111–120 of 269 posts
We have it much easier today.
The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…
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…
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…
I don't know if I really agree. I want to. But flash was supported by much better tooling than what I see in most spots today. Dreamweaver, for all the hate we have it, seems laughable simple compared to common frameworks today.
You can't use Flash, that's fair. But my goodness, you wouldn't want to. The small amount of incidental complexity we've gained from forcing pizza shops to stop laying out their interface in Flash is worth it. And outside of the plugins that were absolutely the correct decision to remove, everything else you want to use is still available.
What we're getting at is that with a few exceptions (HTTPS, Java plugins, Flash), virtually all of the old APIs that you used to use on the web are still supported and are the exact same to use, if not better. This is not the case everywhere with every language and platform. But the web has done a reasonably good job at being backwards compatible.
You're worried about deploy processes, and you want to deploy a free site on Netlify? You don't need to learn Git, you can hand-code your site in static HTML or generate it using any program you want and just upload it as a zipped folder. Your Dreamweaver builds will still run today. Font faces? Still work, you don't need to worry about FOUT. You miss table layouts? Hackernews is using that crud right now. The complexity around build tools, processes, and frameworks is all optional. The browser doesn't care.
If you're missing the old experience of building websites, then just do that. I maintain https://anewdigitalmanifesto.com. It is hand-coded HTML that I wrote in a text editor. It has no Javascript, no build process, no minification, nothing. And it works fine; no one has ever complained about it to me. If you're adding complexity to your engineering process and it's making your job harder instead of easier, then take a step back and ask yourself why you're adding that complexity in the first place. Is it solving a problem? Or do you just feel like you need to do things "properly" based on the current development style? Because again, the browser doesn't care.
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what kind of work did you get into after programming out of curiosity? rare to see people go the other way
Not the OP, but I left professional programming to become a writer (in Czech, not in English; pardon my mistakes). It actually has something in common, you still write structured text for living, though your target audience are now people, not machines. Some readers commented that they find my style clear and understandable; maybe it is a carry-over from programming, where you cannot be ambiguous. But I find writing…
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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.
as a workaround try to use a bind-mount
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…
But if you insist on this crusty bonafides peen measuring contest I got started serving php via cgi on apache deployed with scp.
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I don't know if I really agree. I want to. But flash was supported by much better tooling than what I see in most spots today. Dreamweaver, for all the hate we have it, seems laughable simple compared to common frameworks today.
You can still use your old copy of Dreamweaver if you really want to. I think Adobe still sells new versions too. I wouldn't advise using website builders in general (Dreamweaver was always kind of sketch), and I certainly wouldn't advise using Adobe software in general (they're an awful company with overpriced products), but I can't imagine modern Dreamweaver has gotten particularly worse than it was before. You can…
The loss of flash is very unfortunate.
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I'm an avid Linux user, completely unfamiliar with BSD. Could you shed some light on how it further removes abstractions? I don't mind trying it out by booting it from a usb
> Could you shed some light on how it further removes abstractions? By not running hundreds of useless programs, I guess. If you launch htop inside OpenBSD, it'll fill half of your terminal, and the rest is empty. The easiest way to try it is to install it on a virtual machine. You'll see that not much is needed to get to a point to launch firefox from an xterm.
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And this is exactly why any of my hobby projects that involve JS are done with plain JS, with as few libraries as possible. I might pull in specific libraries, but I don't want to pull in a giant framework that will be outdated the next time I decide to work on that particular project.
Another thing I find weird is how bloated static typical site generator tools are. The delivery medium of static HTML is timeless. But the odds that a static site generator with dozens of dependencies will still work N years from now? Grim.
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Regardless of whether or not your observation about CS graduates is true, I don't think that has anything to do with it. The difference is that with the backend, you have choice over what technologies to use. There's competition between languages and ecosystems, so a better more elegant one can replace a worse crufty one. But with the frontend, there is no competition. You have to use HTML, CSS, and (roughly) JavaScr…
What's wrong with HTML+CSS as a rendering primitive? It's quite successful in decoupling semantics from presentation, which is a requirement for a platform that's as widespread and universal as the modern web. JS is a bit crufty, but you don't have to deal with it. You could write everything in some other source language and compile down to JS/WASM. (Even low-level languages like C/C++/D/Rust can support this via Ems…
HTML+CSS is a soup of overlapping technologies that has accumulated into this tangled ball of mismatched paradigms from nearly 30 years of "generational" improvements.
I grew up with it from the beginning so I understand the reasoning behind it all. But to someone wanting to learn it from scratch, trying to decipher tables vs. floats vs. flexboxes vs. grids must seem like utter madness -- a layout language written by a truly insane person.