synth music, does that mean that 10% of today's music is better than Moroder/Jarre?

That's a lot!

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

#260

Post by jonplackett »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #185
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 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 :-)

Yeah I was pretty impressed with it too. One thing I liked, it does lots of error checking along the way to pick up accidental screw ups.

Eg. It says ‘what is your date of birth?’ And then on the next page it says. ‘You are X years old. Is that correct?’

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