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

#311

Post by stevenicr » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:14 PM UTC

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…

Interesting take that I more agree with than disagree - However I think " there are an infinite amount of tools both for styling and the code itself."

Is actually one of the symptoms of the issue at large I think.

I understand some sites depend on more complex APIs and such - certainly fbook uses the complex stuff that these frameworks do..

However many people are using wordpress and similar tools simply to have a basic static few bits of info from a few pages display decently on various devices. I too am guilty of such a thing on more than one occasion.

For these cases I am moving towards converting the designs to static html and using a php based script from coffeecup to handle the contact form part that in the past I've lazily just added a two click plugin from wordpress to handle.

I feel that the CSS standards group really dropped the ball with not having better responsive menus 'built in' as a part of the problem that can be solved in the future. Now that grids are built in - the menus that bootstrap does auto-magically for most devices is the missing piece that keeps many sites from being just html/css.

I'd love to go back to netobjects fusion for design, but it has not kept up with the responsive needs of the web. I tried coffeecups site designer in beta and it wasn't for me. I've built dozens of sites using notepad++ and occasionally load up sublimetext for find/replace - but still feel that more visual / wysiwyg type stuff is greatly desired by much of the world.

Wordpress is going more in that design direction as the gutenburg blocks start to work with full site design and not just page content. And I still keep meaning to take the time to try out pinegrow site builder - as that might be the replacement for netobjects that I've longed for.

But it's not just me - there are plenty of people who could / would make a site and find things too complex today - about 7 years ago I found someone in the top 3 search results for a home service - and inquired about their designer / seo .. The guy who was there doing the work told me he made the page in microsoft publisher.

While I'm not advocating for the bloat that Msoft's frontpage pushed into the world, and I know the time of clearpixel alignment is a distant memory, even though we have an infinite amount of tools - it still seems the front end world is more complex than it needs to be.

It is better in some ways and worse in others. I hope CSS gets better menu options so there can be less pieces needed for a decent puzzle. I like non-js sites just fine, and building with less tools is okay too.

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

#312

Post by SilurianWenlock » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

I only have experience with backend non web development, so my experience may not be worth much, but...

Setting up a frontend web app with React (or Angular) is insanely hard to self teach and I would consider myself very good at self learning. Its hard to workout how to integrate React with Bootstrap and you often start to get problems you are not even sure how to fix. When you look at tutorials online, they all have slightly different tech stacks which complicates this further. Second to this working out how and where you get your graphics from is impossible for me.

Frontend blows my mind! (And this comes from a guy who has done +1000 leetcode problems for fun)

Also, in this thread people say this or that is bad without specifying examples of websites and a problem which could be fixed. Is anyone able to name 2 to 3 concrete websites and examples from which others can look at and learn what is wrong?

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

#313

Post by wilsonrocks » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:16 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #65

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 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…

I guess this depends on 'musically diverse' === 'better' though, which isn't necessarily the case when people think about what makes the top 100 tracks for a year.

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

#314

Post by zapzupnz » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

Loads of comments in the Twitter thread trying to pin the blame on someone. It’s product managers; no, its frontend developers; no, it’s backend developers; no, it’s users…

An organisational way of thinking is to figure out whose blame it is and charge them with fixing it.

Me, I don’t give a crap who’s to blame. Just fix it.

Stop collectively waiting for someone to do something about it and just do something about it.

Fix your own code. Make your own code better. Be an example to the world.

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

#315

Post by xyzelement » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

pessimizer wrote: post #303

xyzelement wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ru…

Why do you think your mom's chili wouldn't scale? Do you have any material reason to think that?

I think non scalability is the default assumption. Why do you think it WOULD?

If I stumble into the diner at 3am drink and want a bowl of chilly, guarantee positive outcome. At my mom's, not so.

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

#316

Post by leephillips » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:19 PM UTC

mcrittenden wrote: post #308

leephillips wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Easy: take the front page and remove every headline and introductory paragraph that, for some reason that boggles my mind, is repeated, sometimes more than once, sometimes more than twice, on various areas of the enormous page. Now you have a page with the same information that is lighter and easier to find things on. And less stupid. Another example: sometimes there is a stock ticker near the top of the front page,…

I think the core mismatch here is that you are optimizing for experience and NYT, as a business, is optimizing for revenue. Those two things often do not overlap. I can virtually guarantee you that NYT has spent thousands upon thousands of hours optimizing and multi-variant testing their headline display to maximize conversion. In other words, if they followed your advice, they would be leaving money on the table. As…

You are making my point for me: “you are optimizing for experience and NYT, as a business, is optimizing for revenue.” That is simply an attempt to explain away the bad experience of reading the Times. The explanation is probably correct. But by offering explanations for why the site is bad, you are implicitly agreeing that it is bad.

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

#317

Post by mitchdoogle » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:20 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #65

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 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…

I wonder how deeply tinted your rose-colored glasses need to be to go to these lengths to prove that things were better back in the day.

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

#318

Post by toast0 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:22 PM UTC

criddell wrote: post #257

pjmlp wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

So, X flips the nouns, and the server is the part where the user sits, and the client is the part where the data processing happens.

It used to be possible (and done) to have a thin client X server that would have the whole desktop running elsewhere. You could run a computer lab with a bunch of thin clients and a handful of desktop servers for lack of a better word. That was probably hundreds, maybe thousands.

Since then, though, X moved a lot more work from the Xserver to the clients; text is almost exclusively rendered on the client and passed as an image to the server to display.

If you did a classical experience, it might work ok to millions, but the user experience would have to be pretty meager. There's also the issue that there's not really a good way to sandbox different X clients; so nobody in their right mind would let a random internet server connect to their Xserver. Connectivity issues abound as well.

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

#319

Post by yazaddaruvala » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:25 PM UTC

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 reminds me of why Apple Pie is America’s favorite pie.

50-100 years ago when parents were deciding what pie to make or buy, parent’s favorite was X, eldest kids favorite was Y, youngest kid’s favorite was Z.

Parents instead bought Apple Pie, because it was in everyone’s top 5 favorite pies.

Top 50 is an average of all of the world wide listeners. No one’s favorite songs are in the Top 50, but they are the average top 50.

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

#320

Post by stcredzero » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

I know game developers who lament the passing of Flash. Though the runtime had issues with efficiency and power use, the programming environment was great for games, in terms of being truly write once, run everywhere. Even networking had serious quality of life benefits for both devs and users.

The equivalent in Javascript is an order of magnitude worse in those regards. It's ridden with compatibility problems, everywhere.