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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

#441

Post by caseymarquis »

antonzabirko wrote: post #178
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…

You are confused about your comparisons because the largest reason for FE failure is bloated code, an unrelated problem to the dangers of C.

C is to Rust as Webpack is to ______.

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

#443

Post by BackBlast »

chrononaut wrote: post #409
alerighi wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have to distinguish websites from web applications. Websites have no reason to use JavaScript. They should be a collection of documents, possibly generate dynamically on the server side, but to the user HTML+CSS that can be viewed in a browser, downloaded with curl, viewed as source code, etc. Web applications have no reason to exist. Basically we are turning the browser into a JVM, a way to run code portably. But…

As someone who doesn't do neither front-end nor back-end development I think this comment does the best job in this thread summarizing pitfalls I've observed as a user. Although you probably (?) want to add that OS maintainers are slowly turning their repository of available OS-level applications into walled gardens, which I could see may push some developers to currently prefer web application implementations.

The web is the closest we have to an open universal platform. If you want the most bang for the buck as a business in developing widely accessible software, you build a website/webapp first.

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

#444

Post by bawolff »

austincheney wrote: post #433
chubot wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This person has a weird unjustified objection to querySelector. I remembered this same conversation from 8 months ago where I pointed out that parsing something like '#foo' is NOT slow, he argued against it, 5 people pointed out the same thing, and he was not receptive to that feedback, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24054745 Performance is hard; optimizing the wrong thing is also a problem ...

I guess you ignored this from that thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24057163 If jsPerf is down try http://jsbench.github.io/

What precisely do you think a microbenchmark taken out of context is going to prove?

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

#445

Post by mixmastamyk »

chubot wrote: post #403
chubot wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah what's weird is that there's is an entire generation of developers who think of SPA as the default. They think that server side is slower because you have to send down more data, or you have to wait for the server to generate HTML. Quite the contrary, it's slower to send down 1 MB or 10 MB of JavaScript to render a page, than to simply send down a 100 KB HTML page. Even if you need some JS also, browsers know ho…

Thinking about it a bit more, Reddit is a really good example because it launched and got popular before the iPhone or the App Store existed (2006 or so). It was a fast and minimal site back then, similar to what Google used to be. Either the existence of the mobile app, or the drive to get people to install it, ruined the website. It's slower and has poorer usability than 5 years ago, and also 15 years ago. Twitter…

Indeed about twitter, I won't follow about 95% of links there due to the issue you mention.

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

#446

Post by gls2ro »

mmcnl wrote: post #357
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 is a very simplistic characterization of what's happening. First of all, for all the broken websites there are also a lot of websites that are not broken at all. It's also very easy to make a broken website using a completely server-side rendered website, and that actually happens often enough. Second, SPA's decouple frontend and backend in a very strict way, which can bring enormous organizational benefits. Tim…

> Time to market is greatly improved

Can you please clarify this?

If you are referring to a web app time to market I mostly see otherwise.

Here is an example: create a form to edit user settings. In Rails/Django it is pretty simple straightforward. But if you go React then you have an API and a component in React and have to think about routes and security of API and validations on both FE and BE.

There are advantages for SPA probably but time to market is not one of them in this case.

If you are referring to creating a mobile app and a webapp then maybe React with React Native is indeed faster. With this I agree. But I personally prefer to wait for Hotwire to launch their mobile framework and use that.

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

#448

Post by emteycz »

tyingq wrote: post #395
rabuse wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I really believe it's a case of resume driven development. I'm sure there are counter-examples, but the whole move to SPAs, from my vantage point, has been driven by tech people and not leaders. Self-inflicted.

You're making software engineers way more important than they are. They don't hold this kind of decision power except in the smallest companies. In most cases of SME and large enterprises, there is a VP, a director or sometimes a "chapter lead" pushing it (in my experience, 9/10 times they believe this push will get them a promotion, as they "helped to move the company towards an important new technology"); has nothing to do with resumes.

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

#449

Post by nielsole »

cjbconnor wrote: post #56
okareaman wrote: post #14

I recently lost my internet provider, so while I wait for a new one I'm tethering from my phone. The Verizon unlimited data plan actually throttles me to modem speed, about 56k, so it's actually not unlimited. Anyway, it's been interesting to judge various websites by how fast they load at that speed. Hacker News comes right up. Twitter is acceptable. Facebook is terrible and often does not even load at all. The same…

You can bypass the speed restrictions by decreasing the TTL on your machine by 1 [0], I tested it and it worked perfectly. [0] https://android.stackexchange.com/questions/226580/how-is-ve...

The answer you linked talks about _increasing_ the TTL on your machine.

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

#450

Post by tyingq »

emteycz wrote: post #448
tyingq wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really believe it's a case of resume driven development. I'm sure there are counter-examples, but the whole move to SPAs, from my vantage point, has been driven by tech people and not leaders. Self-inflicted.

You're making software engineers way more important than they are. They don't hold this kind of decision power except in the smallest companies. In most cases of SME and large enterprises, there is a VP, a director or sometimes a "chapter lead" pushing it (in my experience, 9/10 times they believe this push will get them a promotion, as they "helped to move the company towards an important new technology"); has nothi…

I've had the opposite experience in this specific case.
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