Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 398 posts

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#121

Post by tjansen »

WandaVision wrote: post #114

Unpopular biased opinion. Frontend development is mostly done by people who are into visual things and less into logic. Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit and less by visual appearance. This leads to the adaptation of large number of garbage frameworks in frontend primarily because their landing pages look visually appealing. After some time fronten…

Hmm... in the early days of HTML+CSS, there were a lot of visual people in the field. Some of them wrote some JavaScript, but stopped when things got too complex. These days they are doing UX design or create designs in Figma, and don't really touch code anymore.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#123

Post by oliwarner »

WandaVision wrote: post #114

Unpopular biased opinion. Frontend development is mostly done by people who are into visual things and less into logic. Unlike backend engineering, where people working are primarily choosing technology based on logic/merit and less by visual appearance. This leads to the adaptation of large number of garbage frameworks in frontend primarily because their landing pages look visually appealing. After some time fronten…

You're discounting interface work. User experience, etc.

That isn't just making things pretty, but finding the best ways to display data, get input, etc.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#124

Post by azangru »

> Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

The browsers became more capable (as someone said in another comment, they are effectively shooting for operating systems now), and more ambitious projects became possible. Consider such web apps as:

    - Google Maps
    - Google Docs
    - Google Meet
    - Youtube
    - Adobe Photoshop online
    - Figma (or Penpot)
    - Miro (or Mural)
    - Excalidraw (or diagrams.net, or lucid charts)
    - Slack (or Discord)
    - ...etc
> Is that complexity necessary or artificially inflated?

This entirely depends on the product. You need the complexity for some products; and not for others.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#125

Post by haspok »

I recently transitioned to a "full-stack dev" role (using React on FE), and honestly, it is much _simpler_ than I expected. I had the opinion before that FE is lacking the breadth of BE development, but of course, without actual experience in the matter I might have missed something.

Now that I'm 2 months in, I still don't see the complexity, actually, if anything, React makes stuff so much _simpler_ due to its leaning heavily towards FP (to me, the class-based approach of React seems more complicated than the hook-based, for example, deciding what `this` points to at any given time in Javascript is no small feat - with functions/closures, you don't have this problem). There is depth for sure, handling all the possible errors and edge cases requires care and attention, just like in the BE.

To me the only shock so far was how low level all the stuff is, I mean come on, we had Delphi in the past millenium already, creating a form with a text field and connecting it to a field in a data structure was a solved problem back then... a "one liner" if you will, now you have to independently manage the state and handle events for each field? Come on, there must be a higher level library that solves this!

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#126

Post by ilrwbwrkhv »

andix wrote: post #22
mojuba wrote: post #12

It's artificially inflated and I'm seeing this in almost all areas, not just frontend. Some of the projects I've seen could have been reduced in size multiple times with no effect on the outcome whatsoever. In one instance I rewrote a GUI app and made it 15 times smaller (!), that's my absolute record to date. Been wondering for years, so you need to actually be inventive to add unnecessary complexity, it's not that…

One of the best examples of this complexity inflation problem I always see is the Redux pattern in frontends. This pattern comes with a lot of overhead, a lot of things that need to line up (Actions, Reducers, Actioncreators, Selectors, ...). And most of the time the applications that use it are completely trivial. If you remove Redux, half of the code is gone, it's faster and easier to understand and extend.

All this complexity is actually a counter reaction to frontend developers not being considered to be real developers. They went overboard trying to prove that they are.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#127

Post by zitterbewegung »

Frontend development has risen as an alternative so that it's much easier to not program for native frontend system but instead hiring "fullstack" developers and or purely frontend developers. The complexity of these frameworks correspond with applications that are either web first and or electron based. The complexity is necessary in certain situations but at this time it is very artificially inflated because of the fact of ease of hiring and that most people and or frameworks that propagate by word of mouth or just following what others in the industry do.

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#128

Post by greggman3 »

eterm wrote: post #33
claudiulodro wrote: post #16

Because the browser nowadays is an "operating system" that needs to be capable of handling all manner of dynamic software: maps, video, image editors, games, etc. I haven't done Windows development, but I assume browser-based development complexity will continue trending towards essentially the same complexity as developing e.g. a Windows program.

TWenty years ago windows development was a lot simpler than modern browser applications. Fire up visual studio and create a new winforms project. You could literally drag and drop your way to a modest application with only minimal programming 'under the hood' for the business logic. I still don't think anything has surpassed the usability of winforms for a developer just wanting to get something done.

drag and drop forms from 20 years ago assumed a desktop PC. Today your form has to work on mobile

Re: Ask HN: Why did Frontend development explode in complexity?

#130

Post by tjansen »

Back in the days of mostly static HTML, and maybe some simple JS for effects, you didn't need much complexity in the Frontend. Most logic was in the backend. That logic has moved to the Frontend, and so has the complexity. Yes, Frontends are more complex than ever before. But at the same time, backends have never been simpler. Most backend devs just implement some simple CRUD APIs for the Frontend code.

The UIs also have become more complex. In early web apps, you submitted a form and got feedback only after submission. The expectations for modern web apps are much higher. Everything has to be evaluated as soon as possible, possibly while the user is entering it. Responses should show up immediately, so there is a lot of caching in the frontend. It all adds up.

Post reply on HN