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Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

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Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#111

Post by TheAceOfHearts »

jorblumesea wrote: post #51

While I hate css, sort of like js and hate html layout, a lot of the problems come from accessibility. In that, it's so accessible anyone can do "web". This means you get non-engineers with no engineering background put into situations where thinking about things from an engineering perspective would really help and might produce actual workable solutions. Like wtf is this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/string.protot…

String.prototype.endsWith is native [0], it was added as part of ES2015. If you're supporting older platforms, you need to polyfill it.

[0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#112

Post by segmondy »

pixie_ wrote: post #24

Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…

Languages don't scale. Systems scale. Without said, Javascript has never really been the language for programming in the large. But make no mistake about it, it's slowly getting there as is evident by huge applications, not just web but even desktop that are being built with it. It's not impossible to refactor. The issue from what I've seen is that people think it as if it's a class based language instead of the prototypical language that is.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#113

Post by gjvc »

emilburzo wrote: post #78
meshko wrote: post #37

It is scary how most commenters here are missing the point. No, not all programming sucks. Yes, web programming sucks more than other things. No, it doesn't have to be like this. Yes, even web programming was better 10 years ago. No, I don't know how to fix it. Neither do I know exactly where we took the wrong turn. One of my theories is this: had Sun not sued Microsoft over their extensions in JVM, MS would have kep…

> Back end and front end are written in the same language with strong typing and all that. Exactly why I love GWT, even though it seems that it's not popular anymore. It gets the job done, refactoring is not an error-prone and painful experience and it's fast because it's transpiled to javascript.

GWT + GXT, vaadin, or smart client are examples of this.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#114

Post by veidelis »

pixie_ wrote: post #24

Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…

We use TypeScript and at first it seems like a burden, but pays off after a while. We used to have a problem with CSS - every time we had to implement some new UI, we just ended writing stronger selectors to override the parts that felt would break if we refactored them. CSS modules solves that problem for us. It's nice that we are allowed to use flexbox. The biggest problems for us are that events are not being dispatched properly or scaling problems when keyboard appears.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#115

Post by niccaluim »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #86
pixie_ wrote: post #24

Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…

React is, in my opinion, a big step forward in reclaiming the front end as a mature UI environment. I have also found that CSS becomes a lot more tolerable with CSS Modules, in combination with React, which allows you to write CSS that targets one component and only that component. By eschewing cascading, you can finally write modular, reusable CSS that avoids side effects and still allows fine-tuning (overriding) by…

I agree—I loathe frontend development, but React made it tolerable to do for limited periods—but it's still a hack on a teetering Jenga tower of hacks.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#116

Post by [deleted] »

jorblumesea wrote: post #96
mashlol wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the problem with those modules. Just because you can do something one way, doesn't mean you shouldn't add an easier and better to understand way. The intention of `string.endsWith('Blah')` is easier to understand then `string.indexOf('Blah') === string.length - 4`. Java String has both `indexOf` and `startsWith`, do you think that is also problematic?

It's added complexity because it's not std lib. Importing an entire module just to accomplish something you could easily do with 1 line of code. I'm not arguing that javascript shouldn't have `startsWith`, just saying there's a large overhead associated for a relatively minor performance increase. Thus going back to the debate about proper engineering. Just my 2 cents, feel free to ignore :)

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#117

Post by jonathankoren »

jorblumesea wrote: post #96
mashlol wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand the problem with those modules. Just because you can do something one way, doesn't mean you shouldn't add an easier and better to understand way. The intention of `string.endsWith('Blah')` is easier to understand then `string.indexOf('Blah') === string.length - 4`. Java String has both `indexOf` and `startsWith`, do you think that is also problematic?

It's added complexity because it's not std lib. Importing an entire module just to accomplish something you could easily do with 1 line of code. I'm not arguing that javascript shouldn't have `startsWith`, just saying there's a large overhead associated for a relatively minor performance increase. Thus going back to the debate about proper engineering. Just my 2 cents, feel free to ignore :)

Give it up. The JS kiddies had to rediscover vendoring. Something that's been a best practice since the 1970s.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#118

Post by EnigmaticLion »

roblabla wrote: post #65
jorblumesea wrote: post #51

While I hate css, sort of like js and hate html layout, a lot of the problems come from accessibility. In that, it's so accessible anyone can do "web". This means you get non-engineers with no engineering background put into situations where thinking about things from an engineering perspective would really help and might produce actual workable solutions. Like wtf is this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/string.protot…

Errm... - "test".indexOf("st") == "test".length - "st".length - "test".enddWith("st") Am I the only one who thinks the second one is WAAAY more readable? And that's a COMMON function. Using the former is bringing complexity UP. Not to mention, endsWith is part of es2016 I believe. So this package is just a simple polyfill.

> "test".indexOf("st") == "test".length - "st".length

I don't think this is a correct implementation of "endsWith".

"testtest".indexOf("st") =/= "testtest".length - "st".length

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#119

Post by breatheoften »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #86
pixie_ wrote: post #24

Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…

React is, in my opinion, a big step forward in reclaiming the front end as a mature UI environment. I have also found that CSS becomes a lot more tolerable with CSS Modules, in combination with React, which allows you to write CSS that targets one component and only that component. By eschewing cascading, you can finally write modular, reusable CSS that avoids side effects and still allows fine-tuning (overriding) by…

I echo -- this is good advice. Pick the minimal set of tools you need to use react and css modules (this probably means banging your head against something like webpack for more time than you can possibly enjoy) - but with those pieces alone as starting point, you don't really need a lot of additional library support to build applications that run in browsers ... and your code should start to seem understandable/predictable -- in a manner reminiscent of using better native frameworks of the past.

Unlike many other web programming approaches -- this stack should help avoid the need to invent new hacks for every new feature or slightly different situation ...

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#120

Post by gbog »

pdonis wrote: post #55
captainbenises wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This post makes me sad. Javascript, CSS and HTML can all be used powerfully, performantly and in a managed way where anyone can come on board and contribute. Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. To broadly paint this web stack that so many people poured countless hours into making, as 'impossible' to use is doing it a great disservice. But hey man, that's just like your opinion.

> Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. And they throw huge amounts of resources at the web stack to do it. It might work for them, but I'm not sure that makes it powerful, performant, and manageable for those of us who aren't huge companies.

You probably do not have the complexity level of these companies either.

To me js and css are kind of manageable, a bit the same way as python: use strongly enforced linters forbidding anything ambiguous, do not jump every other day in a new sexy bandwagon, and do not let one line of code commited in without an automated test running it on a ci machine.

What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the github repos holding these tools are 3 months old.

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