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I’m done with the web

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Re: I’m done with the web

#51

Post by jacquesm »

corresation wrote: post #35
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 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…

Windows also 'won'. That does not make it the best solution. Merely the most successful.

Re: I’m done with the web

#52

Post by Confusion » 

  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?
What compelling reason can you give me to take a few days to learn Ember and not insert one of a dozen alternatives? Or should I take a few days for each of the dozens of newfangled alternatives that pop up every year? Are a few days even enough when you want to truly experience whether some framework is worth it?

Get off my lawn.

Re: I’m done with the web

#53

Post by chao- »

Many of the author's complaints read similar to this one:

Now, people compare Backbone to Cappuccino, or Ember to Rails. Cappuccino, Backbone, and Rails all serve completely different purposes, and saying you don’t need one because you have another is just asinine.

Three questions:

1. Who are these people that compare those three frameworks?

2. Why do you let them get under your skin?

3. What does that have you do with you "being done with the web" (or web community)?

I don't understand any of these. So some morons want to compare apples and oranges? This has nothing to do with "the web" and crops up in all industries and spheres of life. Welcome to humanity, enjoy your stay.

As best I can tell, my lack of empathy must come from a different definition of "web community". When the author complains about how 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. part of me wants to agree with him, flip a table, and join the melee [1].

But at the same time, I was listening to the Ruby Rogues episode with Sandi Metz last night [2]. There is a 20-minute discussion about utility of does-it-all frameworks, their use in a project, the types of projects you use them for, and the point at which all projects will necessarily need to have designed a better solution, or massively adapted the framework, to better fit their problem. It's all very clear-eyed and up front about this exact tradeoff (that is, complaint by the author). That is but one example, and I won't belabor the thread with more.

At the end of the day, either the author is simply frustrated that it was hard to convince people to use his project/product, or we must live in very different "web communities".

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=W...

[2] http://rubyrogues.com/087-rr-book-clubpractical-object-orien...

Re: I’m done with the web

#54

Post by jentulman »

It's a shame to see someone who has been so passionate for a product reach this level of frustration but it feels like there's a lot of blaming 'everything that's wrong with the industry' for lack of uptake. If no-one is taking up on your offering, no matter how cool it is, then you need to look at what you can do to entice people in that you aren't already.

I've been back to look at cappuccino since the 280-slides first went up, and the get people hooked documentation has always been severely lacking (which is the case with a lot of projects, but it makes some of the complaints about peoples efforts to learn stick out Their docs have long had, to my mind, a tone of "it's just like objective-c, which is easy, so learn some of that and you'll be fine" [1] It does have pretty complete API docs, but they're not a lot of use without much deeper examples given than the few they have on the site.

When it comes to having thrown out years of software engineering know-how I think there's possibly something to that, and it is currently being picked up on in more recent frameworks but perhaps, as is being highlighted by things like backbone and angular, trying to shoe-horn dogmatic desktop software patterns like MVC into building apps for a relatively young platform like the browser is only a organisational stop-gap on the way to better, more suitable patterns that are still to come.

[1] http://www.cappuccino-project.org/learn/objective-j.html

Re: I’m done with the web

#55

Post by bhurlow »

Lets think about this from the opposite direction: Which projects on the web are the MOST successful? Facebook? Twitter? Gmail? Github?

Do ANY of those giants use big, all-encompassing super libraries? NOPE

Re: I’m done with the web

#57

Post by asciimo »

This is not a good first impression for someone who had never heard of Cappuccino before. It reads like a verbose rage quit. It would have been more respectful to his colleagues and their (small?) community of users to explain his career decision while also remaining optimistic about the project.

Re: I’m done with the web

#58

Post by 6ren » 

  > 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.
I wonder, heretically, if maintainability/extendability is less important today... in the past, you'd build something, and then need to maintain it for years or decades. But today, if the pace of change really has accelerated that much, perhaps things change so much that it is easier to rebuild from scratch each time (instead of maintaining/extending) - even if you did carefully design it.

Is is just a small but prominent group doing web development (especially with ruby on and back-end and a front-end focus)? Is it just that we're still seeing industries adopt to the web, and old approaches slowly dying (i.e. in the midst of revolutionary times)? Or is this a permenant acceleration, that will only increase?

Re: I’m done with the web

#59

Post by rlpb »

marknutter wrote: post #50
protomyth wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's a false analogy. The original assertion was about the underlying technology being used, not about what they deliver.

Re: I’m done with the web

#60

Post by RutZap »

Done with the web, moving to Google to work on Google Now; an app that relies heavily on web services to provide information to users...

I don't know why but I don't see that as being done with the web. I see it as changing jobs/projects, but still within the web community.

And also I don't agree with: Meanwhile, the web community will continue to solve the same non-problems over and over again.

The web community is larger than the people referred to within the article and I don't think it's OK to generalize like that. In the last 5 years the web has evolved massively and I don't agree with the fact that we are solving the same non-problems. Progress and innovation is out there, on the web, within the web... you just have to look from a different point of view (and occasionally sift through the BS).

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