To me this feels a little bit of a stab at the community for not adopting cappuccino but I remember what happened. Several years ago you showed us what it could do. We were impressed, we wanted to play with it but no, we weren't allowed. Instead of opening it up to the community it was kept locked away. By the time it was released (if ever?) we'd moved on. Now we don't care, we have frameworks that are good to work with (like angular). File size has nothing to do with it.
I’m done with the web
41–50 of 291 posts
Re: I’m done with the web
#42> 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…
>That's spot on
I agree that web developers in general and web development in general follows this trend. But his evidence for it is unconvincing to non-existent. Caring about file size is not a symptom of "tossing out everything we've learned from the last 30 years".
Re: I’m done with the web
#43Perhaps we've reached the point of too many layers of abstraction.
The web is designed for simple hyperlinked documents with some media elements. We've done a pretty good job of adding more stuff to it than that, but that doesn't mean it has proven wise or elegant.
Re: I’m done with the web
#44> 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 disagree. Web programming can be fundamentally different from application programming.
Application programming tends to be far more complex, far more planned, and far slower. Applications last for years and years, and new releases might take multiple years.
Whereas web programming can be extremely experimental, prototype-y, with multiple releases a day. It's also vastly faster to program.
This isn't an argument against good architecture -- far from it. But it does mean that the kind of long-term planning and investment that makes good traditional applications, isn't always applicable to website programming.
Due to the nature of the market, "complete disregard for maintainability or extendability" is sometimes a good thing, because you can iterate faster. Think of a lot of web programming as prototype programming -- then, you go back and re-architect, re-engineer, etc., as desired.
Re: I’m done with the web
#45> This reaction to Ember just baffles me. 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? Couldn't agree more. While I do think that new technology should be intuitive and easy to use, you have to take the time to explore, learn and familiarize yourself with it. I think peoples' attention spans are way too short these days.
Time is money, and the larger your team is the more that the costs of learning a new tech are amplified.
Using his off-the-cuff, totally subjective "a few days" estimate, and assigning 'few' at a conservative 2 days, that would mean my team would spend roughly 50 days doing nothing but learning this one very specific technology. That's 50 days of not producing revenue or otherwise addressing client concerns.
Now, I'm not saying that we shouldn't be able to take time to do things like this (learn and embed new tech), but to dismissively say "a few days" like it's trivial is severely underestimating the impact of dropping everything during that time to do nothing but learn about a tech that will most likely be obsolete or superseded in only a few years time.
Re: I’m done with the web
#46> 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 is as if with the birth of the web there was a complete reboot of the IT industry The web won. It fought a battle against many foes, and it came out on top. Re-read that again and seriously think about it, because comments such as yours don't accept that simple reality. Do you contest it? Do you argue that the web somehow circumvented the competition? For 15 years I've been promoting the web with groups that I've…
I feel the true 'reboot' and memory loss happened with native mobile apps. How did we ever think this would be a good idea? As you mentioned, the unique inputs seemed to have temporarily blinded us to real progress we've made with the web. Why can't web-based apps accept all these inputs as well?
The other big problem we have is that we're stuck with this idea of having cute little icons to launch things. Why can't we have icons that just launch a specific URL? Because then App Stores wouldn't make any money then would they?
Edit - Would someone care to explain their downvotes? Surely HN users wouldn't think to use a downvote to express that they just disagree, right?
Re: I’m done with the web
#47This is a big part of why I left Web dev, too. I'm just sick of working with amateurs. When I'm at work, I have things I want to get done. This isn't the classroom, my teammates' lack of comprehension of even things as simple as dependency injection and MVC is their fault, not mine. My productivity and coding power shouldn't have to be hampered just because I'm working with a bunch of code-until-it-works-sorta hacks.
I'm so relieved to hear that there are no amateur native developers. Gives me a warm, fuzzy feeling inside.
Re: I’m done with the web
#48The disclaimer at the bottom of the page says it all: "(Obviously these opinions are my own and of course do not represent the opinions of my future employer)" He has no real world experience doing anything that matters so just chats about what he's witnessed from within his bubble.
In the interest of not being a coward and deleting what I previously said...
I just read his 'about me' section and feel a tiny bit humbled..... not massively though.
Re: I’m done with the web
#49There'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…
Seriously.
Is he saying that a product failing is the fault of customers? That's simply ridiculous.
No matter how you put it, one way or another it is ALWAYS you fault, I don't even know what it might be the problem, but it's your fault.
Re: I’m done with the web
#50The 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".
Computers weren't originally designed to play music, video, or games. Yet, here we are.