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Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

frankchimero.com

101–110 of 269 posts

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#101
post #7

> simply npm your webpack via grunt with vue babel or bower to react asdfjkl;lkdhgxdlciuhw Nice summary. While I understand that yarn was a good thing to integrate frontend dependencies management just like we do it for the backend, Webpack is still a mystery to me. Just trying to add a simple JS library to make it work is a headache sometimes (DataTable with Rails for example).

I fought with webpack for years, then ViteJS came out. It works out of the box, is uber fast, support Vue + React and does everything webpack did for me. I stopped thinking about my tooling and could go back to spend those CPU brain cycle on solving my clients problems. Peace of mind. Thanks Evan You.

ViteJS is nothing short of a revelation. Recently migrated all my webapps from webpack5 to vite and it took considerably less time and effort than migrating from webpack 4 to webpack5 did, just removing babeljs reduced the dependency footprint by orders of magnitude. I just had to change a few filename extensions and even though my apps all use a custom react-like, JSX, css-modules, postcss, tailwindcss, d3.js, etc it just worked, I'm still kind of in shock over it. I'm always the one saying "webpack isn't that bad, stop being lazy" but no longer having so many config files and a 1k line package.json polluting project root is a thing of beauty.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#102
post #94
post #72

The simple page you could make 20 years ago is the simple page you can make today. With a few minor tweaks, it will work as well as it did 20 years ago. If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better. If for some reason you decide to use the tools meant for complex web apps to make your simple page, you're going to feel like everything has gone hor…

Because sometimes you want to learn the fancy tools but only need to make something simple. When the time comes to make the complex web app, you are now more prepared.

Learning fancy tools is outside the scope of building a simple website. Simple site is usually HTML/CSS/JS.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#103
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>there are differences, but it's 90% the same in the major distributions. Yes and that 10% can cause some unexpected, sometimes hard to fix problems. A poorly written build script or installer that expects a specific distro's directory layout can cause some problems. Especially if it's a large convoluted build system that hard codes the directories in multiple places. I've actually had to deal with this, it sucks. Th…

And yet there's hundreds of apps that will never be updated or changed to conform to standards. i suspect many of those are no longer actively maintained. at best they receive security patches from distributions. Tell that to snap. It insists its folder must sit nicely in my home folder and nowhere else. my (low) opinion of snap aside, the bad here is that the location is not configurable. as a library of application…

I don't want to turn this into a snap bad mouthing thread, but yeah. You can't even symlink it or it causes problems. It really bugs me because I don't tend to allocate too much space to my home partition and keep most of my stuff on data partitions. So if I get a bunch of snap apps, it starts eating up all the space in home.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#104
post #65

No, no it is not. It's somewhat amusing to see people complain about the supposedly increasing complexity of web development. Sorry-not-sorry it's not that bad or even that complex. In fact things are far easier and less complex then they were just a few years ago and improvements continue at a rapid pace (modern browser module support, vitejS, ESbuild). I don't even need to use babeljs anymore whereas just a few yea…

By what standard are you saying things are easier? Certainty not less complexity, abstraction, volume of code, number of moving pieces, raTe of change or configuration. If you don't understand how the foundational technologies work and don't care to learn then things may indeed seem easier. If you have 15+ years of experience and seek to understand today's technology at the same level as when you first learned, thing…

IE7

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

There's also a lot of sub-ecosystem issues which are more prominent on Linux, like the long-standing surprise that NPM doesn't have a global rc file in /etc: https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/533 The argument from the maintainer is reasonable that distros can just patch it, but realistically, everyone wants a newer version of things than what their distros ship—a similar tug-of-war ends up happening in the Python wor…

Node is definitely a bit of a mess, it's misuse of the Linux system doesn't really come as a surprise.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish wish wish I could move over to Linux but its font rendering situation is terrible [1] I've tried Manjaro and Ubuntu to no avail. I have no idea what causes it or if people on Linux are not as sensitive to it or its a specific hardware setup which causes terrible fonts but once you read Windows fonts stuff looks so much better to me. Apparently its a hot debated topic but its so obvious to some it seems. [1] ht…

Wow, first time I hear that as the main and apparently only argument to using Windows over any Linux distro. With HiDPI displays all over the place, is subpixel rendering really still a thing? Pixels have gotten so small, I can't see individual ones anymore even if I'm trying. They could leave out anti-aliasing altogether in fonts and I'd hardly notice. Or I'm just getting old.

Most desktop environments will offer subpixel AA, and with GNOME and KDE, I think it's enabled by default.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#108
post #65

No, no it is not. It's somewhat amusing to see people complain about the supposedly increasing complexity of web development. Sorry-not-sorry it's not that bad or even that complex. In fact things are far easier and less complex then they were just a few years ago and improvements continue at a rapid pace (modern browser module support, vitejS, ESbuild). I don't even need to use babeljs anymore whereas just a few yea…

If using babeljs for cross browser support is your starting point, then you likely started way later then the article author.

Go back a few more years to 2005 or even earlier. If you wanted a website you installed Apache on a server (or used a shared hosting package), FTP your files to it and you're done. That's it. No pipelines, no builds, no package managers. Just files in a folder, that you copy to the server.

If you wanted to do cross browser JS you downloaded the latest version of jquery.min.js, FTP it to the server and reference it in a script tag.

I wrote my first websites in notepad.exe and used something like FileZilla to upload.

That is what I call simple web development.

I agree with the author that now things are just way more complex than they should be.

edit: looks like jQuery was first released in 2006, which is 4 years after Firefox was released, and 2 years before Chrome. So take my `2005` line as rough estimate.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#109
post #72

The simple page you could make 20 years ago is the simple page you can make today. With a few minor tweaks, it will work as well as it did 20 years ago. If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better. If for some reason you decide to use the tools meant for complex web apps to make your simple page, you're going to feel like everything has gone hor…

20 years ago we were criticising the syntax in JSP and ASP pages that allowed to embed code inside an html template. Today it seems that you are crazy if you are not writing a JSX SPA embedding JavaScript inside a JSX template. We are doing “There and back again” for I don’t know how many times.. And believe me I kind of like React and JSX, but I liked also embedding my dirty code in HTML ages ago.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#110
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because sometimes you want to learn the fancy tools but only need to make something simple. When the time comes to make the complex web app, you are now more prepared.

Learning fancy tools is outside the scope of building a simple website. Simple site is usually HTML/CSS/JS.

But... so are the complicated sites, once you've reduced it to its essence. Everything else are (excessive, complicated, arguably unnecessary) abstractions on top of that
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