I love this recent xkcd about Depedency: https://xkcd.com/2347/
I particularly appreciated the alt text.
On Modern Web Applications Stability
11–20 of 41 posts
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#12The author is absolutely right. And to add one more point: Debugging such a system has become so difficult that many do not even attempt it anymore. I have seen experienced operators treating their stack like voodoo ("I have no idea why it acts up, but restarting this part seems to help sometimes. Oh and I increased memory on that VM, because, why not.").
For any reasonably successful web application there comes the day when a developer has to investigate the cause of a bug who wasn't there when the application was "young and agile". They will scratch their head above old libraries, out-of-fashion frameworks, tools, and languages, and finally, more often than not, argue that the whole system needs to be reimplemented in X.
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#13Definitely some issues raised in the article and particularly the idea that even if you need a little bit of something, you inherit the entire library with dependencies you don't need! However it is a little short on solutions. The truth is that I don't want to write my own PayPal API when there is one that PayPal produce and are likely to keep more up-to-date than me. Writing my own means that I only rely on my team…
It seems like "the hundreds of lower-level dependencies" is a problem that is unique to JavaScript due to its lack of a standard library. JavaScript has a huge ecosystem, and as a result produces many new, interesting ideas, but its also the source of a lot of churn. I remember working on large-ish (+300k LoC) .Net applications that were essentially dependent on just the .Net Framework itself. For those looking to pr…
avoid Node.js based applications altogether.
I ran into this recently. Firefox has a "packager" for putting together add-ons. It uses "node.js". All it really does is apply "zip" to some files. I tried to install the "packager" on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. It had several hundred dependencies, and wouldn't run because of some version dependency in node.js for something totally irrelevant to the task at hand. Mozilla support suggested upgrading the operating system on the development machine.
I wrote a one-line shell script which zipped up the proper file types into one file to package the add-on.
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#14I love this recent xkcd about Depedency: https://xkcd.com/2347/
There was a period during which OpenSSL was maintained by a World of Warcraft guild.
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#15Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#16There is a reason distributions like Debian exist.
They solve a lot of those problems through collaboration if one stays within it.
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#17At the very least, I like the rocketbook usage
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#18Occasionally while waiting for npm install to finish downloading, I think about how there are websites like http://www.urbandead.com/ which is probably a single 20k line perl script and mysql server running on a single box with 12 years of uptime that somehow manage to get along just fine with no javascript and apparently no input from their owners.
When I started doing webdev 8 years ago you shipped a recentish copy of jQuery, maybe jQuery UI if you were feeling fancy and that contained pretty much every library function you needed. Now we NPM install thousands upon thousands of modules to get by.
These days, browsers have tons of library features baked into them - but with APIs so obtuse and difficult to use you have to install another library to make them usable.
Last week at work I had a 2 hour meeting where we tried to work out how to ship the 2MB of JS our website apparently needs to clients without Google Lighthouse penalising us.
I don't know what to do with any of these thoughts but they often make me want to quit and take up a profession that doesn't involve computers like blacksmithing :/
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#19Occasionally while waiting for npm install to finish downloading, I think about how there are websites like http://www.urbandead.com/ which is probably a single 20k line perl script and mysql server running on a single box with 12 years of uptime that somehow manage to get along just fine with no javascript and apparently no input from their owners. When I started doing webdev 8 years ago you shipped a recentish copy…
Frankly this is why I avoid web dev like the plague.
The situation is much better in desktop dev / back-end (jobs might be scarcer though).
Re: On Modern Web Applications Stability
#20Definitely some issues raised in the article and particularly the idea that even if you need a little bit of something, you inherit the entire library with dependencies you don't need! However it is a little short on solutions. The truth is that I don't want to write my own PayPal API when there is one that PayPal produce and are likely to keep more up-to-date than me. Writing my own means that I only rely on my team…
It seems like "the hundreds of lower-level dependencies" is a problem that is unique to JavaScript due to its lack of a standard library. JavaScript has a huge ecosystem, and as a result produces many new, interesting ideas, but its also the source of a lot of churn. I remember working on large-ish (+300k LoC) .Net applications that were essentially dependent on just the .Net Framework itself. For those looking to pr…
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