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I can only think that modern front end development has failed

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Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#111

Post by sdfhbdf »

coldtea wrote: post #65
notjustanymike wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new…

> I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and…

The articles you're linking are proven to be misrepresenting.

They for example look at a really small subset of music "Million song dataset" and only analysed basic metrics that could be automatically measured. To be honest I think the linked Spanish paper and the senationalist "Science proves modern music is bad" should be retracted since the methodology is flawed.

Don't take my word for it, take Tantacrul's - composer, video creator, Design Lead for MuseScore [0].

It's such a complex topic to study "music" - you have to narrow it down - genre, country of origin, purpose - it's a major simplification to say that "all music is worse now", there are a lot of types of music that didn't exist in 1961 (synths, electronic, hip-hop) - how can you compare it?

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfNdps0daF8

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#112

Post by BlueTemplar »

simion314 wrote: post #18
542458 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like valid HTML as much as the next guy and try to always write valid HTML myself, but it’s not the be-all-end-all: if Safari, Chrome and Firefox can parse your site 99% of users are happy. No end-user cares if you have charset set on a script that doesn’t have a src attribute, or that you’re technically not supposed to put style tags inside noscript tags.

The problem is that nobody can create anew browser engine because you not only need to implement all the standards you also need to make your browser work with broken html and work in the same way Chrome and Firefox work. IMO we would need 2 split the document part from the application part. Have a set of elements and a document format just for blogs and news websites , and more complex components and APIs for applic…

That first part is the Web, while the second part are native programs with Internet connection.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#114

Post by Waterluvian »

antirez wrote: post #4

Regardless of my tweet, that is a personal opinion based on my feelings, background and experiences, the discussions in the replies are interesting from the POV of understanding what different people think in the programming community. Some will say that critiques are only from old people, in the style "when I was young we had only zeroes! You now have ones and zeroes". Others say that the web is slow because of ADs…

I think this is more about the limitations of our perceptions given we live such short focused lives.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#115

Post by radicalbyte »

bryanlarsen wrote: post #75
coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and…

To be fair, you have to adjust for the relevance of top 100. In the past the top 100 was the only thing most people were exposed to because that's all the radio played. Today Spotify and Youtube and their recommendation algorithms make the top 100 almost completely irrelevant.

The size too: there are far more songs released now than in the 1960s. So it makes sense that the "creme" on the top is more homogenised.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#116

Post by hyperpape »

I'm bothered by a lot of contemporary web development. Many things are implemented using far too much heavy JS code, and user experience suffers. I also think a lot of people drastically underestimate how much we get out of modern tools.

In a followup tweet[1] and in this thread, antirez says that we haven't improved interaction in 20 years.

Let's consider gmail, which is close enough to 20 years old. But at the time, it was an example of a very rare and complex app build on top of ajax. I don't personally quite remember this, but it apparently didn't have rich text editing for a year after it was released.

Ask yourself: how long would a competent front-end developer need to make a decent 2004 gmail clone using modern front-end tools?

The ideal would be to build more lightweight websites, but exploit modern tools where they pay for themselves. While we're at it, we can write fast software without premature optimization.

[1] (https://twitter.com/antirez/status/1378274076859502593)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gmail_interface#cite_ref-RichT...

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#117

Post by pacifika »

It’s been the same problem since the web design should be pixel perfect days, instead of print design the web is now in love with app design.

The difference now is that there is less good practice. But look at gov.uk and you see the difference between good web design that doesn’t need to be an app or have carousels.

Web development now has the Sharepoint problem: it can do everything given enough effort. It’s not about what is possible but it’s about what you want from it.

Before it was flash intro movies now it’s a shop front with modals and carousels.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#118

Post by selfmodruntime »

caseymarquis wrote: post #25

I'd like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It's all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provide…

I love modern frontend development. I can build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users. They are fast where they need to be fast, and building components means complexity lives only where it's needed. Static parts are rendered statically, dynamic parts are rendered dynamically. I can write all code for the entire stack in Javascript. The entire workflow is streamlined in a simple way (webpack really isn't that hard to grok). There are templates for every project imaginable. I don't need an entire VPS for my web-apps, just a simple static hosting service. My apps run on every system and any browser back to IE9 without any issues whatsoever. No complex build tools or linking process or debugging weird architectures needed. Compatibility issues are solved automatically in any modern build pipeline by adding vendor prefixes. New code is transpiled to old code for older browsers. Debugging modern front-end code is a breeze, there are an infinite amount of tools both for styling and the code itself. My modern frontend app takes seconds to build; QT apps I built in the past needed up to twenty minutes, just to check a simple change. No need for that with hot reloading. My users are happy too: They don't have to download an app which might not work on their specific system. Linux, Windows and Mac users alike can use it on their computers, laptops, tablets and phones without any issue. They can use the default environment a browser provides for an even better user experience (zooming, Screenreaders, upscaling fonts, copying images and text, preferences for dark mode, theming their browsers, saving credentials and auto filling them, sharing stuff, etc.). Integrating stuff from other companies has never been easier: Paypal, Stripe, Apple Products all provide a well tested and documented library for every framework out there. There are open source packages for anything, it's a FOSS dream. Building prototypes for anything is insanely fast, thanks to modern debugging tools in Chrome and FireFox.

It's much better than people make it out to be.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#119

Post by simonw »

hyperpape wrote: post #116

I'm bothered by a lot of contemporary web development. Many things are implemented using far too much heavy JS code, and user experience suffers. I also think a lot of people drastically underestimate how much we get out of modern tools. In a followup tweet[1] and in this thread, antirez says that we haven't improved interaction in 20 years. Let's consider gmail, which is close enough to 20 years old. But at the time…

From defining the entire approach when it launched, Gmail has somehow turned into the single best argument /against/ SPAs. I dread opening it, because I know it's going to be slow to load and slow to use.

I don't know how it went so wrong. Original Gmail was a revelation. Today it's sludge.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#120

Post by criddell »

antirez wrote: post #4

Regardless of my tweet, that is a personal opinion based on my feelings, background and experiences, the discussions in the replies are interesting from the POV of understanding what different people think in the programming community. Some will say that critiques are only from old people, in the style "when I was young we had only zeroes! You now have ones and zeroes". Others say that the web is slow because of ADs…

If ECMAScript, HTML, and the DOM didn't exist and you were asked to create a specification for applications where the client UI is remote, possibly very resource constrained with a connection to the back end that may be slow and only mostly reliable, what would you invent? Is there a better model already out there that isn't used because Javascript + HTML has sucked all of the oxygen out of the room?
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