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Web Development: A Crazy World

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Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#111

Post by blablabla123 »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #44
davidw wrote: post #8

Most of the 'mess' I see is the current state of Javascript frameworks, which are in the Cambrian explosion phase of things. I'd just use Rails as a default for most things I do these days, and if it's not a good fit, evaluate other technology.

> I'd just use Rails as a default for most things I do these days, and if it's not a good fit, evaluate other technology. But ZOMG RAILS IS INSECURE, quick, switch to something else! [/sarcasm]. Evaluating other technology is the opening of the rabbithole.

+1 for ZOMG

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#112

Post by ldh »

pkorzeniewski wrote: post #10

Just choose the right tool for the job. Beside that, variety is a good thing, isn't it?

I think part of the problem is that there is no clear "right tool for the job" for many jobs. There are many that will work just fine. Every author and podcaster who wants to project a veneer of pragmatism will sprinkle "the right tool for the job" truisms and call it good, but IMO that's just a hand-wavy placeholder for whatever they happen to be into at the moment. Which is fine, but to me it somewhat disingenuously dismisses the fact that it's still largely a subjective choice in many situations.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#113

Post by baak »

beefsack wrote: post #31

Call me a masochist, but I love the huge amount of selection, I love how passionate people are about their own solutions meaning they rapidly improve, and I love getting my hands dirty with pretty much anything I can get my hands on. It's great having too many tools in your toolbox.

That last sentence conjured an image of a person trying to drag a giant toolbox with him everywhere for some reason :) I do tend to disagree with the sentiment though.

The initial time investment per tool is steep.

Also, the tools' values deteriorate rather rapidly. Languages/Frameworks will become less used over time as something new replaces them (generally), and even your specific skills with a language will get worse over time if you aren't using it.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#114

Post by lifeisstillgood »

redeemedfadi wrote: post #89
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was just about to post "Cambrian explosion" as an metaphor for the state of javascript libraries. There are good reasons to get the HTML formatting off the server and into the client, so the new style JS is all going in the right direction. So another metaphor: All these frameworks are trying to solve the right problem in the right direction - which one will win out eventually - who knows, but even if you hitch a r…

What will be funny is when we move everything back to server-side once we don't have network latency/bandwidth issues.

Really? transmitting just the data and letting the client handle the display and interaction seems a much more natural split.

It alos makes my server software conceptually simpler - which is always nice

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#115

Post by Torn »

Kototama wrote: post #24
Torn wrote: post #17

As with all technology choices, you've got to draw the line somewhere - new and risky, or old and proven, or somewhere in between. What matters these days is probably how well you and your team already know the technology, how good the documentation is, community size/takeup, how quick the devs are to respond to issues, and how mature and stable the API is from release to release. How popular/old the technology is al…

I used to develop with JavaScript, and JavaScript with Backbone before we switched to ClojureScript. Backbone helped me to better structured my code but I found it also brings its own problems. There is a quite a lot of boilerplate code and views composed of other views were for me hard to manage. I also wrote some macros to use Backbone from Clojure but the mismatch between object/mutable and functional/immutable is…

Yeah, we had to write our own view nesting logic and allow this to be used within our dustjs templates.

Marionette (https://github.com/marionettejs/backbone.marionette) lets you do all of that stuff out of the box; I've not used it though so can't comment.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#116

Post by mattjaynes »

I love how YouTube approached this: Choose the simplest and most stable tools and use those.

It's a great strategy for developers that want to ship. Otherwise one can easily be lured by the siren calls of new tech.

I've certainly fallen victim to this temptation, but I've found that as I let go of the new pretty things and focus more on using the old boring workhorses of the interwebs, I get a ton more done.

Plain vanilla seems boring - but it's bad-ass in web architecture. We forget that YouTube had plenty of competitors that were well ahead them before they dominated.

They kept things simple and solid and that allowed them to scale. It's certainly not the only reason they won, but I'd bet it's a huge part of it.

---

For more on YouTube's stack, see: http://highscalability.com/blog/2012/3/26/7-years-of-youtube...

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#117

Post by lifeisstillgood »

Swizec wrote: post #81
eranation wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of the original rant here, funny it became viral and translated to Chinese (and back to English) :) The rant was made as a comment here: http://www.zemanta.com/blog/i-bet-you-over-engineered-your-s... Picked up by a Tilo Mitra: http://tilomitra.com/the-crazy-world-of-code/ And as discussed here in HN before: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4226990 The point of it was actually: it's impossible to always kee…

Author of original post here ... ... this is a crazy trip for a comment to make! And I still think most people over-engineer and over-think their startup tech. Customers don't care what you use, as long as it solves their problem. The rest just helps with recruiting I guess.

I am amazed a rant can go English -> Mandarin -> English via half the world's tech forums, and still be recognised by its original author.

But what really blows my socks off is how a tech forum in Beijing follows rants from Slovenian blog to a Californian forum and back again. And it actually matters to the Chinese because they liked it as much as we did.

Welcome to the new global culture, sharing the same memepool.

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#118

Post by equator »

anons2011 wrote: post #21

Quite amusing and very true. Just had a little look at Handlebars - writing 3 to 4 times as much to generate very little. Also reminds me of this tongue in cheek site : http://html9responsiveboilerstrapjs.com/

Heh... https://github.com/impressivewebs/HTML9-Responsive-Boilerstr...

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#119

Post by skimmas »

smutticus wrote: post #33
rpeden wrote: post #30

I've found that a large subset of programmers share the same trait as a large subset of photographers: they become so obsessed with tools that they lose sight of the fact that the end product is what matters at the end of the day. For example: there are many people who spend thousands on cameras and gear, and still take terrible photos. There are many developers who spend a lot of time keeping up with what they think…

"A bad carpenter blames his tools." -- Unknown

"A good carpenter will crave wood with its own teeth if he can't have good tools." :)

Re: Web Development: A Crazy World

#120

Post by 31reasons »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #117
Swizec wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author of original post here ... ... this is a crazy trip for a comment to make! And I still think most people over-engineer and over-think their startup tech. Customers don't care what you use, as long as it solves their problem. The rest just helps with recruiting I guess.

I am amazed a rant can go English -> Mandarin -> English via half the world's tech forums, and still be recognised by its original author. But what really blows my socks off is how a tech forum in Beijing follows rants from Slovenian blog to a Californian forum and back again. And it actually matters to the Chinese because they liked it as much as we did. Welcome to the new global culture, sharing the same memepool.

This is scary, we are loosing diversity at an incredible rate.
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