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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

#381

Post by jlokier »

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 :-)

Not quite bulletproof. I found a couple of bugs while using it.

At the end, just before submission it showed the completed sections, and you could look at each section to see a tidy summary of the answers provided. Except for the section 1, where doing that jumped to the last of the section's questions instead.

I wanted to see one of the answers I had given in the section 1 to check before committing, and due to the missing summary page, tried stepping backwards and forwards through each question. All were shown, except the question I wanted to check (and had answered) was skipped.

Inspired to try things, I added a non-existent person to the household, then removed the non-existent person.

After that, when I stepped through all questions in section 1 it included the question and answer I'd been looking for, allowing me to confirm it was correct before submission.

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

#382

Post by darkhorse13 »

martinald wrote: post #142
darkhorse13 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure I think this is the important thing here. Everything feels less stable, and more prone to breaking, on the modern web. You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is…

This is a really rose tinted view of the world. Writing JavaScript works ok now the language and browser support has matured. 10 years ago it was a complete nightmare. Regardless without a framework it ends up with you reinventing core framework features anyway. Yes, a framework driven app is more complex if the page/app is extremely simple. But if it is of any complexity a framework driven app is going to be far eas…

Your comment is a common retort, but I think it highly depends on what I'm building. If I'm building something simple, like a CRUD app, I really don't need a framework and won't end up reinventing core framework features.

Give me basic templating and server-side rendering and I'm good to go.

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

#383

Post by trs8080 »

onli wrote: post #223
have_faith wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you could implement the same thing with DOM elements or simply with SVG

In the same way that writing a REST API is "connecting to some DB and simply exposing data via some endpoints" or building a machine learning model is "simply throwing some data at some algorithm and getting a bunch of analysis out" or devops is "simply starting some remote servers" or creating an OS is "simply writing a bootloader and then some stuff on top."

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

#384

Post by ramin_hal9001 »

Others have mentioned the trend of making everything a SPA, which I agree is a huge part of the problem -- it is a cultural issue, not a technological one. Most apps only need to be HTML with minimal client-side scripting. People who teach front-end need to start out by teaching people how to use static site generators, rather than immediately telling everyone they need to start learning React or Vue.

But I'll also say that the web as an app platform was fundamentally broken from the very start, and this is because it was built on a fundamentally bad programming model. *Why is it* that everyone feels the need to use use virtual-DOM frameworks and CSS preprocessors for all the apps they design? Why is it that whenever I build an app for the web, NPM needs to download and compile around 10,000 modules (no exaggeration) in order to build the app?

JavaScript was originally going to be a Lisp-like language, but OOP was in fashion at the time and so it was made to be more like Java. Had it been a Lisp from the start, at least CSS preprocessors would never have become a thing because with Lisp you have macros. I am not saying the web needs to be based on Lisp, although it would definitely help if things started moving toward web assembly so people can start using better programming languages and frameworks than just the ones that compile to JavaScript to program front-end apps.

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

#385

Post by throwaway823882 »

Software development in general has failed.

20 years ago I had an iPAQ, which is basically a handheld Windows machine. Today I have an Android. 20 years ago, the iPAQ had 32 megabytes of storage. My Android, if it only has 32 gigabytes, is used up in a month by just a couple of apps.

I could do the same things 20 years ago with my iPAQ that I do with my Android today. Yet today it requires 1,000 times more storage space and 100 times more processing power.

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

#386

Post by hardwaregeek »

I really dislike these posts. Not because they're wrong. They often have some truth in them, albeit an uncharitable, selective truth. I dislike how these posts just keep on complaining same tired points. I dislike how they don't offer solutions. I dislike how lazy they are. If you're going to offer criticism of front end, then please include some strategy to fix these problems. It doesn't do much to repeat the same "muh SPAs are too slow".

And yeah, I understand that proposing solutions won't fix your state's DMV site from sucking, but it's at least constructive. It at least makes it feel like you're trying to help instead of keyboard criticizing. Even better, build products with these solutions! Plenty of users would love fast, efficient sites. I know I love it when Hacker News opens instantaneously.

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

#387

Post by axguscbklp »

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…

Yeah it's strange. For example, Facebook has billions of dollars, thousands of developers, and they themselves created the front end framework that they are using - yet Facebook's front end is slow and glitchy.

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

#388

Post by camgunz »

JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #204
jefftk wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doing most of the work on the client instead of the server can often make scaling much easier. I read your comment as assuming that the division between the server's job and the client's job is fixed, but as the browser has become more powerful many things have moved to the client.

Doing the work on the client can sometimes be the right choice, but I'll share a converse point. I was tasked with implementing a bulk record upload feature. The UI was to accept up a CSV file with up to 1 million records. The API provided by the backend team accept max 1,000 records in JSON. So now I have to convert CSV, for which there's no official specification, to JSON, and then make (up to) 1,000 HTTP requests…

If you backend team doesn't hear "I might have to make 1000 requests" and immediately think "oh that probably times out" and "oh do we have to re-batch that data" and immediately make a file upload endpoint, they're committing malpractice. Good grief.

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

#389

Post by ec109685 »

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…

The New York Times used to be a mess on mobile where swiping back was a 5 second wait until the SPA synced. It is much better today, so either they ditched the SPA or have now fully simulated a browser’s back and forward behavior.

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

#390

Post by onli »

trs8080 wrote: post #383
onli wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> you could implement the same thing with DOM elements or simply with SVG In the same way that writing a REST API is "connecting to some DB and simply exposing data via some endpoints" or building a machine learning model is "simply throwing some data at some algorithm and getting a bunch of analysis out" or devops is "simply starting some remote servers" or creating an OS is "simply writing a bootloader and then som…

No. In the way that having written UIs that go into that direction, adding refinements to them and adding performance improvements does not change the base characteristics of what has to be written.

Remember, my comment was a response to the claim that something like Figma could not be done before the current frontend development complexity mania. But there is nothing in that collection of bad tools that is necessary to write a canvas based UI like that. It could have been done before and it most likely has been done before.

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