As much as I share the sentiment, at least the browser has one single programming language. What’s a waste of time is to have dozens of backend programming languages (each of them having a few frameworks and countless libraries). So much wasted effort. I agree that variety is important, but ffs, it’s time to make a good use of our time and stop implementing yet again the same things but in a different language.
JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
51–60 of 171 posts
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#52You mean react broke the web ?
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#53I often see people say “JS is unstable,you’re always rewriting your code for the latest and greatest framework” and I always wonder where do you work? If I told the people I report to I can’t deliver that for you because we’re rewriting the app, I’d be out of the door soon. The JS ecosystem is like any technology ecosystem, things change over time but you don’t have to chase the trends, be pragmatic about what you fo…
There was a time between 2015 and 2020 when framework fatigue was a real thing. People were jumping between angular, ember, react, vue, and if you were unlucky enough to choose react, Crazy Mad Scientist Dan Abramov was telling you YoureDoingItWrong(TM) every other tuesday and prompting everyone to rewrite their app in shame (even though they wrote it the way that was trendy LAST tuesday). Since then, things have set…
Yeah true especially if you were trying to use Typescript. Every npm update broke things.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#54Although I agree that JS is being used incredibly irresponsibly, I also think this article is almost certainly AI-generated with minimal editing based on the way it reads, and I wish that wasn't the case because the topic deserves better than this. [Edit: Although I recognise that em dashes are what a lot of people use to identify AI-generated text, that isn't what I was doing here. I hadn't even been considering the…
Holy s@#$! You're right. I didn't catch it at first, probably because it was on the HN frontpage. But yeah, the amount of em dashes (among other things) totally gives it away. There were so many contradictions in the article, I was going to point them out. Don't see a point now.
You don't need to be an AI to use em-dashes. I actually use them quite a lot (even outside of Word) and AFAIK I am not an AI. I just care about text layout and proper use of characters. — is Alt-0151 on Windows (ok you need a keyboard with numeric pad).
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#55I often see people say “JS is unstable,you’re always rewriting your code for the latest and greatest framework” and I always wonder where do you work? If I told the people I report to I can’t deliver that for you because we’re rewriting the app, I’d be out of the door soon. The JS ecosystem is like any technology ecosystem, things change over time but you don’t have to chase the trends, be pragmatic about what you fo…
In 2017, I met modern frontend. In a few hectic months, I had to learn AngularJS, Gulp, Grunt, and some CSS improvement system (LESS or Sass or something). Then I moved on to Angular and worked with it for a couple of years. For the first time, it actually started to feel worth it. But what a churn in the beginning. Angular 2, 4, 5, 6, and I think up to 9 all dropped while I was still working with it.
Since then, I’ve mostly worked with React, which is blissfully productive and unexciting in the best way possible as long as we prevent people from pulling in CV-padding material like Redux.
Over the past few years, I’ve been hired into places where I’m once again upgrading codebases written in AngularJS (yep, it still exists), Elm, and jQuery. Everything gets rewritten to React, and after that we can hire people right out of school to maintain it (as long as we keep the CV-padding libraries out of it).
I guess this is a long-winded way of saying: even if you’ve been lucky enough to work in a place where people made good technical decisions years ago, and work in a place that treat their devs well enough that someone who still remembers how it works cares to work there —not everyone’s that lucky.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#56Nah, tracking and ads broke the web (using JS).
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#57This. So much this. I have a website for my students, with various content they need for assigned projects. HTML and CSS. The webserver itself is a small, simple Java application that sends files requested by the browsers. KISS.
Looks like that article was AI generated by a SEO consultant. Ironically, if anything "broke" the web, it's ADs and SEO...
Sorry, the article itself was really painful for me to read.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
Holy s@#$! You're right. I didn't catch it at first, probably because it was on the HN frontpage. But yeah, the amount of em dashes (among other things) totally gives it away. There were so many contradictions in the article, I was going to point them out. Don't see a point now.
Why are em dashes a giveaway? They’re auto inserted on Windows for two hyphens still, aren’t they?
Not in every application -- these are two hyphens, Windows didn't touch them.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#59While I don't agree with other points, things got clearer once I reached the following: > Marketers, content editors, SEOs, designers – they’re all locked out of the process. Because now, even simple tasks require technical fluency. I worked in web development in the 2000s and then restarted in 2020s. The power of the tools, the speed of development and the result are all much better. The downside? You need to know m…
The fast pocket computer might be fairly common in fully developed countries, but bandwidth is not. It’s trivial to run into use cases with limited network bandwidth regardless of how fast your iPhone is.
And if you broaden your idea of your user base a bit, even the fast computers aren’t ubiquitous. Try using a low end Android phone sometime, or a hand me down iOS device still on iOS 12.
Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)
#60> The result? Broken back buttons. Image bloat. Inaccessible markup. URLs that don’t behave like URLs. Metadata that disappears. Content you can’t copy. Buttons you can’t keyboard to. Modals that trap you. Scroll positions that reset for no reason. Headlines that shift mid-read. Analytics that don’t match reality. Preview environments that lie. And pages that load… eventually. -- None of that is the fault of Javascri…
Javascript is a platform that gave developers the ability to modify the core UX of web browsers. That's a platform problem, not a builders problem - if you don't want crappy apps on the web that break things, then don't give developers the power to break things.
This is nonsense, any language makes it possible to crash a program but somehow it's only an issue for JavaScript