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I’m done with the web

randyluecke.tumblr.com

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Re: I’m done with the web

#21

Post by delinka »

clintjhill wrote: post #15

Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs? This is the opinion I had when all of the previous Ember flare ups happened. My thoughts were exactly this. It would behoove so many of us to simply spend more time with new technology and ideas before we simply throw our hands up and say "it confuses me".

"Confusion" is not the word I would use.

Metaphorical "you" alert, not directed at parent:

You have a new-fangled thing for everyone to use. Scratch that, everyone who's been in your shoes, with your particular pains. Great, you solved a problem. Take some time to explain on your blog or in your GitHub README.md the context of your solution. "Because I can!" is a fine reason, but I don't spend time exploring something that was built because it was possible to build it.

So your new-fangled thing looks like it's a solution to a problem I'm having. I start to implement it and ... oh dear $DEITY, it's a mess. I don't mean it's ugly, I mean it's completely inextensible. It's a specific solution where a generic one would suffice. Or worse, you didn't think outside your little box to discover that this "fix" will debilitate 95% of the web servers on the planet if they were to try this solution.

My advice: if you build it, A) explain why, B) learn to build it well.

Re: I’m done with the web

#22

Post by thetrumanshow »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

> The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years of building applications in favor of being able to put something together quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. That's spot on. You can add in to that that all the lessons of the process of developing software have also been discarded and are slowly being re-learned. It is as if with the birth of the web the…

I worked in a consultancy that primarily deals in websites and small apps for clients. Projects were generally underbid and handed to designers and engineers with the impetus to hurry your ass up so we can make money on this. As such, we were constantly throwing stuff together, duplicating code used elsewhere, no DRY, mounting technical debt. Don't get me wrong, this worked for us, so I couldn't complain much...

However, what irked me is that this mindset flowed into the SaaS and native mobile app-development side of the house as well. Fully or partly-spec'd native development is expected to result in something pretty and take no time at all, just like the web-design side. Very little interest in engineering things properly.

Fear of over-engineering absolutely should be ever-present as part of your efforts. But, I think we're taking this to extremes sometimes.

Re: I’m done with the web

#23

Post by jacquesm »

lukifer wrote: post #8
jacquesm wrote: post #2

> The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years of building applications in favor of being able to put something together quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. That's spot on. You can add in to that that all the lessons of the process of developing software have also been discarded and are slowly being re-learned. It is as if with the birth of the web the…

> On top of all that the web is incredibly messy. That is arguably both a bug and a feature. The web is an untended jungle, possibly the most diverse of any technical ecosystem. Democracy and markets are messy too, but I think most of us would rather not give those up.

When it comes to technology messy is not a feature but a drawback. It precludes a very important thing from manifesting itself, reliability. The difference between the backbone of the internet (TCP/IP) compared to the maze that is web development is simply astounding. The amount of hoops you have to jump through to do stuff that was child's play on any computer 20+ years ago just because it is on the web completely baffles me.

People are actually proud of being able to make simple games or chat services using a browser. That is because it is so terribly difficult to do such simple things using the web as a delivery device.

- HTML - JavaScript - CSS - Server side code (pick your flavor) - HTTP - websockets - some real time extension (node or whatever) - a persistence layer

And all that for the basic functionality of tying a few people on graphics terminals to each other. Oh, and to make it more interesting we're shipping actual code from one location to another so you have a few security nightmares extra.

Re: I’m done with the web

#24

Post by kevincennis »

Kind of surprised to see that this was posted by Paul Irish, considering he's such a huge web evangelist.

There are definitely some valid points in the article, but at the end of the day, it's hard for me to accept that The Right Way™ to do web development is to completely abstract away HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

Re: I’m done with the web

#25

Post by protomyth »

xsace wrote: post #10

The web is the only future of software development. It's open, free, innovative, and unpredictable. It didn't pick your Cappuccino, sorry for you, but that's OK for the rest of us.

Something will come along and replace it when we finally pile too much on something that wasn't designed to do UI in the first place. The questions are "what" and "when" not "if".

Re: I’m done with the web

#26

Post by tlarkworthy »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

> The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years of building applications in favor of being able to put something together quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. That's spot on. You can add in to that that all the lessons of the process of developing software have also been discarded and are slowly being re-learned. It is as if with the birth of the web the…

I avoided web for 15 years. Now I think it has matured and I am loving it! Cloud computing and decent frameworks with decent browsers.

Re: I’m done with the web

#27

Post by jonsterling »

martinced wrote: post #11

There's no way yet another webapp framework, no matter how close it emulates the desktop, is going to gain lots of traction when it mandates users to use... Objective-J and JavaScript. Seriously: being on your high horses and all is fine and well but your article is an oversimplification as to how the web works and as to what devs need and want. For example lately I've been very interested in flapjax (FRP UI) and web…

This, so much.

Randy's probably right about how silly all the tiny reinventions of UI frameworks are. And, though I'm generally unsympathetic to claims that a project is a failure because people don't want to learn the tools, I think it's safe to say here that asking people to use a language that's only marginally less horrible than JavaScript is not going to be a win from any perspective.

But he fails to realize that doing UI in a Cocoa-like framework is totally fucked (to be clear, I do Cocoa touch for a living; I'm speaking from experience).

I'd be making an understatement if I said I was unexcited about Cappuccino because it fails to even approach solving any of the truly important problems of UI work, which are (as you hinted) less about "can I make the table scroll quickly" and more about "can I decouple this monstrous mess of data, dependent requests, and presentation". As you note, FRP looks like a step in the right direction toward solving that problem. Traditional Cocoa-like approaches are a step backwards in that area, not forwards.

Re: I’m done with the web

#28

Post by jacquesm »

danso wrote: post #17
jacquesm wrote: post #2

> The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years of building applications in favor of being able to put something together quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. That's spot on. You can add in to that that all the lessons of the process of developing software have also been discarded and are slowly being re-learned. It is as if with the birth of the web the…

While you've undoubtedly worked at some great shops with other great engineers...can you say that the IT and development industry isn't as rickety as web development seems today? I mean, how can we really know? Today, we have github and stackoverflow and a myriad of other coding boards in which we can see the most horrible of code snippets -- and the way the mind works, we usually remember the horrid examples more th…

I've worked in banking, telco, cad/cam and embedded systems.

Nowhere, and I really mean that, was the tech as botched as it has been on the web past the early days.

Re: I’m done with the web

#29

Post by smacktoward »

jacquesm wrote: post #2

> The community has tossed out everything we’ve learned from the last 30 years of building applications in favor of being able to put something together quickly with complete disregard for maintainability or extendability. That's spot on. You can add in to that that all the lessons of the process of developing software have also been discarded and are slowly being re-learned. It is as if with the birth of the web the…

It's more like the ease of Web programming opened up programming to an entire new slice of the population that would never have had the opportunity to become programmers before.

These people don't have computer science degrees, so they spend a lot of time reinventing wheels. But lots of it works well enough despite all that, and as time passes, they learn and get better.

The messiness is a good sign, not a bad one. Thirty years ago these people would have had no options other than to be passive consumers of software other people made. Now they're making things for themselves! And some of what they make is good enough to help other people with their problems, too. That's a positive development, even if the things they make aren't always pretty.

Re: I’m done with the web

#30

Post by clintjhill »

delinka wrote: post #21
clintjhill wrote: post #15

Your day job is to build a piece of web software and you can’t take a few days to learn the ins and outs? This is the opinion I had when all of the previous Ember flare ups happened. My thoughts were exactly this. It would behoove so many of us to simply spend more time with new technology and ideas before we simply throw our hands up and say "it confuses me".

"Confusion" is not the word I would use. Metaphorical "you" alert, not directed at parent: You have a new-fangled thing for everyone to use. Scratch that, everyone who's been in your shoes, with your particular pains. Great, you solved a problem. Take some time to explain on your blog or in your GitHub README.md the context of your solution. "Because I can!" is a fine reason, but I don't spend time exploring somethin…

Fair. I'm only suggesting that before we collectively steam roll an open source project and its volunteers with "I don't get it, so it sucks" mobs, that maybe we spend a weekend with it. Maybe over that weekend we learn "oh dear $DEITY". And maybe, just maybe we contribute back to it in an effort to "help".
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