Why must you laugh at my back end? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#211

Post by oemera » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 12:31 PM UTC

I'm little late here but I can't stop but write my response to this.

I know the problem to laugh about code, backend or infrastructure. I know a lot of people are opinionated and if they don't like something you can't stop them firing on you. I'm very happy for you that you found a stack which works for you HOWEVER this doesn't mean that it works for others. A lot of programming languages, paradigms, frameworks and infrastructures just work for one guy on his greenfield project but while getting bigger things get lot harder and crappy cause it isn't modular enough or no-one understands "the legacy code" ect.

At beginning it seems like you can't run into such problems but after a couple months of development this happens nearly in every project. You learning from these mistakes and get better with every project. There are a lot of things in software development people are talking about but you can only truly understand it when you came to the point where you have this problem people are describing to fix.

For example a lot of my old colleagues are in love with PHP. They get stuff done with it and somehow they get code shipped but they don't go for elegance and having less code smells. They just go for "it works what you want more?". Software development is not only "it works" it is far more than that! Maintainable code, readable code, performance, architecture, elegance (for example: less readable code which covers the same as before) you name it.

I found my self learning a lot from different languages, paradigms, people and different systems. For example what I love about linux is: I could write a automatic shell script to do anything. With Windows you can't! You just can't write for every step a shell script a lot of things are only available through the GUI. This bad. I don't like that. And I also don't like to run the GUI on a server. You are wasting a lot of resources here.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#212

Post by MatthewPhillips » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 12:57 PM UTC

shadowfiend wrote: post #109

drblast wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>These are the kind of people (I kid you not) that think HTML tables are a great way to get your page layout just right. Is there are good replacement for HTML tables yet that works well in all browsers? I'm talking about for things that actually need to be laid out in a grid, which, in my experience, is many things. Grids are fairly fundamental to layout and design.

Look at http://960.gs/ to see some examples of stuff that is done, cross-browser, with a CSS grid framework and without tables.

These frameworks all use pixels. If you're developing a mobile app you need percentage based layouts because you must use the entire screen or the experience will suck. Luckily most mobile browsers support flexbox which seems to work relatively well.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#213

Post by trebor » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 1:08 PM UTC

I laugh at your backend because you need to exercise!

(Just a joke, nothing more.)

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#214

Post by evilduck » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 1:49 PM UTC

paganel wrote: post #205

eropple wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm unclear why you replied to me, because you didn't say anything meaningful. I did not say you couldn't build web applications if you were a jerkass who was cavalier with the security of his users' data. I said you shouldn't .

>I did not say you couldn't build web applications if you were a jerkass who was cavalier with the security of his users' data. I said you shouldn't. That would have left us without reddit, I don't know about you, but without it the Internet would have been a lot less interesting.

Compromising user data isn't a prerequisite to building something cool. Negligence is still negligence. Drunk drivers make it home without killing anyone more often than not.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#215

Post by bobstobener » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 2:36 PM UTC

eapen wrote: post #170

As a ColdFusion developer looking for a job in the valley, I also faced all the negativity associated with the language. In fact, I ended up barely mentioning the language on my resume. If the language was renamed to something else and totally re-branded, it would probably gain more respect. Most people still think of the older versions when it was built in C. But since the conversion to Java, it has been able to ben…

Which is very unfortunate because Railo is a great product and, in several ways, superior to the Adobe engine. You're right about the branding aspect.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#216

Post by slowpoke » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 3:43 PM UTC

prawn wrote: post #156

slowpoke wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you have a boss telling you to support IE6, you don't . People need to stop using this prehistoric excuse for a browser.

As you said, some people work at companies that mandate its use - they have no choice. While that's happening, it needs to be considered.

If by no longer supporting IE6 we can force these companies to finally go with the times, then by all means, no, we should not consider this. We cannot endlessly cater to every outdated technology ever.

Besides, these companies have absolutely zero valid reasons to keep using this crutch - it's severely outdated, a giant gaping security hole and a hindrance to the entire world wide web.

And no, legacy applications built upon IE6 on which some corporations have based their entire internal communication (or other things) are not an argument for supporting IE6, but instead gives us all the more reason to force them to get rid of it.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#217

Post by ebiester » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 3:49 PM UTC

JasPanesar wrote: post #149

ebiester wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will admit that my CFML experience is limited to studying it for an interview (that made me not want the job) and learning it well enough to read old source code for a new application based off the old. (The app was MX 7) My primary complaints were (as everyone) the verbosity - I've never seen a more verbose templating system, which led people to copy and paste all around. While there were some CFCs, those were mos…

Verbosity is totally a pain. Interestingly, I didn't know ECMAscript (aka Javascript) is too verbose for folks out there. It turns out that CFML has two syntaxes, script and tag. The tag based html-type that's being discussed here, and and cfscript. Cfscript is is nearly identical to javascript and based on ECMAscript. Several languages follow ECMAscript. In a way, if you know HTML and Javascript, any language should…

I thought that the CFML was the tag language and CFscript was considered separate, and this particular project didn't take advantage of CFscript, but looking around, people aren't too keen on the interfaces given to CFscript, even today.

http://www.clearcrystalmedia.com/pm/full-cfscript-cfcs-not-w...

http://www.forta.com/blog/index.cfm/2011/2/4/I-Am-Not-A-Fan-...

I can speak to a similar adobe product, Flex (and MXML/ActionScript) and at least there, Adobe tried to figure out what would make most sense in MXML, and then the ActionScript interface fell out of that, rather than what made sense for an ActionScript interface. Then, Adobe pointed everyone to the MXML as documentation, rather than having a separate documentation for ActionScript. However, things didn't work exactly the same.

Perhaps life is better in CFland, but Adobe has seemed to have "good enough? Then ship! Our devs will figure out workarounds." in their DNA. Looking at this thread -- http://forums.adobe.com/thread/507720 -- it seems ColdFusion is no exception.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#218

Post by gbog » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 4:47 PM UTC

radagaisus wrote: post #207

antonp wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't know if I write 'best practice' python or django but it's about x6 less code than in PHP. Just curious... Surely you mean django vs php (not zend or some other framework - which _would_ have been the fair comparison.

No, the weird thing is I'm comparing Django to Kohana. The app I worked on in PHP was more complex, but one API page was very similar in both apps: - Kohana: ~200 lines of code. - Django: 15. Seriously.

It's not only a matter of LOCs, it's also that writing code should be enjoyable. Python is, PHP not so.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#219

Post by kemiller » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 5:14 PM UTC

snow_mac wrote: post #186

kemiller wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read pud's comments as essentially the same thing: he has better things to worry about. However. A lot of the leeway in technology choice you might have as a lone-wolf entrepreneur fly out the window once you grow beyond that. If you have no intention of growing beyond, go nuts. Use whatever makes you happy. If you do want to grow more, then be prepared for a rewrite.

Not if you're the guy cutting the checks.

I'm not sure what that's in response to.

Re: Why must you laugh at my back end?

#220

Post by shadowfiend » Wed, Aug 31, 2011, 5:47 PM UTC

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #212

shadowfiend wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at http://960.gs/ to see some examples of stuff that is done, cross-browser, with a CSS grid framework and without tables.

These frameworks all use pixels. If you're developing a mobile app you need percentage based layouts because you must use the entire screen or the experience will suck. Luckily most mobile browsers support flexbox which seems to work relatively well.

True. I don't use 960.gs personally, it just has some good examples (I tend to use compass+susy, but flexbox looks better for mobile).