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Things engineers believe about Web development

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Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#61

Post by pi-e-sigma »

seszett wrote: post #44
dustingetz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the problem" "you should" – this is the language of special interests developers are salarymaxxing first, second virtue signaling to support their case in their employers' selection process, third work-minimization and pain-minimization. Even the Simplicity Paladins are min/maxxing the same three priorities, perhaps weighing pain-minimization above salarymaxxing, yet still subject to the same invisible macro forces…

I feel like we live in completely different worlds.

You have never seen the resume-driven development? Lucky you, because it's the vast majority of development out there

Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#62

Post by blackoil »

ryanbrunner wrote: post #6

The refrain against the "we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML" is often "well what about Figma and Photoshop", which of course, yes those don't really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model. The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The…

> The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites

It is not only Figma or Photoshop. Any site with multiple steps of interactions or complex filters over search result etc. benefit from SPA and declarative code. The experience is smoother and development of anything, but simple forms is much faster.

People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business.

Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#63

Post by xigoi »

blackoil wrote: post #62
ryanbrunner wrote: post #6

The refrain against the "we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML" is often "well what about Figma and Photoshop", which of course, yes those don't really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model. The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The…

> The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites It is not only Figma or Photoshop. Any site with multiple steps of interactions or complex filters over search result etc. benefit from SPA and declarative code. The experience is smoother and development of anything, but simple forms is much faster. People disabling JS or working on satellite internet f…

> People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business.

How about people working on a train?

Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#64

Post by lacerrr »

traverseda wrote: post #21
ryanbrunner wrote: post #6

The refrain against the "we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML" is often "well what about Figma and Photoshop", which of course, yes those don't really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model. The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The…

For stuff like figma and photoshop I can't help but suspect that the creators would be better of writing their program in CPP with the GUI toolkit of their choice, and compiling it for the web with emscripten.

I tend to dislike this approach for the simple reason that it's an extra "compatibility layer" where you give up control. If you're developing for the web you may every now and then want to do things a specific way or use a specific feature and be unable to do so because the transpiler doesn't support it or is programmed not to.

Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#65

Post by endisneigh »

Xeamek wrote: post #59
endisneigh wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you should strive for the simplest tool possible, and even further, you should strive to make solutions that require the simplest tools possible whenever you can. Why do you believe this? I couldn’t disagree more. People should strive for the most effective tool, and most of the time that’s what they already know, unless some new tools’ efficacy outweighs cost to learn it

>most of the time that’s what they already know, unless some new tools effficacy outweighs cost to learn it ....which any proponent of the new tool will argue it does

Yes which is why you should generally stick with what you know until you have an actual problem that needs solving…

SPA, MPA, who cares. Ship.

Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#66

Post by danielvaughn »

> When I worked on animations, I was surprised at how many people believed that some animations “run on the GPU” (the browser can offload some animations to a separate process or thread that updates animations using the GPU to composite or even paint each frame but it doesn’t offload them to the GPU wholesale)

Not to nitpick his nitpick, but...I've said this exact thing in the past, and his parenthesized explanation is what I meant. It's too much of a mouthful to try and be super accurate and specific all the time.

Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#67

Post by lacerrr »

diggan wrote: post #23
dustingetz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the problem" "you should" – this is the language of special interests developers are salarymaxxing first, second virtue signaling to support their case in their employers' selection process, third work-minimization and pain-minimization. Even the Simplicity Paladins are min/maxxing the same three priorities, perhaps weighing pain-minimization above salarymaxxing, yet still subject to the same invisible macro forces…

I feel like I understand 50% of your comment, is this some DSL from a different ecosystem being used to explain developer behavior, or something like that?

Lol, this is written in very game-like language where you often need to prioritize certain aspects (to max something) above others. This is often because you get a limited number of "ability points" when you level up, so "maxing" strength means you prioritize using those points to gain strength.

Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#68

Post by t8sr »

blackoil wrote: post #62
ryanbrunner wrote: post #6

The refrain against the "we should go back to MPA apps with server rendered HTML" is often "well what about Figma and Photoshop", which of course, yes those don't really work in the MPA, server rendered HTML model. The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites because it sounds sexier and cooler to work on something complex than something simple. The…

> The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites It is not only Figma or Photoshop. Any site with multiple steps of interactions or complex filters over search result etc. benefit from SPA and declarative code. The experience is smoother and development of anything, but simple forms is much faster. People disabling JS or working on satellite internet f…

This attitude is the reason why I now dread filling out any random web form, because a poorly implemented crappy JavaScript ”flow” will take over my browser, break the back button, accessibility and autofill features and randomly fail and start over in step 6 out of 19. It’s the reason why a simple web form requires 100 MB of bandwidth to deal with.

People working from a train or on data roaming are not a fringe case. They have amounts of bandwidth that, 20 years ago, were enough to serve any complex web experience. It’s not acceptable that we now require more data than is contained in all the books in the library of congress to buy a ticket on Ticketmaster.

I can’t understand how someone looks at the ratio of useful action to code size, sees it’s something like 1:1e6, and thinks this is fine.

The modern web’s usability, efficiency and reliability are terrible, and worse each year. Defending the tech stack that led to this with “it’s a good UX” is both wrong and makes me feel like web devs live on another planet from the rest of us.

Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#69

Post by Const-me »

diggan wrote: post #52
Const-me wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On Windows, WPF is better: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Presentation_Foundatio... The critical features missing from HTML are data binding and data templates. Last time I checked, many modern frontend frameworks contain overcomplicated, incomplete, and inefficient implementations of these features on top of HTML DOM.

I'm not super familiar with Microsoft's offerings, but is WPF available cross-platform? It's hard to argue something that is only on one platform is better when it only have to do 25% of what a cross-platform solution would do.

Sadly, WPF is Windows-only.

There’s an equivalent cross-platform GUI framework called Avalonia https://www.avaloniaui.net/ I don’t have a hands-on experience with it, but based on the internets I have an impression the tech is pretty good by now.

Re: Things engineers believe about Web development

#70

Post by christophilus »

xigoi wrote: post #63
blackoil wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem isn't so much those but how most developers lump themselves in with the incredibly interactive sites It is not only Figma or Photoshop. Any site with multiple steps of interactions or complex filters over search result etc. benefit from SPA and declarative code. The experience is smoother and development of anything, but simple forms is much faster. People disabling JS or working on satellite internet f…

> People disabling JS or working on satellite internet from a remote island are fringe cases and are not relevant for the business. How about people working on a train?

Their experience shouldn’t be much different on an SPA vs an MPA. If they can do an MPA round trip involving a medium-size image, then they should be able to load an SPA.
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