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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#621

Post by CRConrad »

hnuser847 wrote: post #104
afarrell wrote: post #17

> Programming is engineering Is it? Genuine question that I've been asking myself for the past several years: In what senses is software engineering actually an engineering discipline? If you make a project trade-off for the sake of code maintainability, is that based on empirically tested knowledge or following a design pattern guided by an artisan's intuition about how code will be interpreted?

I truly think it's more craft than engineering, and even that's somewhat generous. It's mostly guesswork, hacks, inter-team politics, and trend chasing. Imagine an engineering team designing a toaster. They have real constraints to consider, like physically fitting all of the components inside a single package and selecting materials that won't melt during operation. They have to ensure that product won't injure the…

> Imagine an engineering team designing a toaster.

Heh... That supports TFA's point (if taken broadly as "old tech was better tech") in yet another way: Harking back to the famous Technology Connections YouTube video, the best toaster ever was conceived sometime in the 1940s or 50s.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#622

Post by CRConrad »

profmonocle wrote: post #171

> well, perhaps with the only exception that now a 2 year old baby can make something shiny that you can click on with your mouse. Rudeness aside, this shouldn't be dismissed. The same designers you already have on staff who make your web sites look nice can make your desktop apps look nice using the skills they already have. Things like React Native mean that the engineers who make your web app can make your mobile…

> The same designers you already have on staff who make your web sites look nice can make your desktop apps look nice using the skills they already have.

Wrong way around. The opposite, yes, but not this way.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#623

Post by CRConrad »

bdavis__ wrote: post #42
KennyBlanken wrote: post #9

Will random tech people with blogs ever going to stop submitting clickbait-titled blog posts? The actual subject of the rant: > Why in the world has this idiotic trend of abstracting everything away by layers upon layers of complexity gained such a strong foothold in the industry?

up next, chapter 2, about the docker infrastructure.

Someone else already wrote that and posted a link in this very thread: http://www.smashcompany.com/technology/my-final-post-regardi...

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#624

Post by npn »

Joeri wrote: post #498
phailhaus wrote: post #85

I feel comfortable with asserting that the author has never worked on a complex web application. This web-dev hate borders on pathological: this is a guy that seems to specialize in Unix/Linux tooling, doesn't have a single tutorial on web app development [1], and yet has an intense hatred towards a space that he barely understands. These types of arguments are incredibly embarrassing to read, not only because they b…

I have been in professional web development since 2004 and I mostly agree with the author that there are massive amounts of groupthink going on. "Modern" web development has standardized in tool stacks which are insanely complicated, far beyond anything that is warranted in most cases. We have forgotten how to make simple things in simple ways. At a minimum you need node, npm, webpack, babel, an spa framework, a fron…

> At a minimum you need node, npm, webpack, babel, an spa framework, a frontend router, a css transpiler, a css framework, a test runner, a testing functions library, and a bunch of smaller things, and that's just what is "needed" to build a static website with a bit of interaction.

no you don't. just because you use react doesn't mean that everyone else also has to do the same.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#625

Post by johnchristopher »

> In the past IT people, whether we're talking about programmers or something else, were very clever people. People with a high level of intelligence that took serious pride in doing things in a meaningful and pragmatic way.

Yeah, I wouldn't be so sure about that. Lot of self taught who blew up things big time and are deeply familiar with the stack that the company they have been working at for 20 years relies on but would be lost in another company.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#626

Post by Handytinge »

phailhaus wrote: post #619
Joeri wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been in professional web development since 2004 and I mostly agree with the author that there are massive amounts of groupthink going on. "Modern" web development has standardized in tool stacks which are insanely complicated, far beyond anything that is warranted in most cases. We have forgotten how to make simple things in simple ways. At a minimum you need node, npm, webpack, babel, an spa framework, a fron…

> Why do we need npm or babel at all to make a simple web frontend? See, that's a reasonable argument: many companies tend to reach for complex web tooling when simpler tools would do for the task at hand. But that's not what the author is arguing. He's convinced that none of this tooling should have ever been produced in the first place, it exists solely to stroke the egos of their creators, and anyone who uses it i…

Wouldn't you agree though that the vast majority of clients don't have that complex a need?

These tools are taught to new developers as "the way things are", yet a significant portion of them statistically must be working in lower complexity environments that may not be serves by this level of tooling.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#627

Post by lucideer »

omgitsabird wrote: post #578
lucideer wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I specifically said "large PHP applications" instead of just "PHP applications" because the difficulty is not in writing, it's in auditing and enforcing. Even within templating libraries there are different levels of advancement around context-awareness: e.g. is still dangerous in languages like Twig, and is similarly challenging to audit. Alternatives like Latte mitigate this but even Twig is still a large degree ea…

"Large PHP applications" doesn't immediately express to me that you combine styles, scripts, and markup in your templates and have a need for automated context-aware escaping.

It doesn't need to.

"Large PHP application" just means "at scale", in terms of LoC, and - most likely - contributors. Which means (a) potentially anything may be combined in templates by somebody at some point without careful manual code-review, which is difficult to audit at scale, and (b) there are a larger number of files to audit, likely with a degree of complexity to their overall structure, which further adds to that difficulty.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#628

Post by phailhaus »

Handytinge wrote: post #626
phailhaus wrote: post #619

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do we need npm or babel at all to make a simple web frontend? See, that's a reasonable argument: many companies tend to reach for complex web tooling when simpler tools would do for the task at hand. But that's not what the author is arguing. He's convinced that none of this tooling should have ever been produced in the first place, it exists solely to stroke the egos of their creators, and anyone who uses it i…

Wouldn't you agree though that the vast majority of clients don't have that complex a need? These tools are taught to new developers as "the way things are", yet a significant portion of them statistically must be working in lower complexity environments that may not be serves by this level of tooling.

Sure, but again, the author is explicitly not arguing that. Look:

> They keep inventing "revolutionary new ways" of doing the same thing that could be done in a dozen ways already. And they do that by coating more and more and more unnecessary complexity on top of existing technology stacks.

He's mad that the tools exist at all. He's going after the people making them, not just using them.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#629

Post by omgitsabird »

lucideer wrote: post #627
omgitsabird wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Large PHP applications" doesn't immediately express to me that you combine styles, scripts, and markup in your templates and have a need for automated context-aware escaping.

It doesn't need to. "Large PHP application" just means "at scale", in terms of LoC, and - most likely - contributors. Which means (a) potentially anything may be combined in templates by somebody at some point without careful manual code-review, which is difficult to audit at scale, and (b) there are a larger number of files to audit, likely with a degree of complexity to their overall structure, which further adds t…

You can overcome this using a linter that doesn't allow expressions in those contexts, no?
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