I can only think that modern front end development has failed • Hacker News Board

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

#271

Post by wideareanetwork » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

That’s a really negative, glass is half full viewpoint. How can anyone not see the incredible wealth of unbelievable awesome that is the modern web?

How can anyone use 200 popular websites and see shit instead of being astounded by how awesome it all is?

I look at the same thing and see unbelievably powerful web applications, the web browser as the most sophisticated fabulous software ever built (alongside Linux), a constant drive amongst front end developers/libraries/tools for new and better ways of doing things.

And I see so many websites that it’s impossible to make sweeping generalizations about front end development.

The world contains certain people who want to see the bad... this is what’s happening here.

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

#272

Post by arcturus17 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:39 PM UTC

antirez wrote: post #84

notjustanymike wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have a different opinion. When we moved from the old way to semantical HTML5 generated still server side but which the layout was defined by the finally mature CSS, with the dynamic parts handed by JavaScript and RPCs, everybody agreed it was better. Such web was faster, more compatible, simpler to parse, and so forth. I think that, if in the 20 years that followed, frontend development would progress in the same d…

I’ve heard and read stories from seasoned engineers, here on HN and elsewhere, that say that FE dev was as prone to tire fires back then as it is now, so I don’t think that point is as incontrovertible as you claim it to be.

Some of those seasoned old-school engineers have, believe it or not, embraced modern FE frameworks and architectures and wouldn’t go back to the old thing if you paid them to do so. I’ve seen testimonials here on HN and surely it must be a factor in the world moving in this direction - it was not the juniors who made these decisions after all.

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

#273

Post by polynomial » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #245

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 T…

How can a government contractor reasonably justify a price tag that's on par with fancy bloated non-government sites, for an no nonsense form + js approach?

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

#274

Post by coldtea » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

sdfhbdf wrote: post #111

coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and…

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…

>The articles you're linking are proven to be misrepresenting.

Citation needed. The articles are actual proof and measurements, whereas Tantacrul's take is just an opinion.

>They for example look at a really small subset of music "Million song dataset" and only analysed basic metrics that could be automatically measured.

The "small subset of music" is the most popular music of any year. That is what reveals music tastes over time, and this is the kind of music that permeates culture.

As for the "basic metrics" there's not basic as in trite/insignificant but basic as fundamental.

It's just that some people want so much to cling to "each period is the same, there are no ups and downs in cultural production" to not be seen as backwards oldsters, whereas milenia of history teaches that that there are absolutely ups and downs in cultural production (periods of stagnation, etc).

>it's a major simplification to say that "all music is worse now"

It's also a strawman. Nobody said that here.

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

#275

Post by xyzelement » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

leephillips wrote: post #240

johnfn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, not at all. It is more like saying that I make better food than almost all restaurants in town. Which of course is not true, and that’s the point. Because I do make better websites than almost any I come across in the wild. Your question about handling traffic is orthogonal to the topic of design. The answer is that any of my sites would do better, given the same server architecture, because I deliberately limit…

I think their analogy may still hold.

My mom claims her cooking is better than the restaurants (arguable) but she's not operating under the constraints of cooking at the variety, consistency and speed that my local diner does. The diner needs to be able to provide hundreds of dishes on short order including on days when the main chef is out. So maybe my mom's once-in-a-while pot of chilly is great but she couldn't run scale to run a profitable diner.

Similarly, sounds like you are hand crafting awesome websites on your own whim and schedule. That's awesome - me too - and I've done amazing handcrafted HTML/js/css for fun.

And then I go to work and manage an organization whose front-end experiences are decidedly not hand crafted and I feel great about that. Our product helps people navigate one of the most important decisions of their life and and sacrificing our ability to iterate quickly at the expense of hand crafted front-end code would be the wrong call. Like my mom's chilly it wouldn't scale.

You'd look at my work product and say "ugh what a badly crafted website" and I'll take the criticism but I wouldn't change it.

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

#276

Post by JMTQp8lwXL » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:43 PM UTC

1337shadow wrote: post #263

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Exactly, you can see that the webcomponent I linked is microfrontend. Interestingly, I first ported the code to StencilJS, but then it seemed the framework actually got in my way and I removed it, I prefer the code as is now and there's not even a build because it's vannillajs. You just add the script tag in your page and start using the tags with your options. I used the mdn custom element documentation without any…

I like what I'm seeing in Web Component technology, but it's not fully there for me yet.

Suppose your base Design System is web components. Most Microfrontend (MFE) teams will still pick up an off-the-shelf React, Vue, Angular, etc.

But VDOM and web components don't always play nicely. If you have Parent-Child web components, specifically 1 parent with N-immediate children, React can't resolve this gracefully. Every render past the first breaks with Stencil. That's a pretty significant issue, because (very) common components like Select dropdowns are modeled as 1 parent with N immediate children.

So you can't any longer stay in React's declarative model. The workaround (last comment in issue) has you writing imperative code to fix the problem.

It has that "using D3 in React" vibe to it. It works, but it's not nearly as elegant as if you had, say, a React-based Design System (but then, of course, all your MFE teams must use React).

https://github.com/ionic-team/stencil/issues/2259

Users have also reported the same analogous issue exists for using Web Components in Vue too, so it's not even a React-specific shortcoming.

https://github.com/ionic-team/stencil/issues/2259#issuecomme...

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

#277

Post by arcturus17 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:44 PM UTC

Drew_ wrote: post #194

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…

> Others say that the web is slow because of ADs This is pretty much objective truth in my mind. I might agree with people who hate the web if I always had to browse with ads enabled.

My worst experiences in the web come from mobile media (news) sites where I can’t block ads. They are absolute dumpster fires.

Everything else, including the aforementioned sites when ads are blocked, is pretty decent in my experience.

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

#278

Post by rsj_hn » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:44 PM UTC

notjustanymike wrote: post #176

frosted-flakes wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon's user experience is fantastic. Why else do you think they are so commercially successful?

Amazon pages are a cluttered mess, but they are a -familiar- cluttered mess because everyone has used Amazon for so long. Amazon succeeds in spite of its design, because everyone has become familiar with how it works. This approach would not work outside of Amazon, which Nielsen Norman discussed some 15 years ago ( https://www.nngroup.com/articles/amazon-no-e-commerce-role-m... )

> Amazon pages are a cluttered mess

Ahh, you want "clean" design where maybe there is just one box with beautiful font and not all these options "cluttering" things. You want those options buried in an option tree maybe 8 levels deep.

Well, I'm pretty sick of this minimalist design philosophy that requires 10x more clicks to accomplish anything because a designer decided the original was just too easy to use and wasn't "engaging enough" to generate enough clicks. They have made the web a much worse place for getting stuff done online, and it's no wonder that Amazon, the home of one-click purchasing, has continued optimizing for having the UI get out of your way and accomplish the most with the least effort rather than building attention-seeking UI "experiences" that require lots of interactivity to get simple things done.

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

#279

Post by neilv » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

Soon after Web banner ads appeared, researchers discovered that users quickly learned to tune them out.

Sometime after that (after clumsy false starts), what used to be advertising people took over the nature of the Web.

HCI and human factors engineering (i.e., technology in service of the user's goals) was largely forgotten, and UX (i.e., technology in service of the developer) was born.

Be skeptical of most UX you've seen, since much of what we're now taught, much of what tools/platforms are available, much of what the jobs are... are now generations away from the needs of users. If you want to genuinely serve the needs of users, question everything, including all the implicit and explicit conventions of your field.

Product concept and design are in some ways harder than they used to be, since, e.g., users' conceptual models, fashion, and available platforms/technologies have been shaped by a pervasively user-hostile and manipulative environment. But, as designers, you still have a lot of leeway to operate creatively within that. Question everything.

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

#280

Post by aiisahik » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:45 PM UTC

I can only think that modern power generation systems have failed. There are so many advances in power generation in the last 100 years - from nuclear, wind, solar, hydro, and even biothermal. Yet when I look around all there are so many dirty combustion engines and coal power plants spewing greenhouse gasses and toxic fumes.

Both statements are moronic. Taking advantage of modern design philosophy, modern CDNs, modern framework - all of that takes time, attention and MONEY. If you don't put in the investment in all of these, the fact that you have access to "modern frontend development" is meaningless. It's like asking why is not everyone in the world driving Teslas.