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JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

jonoalderson.com

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Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#121

Post by exiguus »

> Not just slow – awful. Bloated, fragile, over-engineered disasters. They load slowly, render erratically, and hide their content behind megabytes of JavaScript. They glitch on mobile. They frustrate users and confuse search engines. They’re impossible to maintain. And somehow, we’re calling this progress.

I have the slight feeling that JavaScript is not the problem, bad engineering is. Then I can agree to some of the statements in the article. But most of them suggest a simple solution without any context. Programming is one thing, software development another.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#122

Post by pyman »

austin-cheney wrote: post #2

Bitch about JavaScript all you want but this exact failure has occurred in many languages. It’s not a language failure. It’s a people failure. Nobody trains JavaScript developers properly and employers knowingly hire unqualified people to do the work. Of course the result is shit. It would be just as shitty if this were a different language. If you want to isolate yourself from so much of the stupid then use a PiHole…

We need to be honest about this. JavaScript created loads of jobs, helped people buy houses and raise families. That's real impact, and I respect that. But I can't help wondering: did we choose it because it was the best tool, or just the least terrible one that was easy enough to learn?

I'm assuming that back then, people chose JS because of its simplicity. But maybe that simplicity came with an ocean of problems. It's like we all showed up to a party because the entrance was free, but no one mentioned that each drink would cost a week’s salary. Why bother though, devs are not the ones paying the bill, right?

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#123

Post by karel-3d »

Aldipower wrote: post #67
karel-3d wrote: post #19

JavaScript is named JavaScript because it was intended to "bridge browser and Java applets" if you read all the old press releases, they try to push the Java applet connection a lot. The original plan was to run Java applets everywhere and JavaScript as a "glue". I think we are much better off now than with Java applets. It could have been much, much worse.

Initially it was called Mocha or LiveScript and not intended to bridge Java applets. It really was invented to make HTML more dynamic. But eventually Netscape and Sun did a license agreement. Sun owned Java. From this point on, the name JavaScript was born and it was marketed to bridge browser and Java applets.

Ah, okay then. I gave too much weight to old press releases then.

Anyway Java applets (and ActiveX) was expected to be the main thing; write once, run anywhere; and that world would be much much worse than what we got.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#124

Post by djoldman »

All of this may be true. It raises the question: why has a better way not won out?

It seems to me that the better user experience that would be gained by a different approach has not been worth the (perceived or actual) hit to developer experience.

Or in a sentence: users do not seem to care enough to make it worthwhile.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#125

Post by nurumaik »

gf000 wrote: post #43
mschuster91 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a wired connection? No problem. On a crowded mobile network? Or when you got only EDGE (hello Germany)? Whoops. Hacker News however? Blazing fast - one page and only the CSS is actually required for rendering the page, and it is using both a cache-buster in the URL and a 10 year (!) cache life time. The JS uses the same as well but it's only loaded at the end of the page, so after rendering is done.

> Hacker News however? While being completely useless on mobile, with tiny buttons and textarea, which could be fixed while barely making the whole thing larger.

Hacker News is the only usable mobile website

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#126

Post by [deleted] »

wffurr wrote: post #59
vladms wrote: post #36

While I don't agree with other points, things got clearer once I reached the following: > Marketers, content editors, SEOs, designers – they’re all locked out of the process. Because now, even simple tasks require technical fluency. I worked in web development in the 2000s and then restarted in 2020s. The power of the tools, the speed of development and the result are all much better. The downside? You need to know m…

The fast pocket computer might be fairly common in fully developed countries, but bandwidth is not. It’s trivial to run into use cases with limited network bandwidth regardless of how fast your iPhone is. And if you broaden your idea of your user base a bit, even the fast computers aren’t ubiquitous. Try using a low end Android phone sometime, or a hand me down iOS device still on iOS 12.

[deleted]

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#127

Post by austin-cheney »

pyman wrote: post #122
austin-cheney wrote: post #2

Bitch about JavaScript all you want but this exact failure has occurred in many languages. It’s not a language failure. It’s a people failure. Nobody trains JavaScript developers properly and employers knowingly hire unqualified people to do the work. Of course the result is shit. It would be just as shitty if this were a different language. If you want to isolate yourself from so much of the stupid then use a PiHole…

We need to be honest about this. JavaScript created loads of jobs, helped people buy houses and raise families. That's real impact, and I respect that. But I can't help wondering: did we choose it because it was the best tool, or just the least terrible one that was easy enough to learn? I'm assuming that back then, people chose JS because of its simplicity. But maybe that simplicity came with an ocean of problems. I…

JavaScript employment always felt like a spoons versus shovels type story.

https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/milton-friedman-shovels-vs-sp...

If you cannot do the job without things like React, Angular, or jquery you may not be qualified to write that code. On a bigger level if you cannot create an original application from scratch you aren’t a senior developer and if you don’t measure things you aren’t an engineer.

Nearly every other professional line of work has solved for this with some combination of licensing and/or broker/agent model. Developers tend to be scared shitless of industrial baselines of qualification assessments.

Again, I am saying all this as someone who wrote JavaScript for employment for 15 years and still love writing in the language.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#128

Post by cherryteastain »

> We’ve rebuilt the web like an air traffic control system – just to serve a few kilobytes of text.

Funny, in the context of Germany's ATC working off some Emacs Lisp cooked up by one dude in just a week back in the 90s [1]

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/emacs/comments/lly7po/do_you_use_em...

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#129

Post by em-bee »

wffurr wrote: post #59
vladms wrote: post #36

While I don't agree with other points, things got clearer once I reached the following: > Marketers, content editors, SEOs, designers – they’re all locked out of the process. Because now, even simple tasks require technical fluency. I worked in web development in the 2000s and then restarted in 2020s. The power of the tools, the speed of development and the result are all much better. The downside? You need to know m…

The fast pocket computer might be fairly common in fully developed countries, but bandwidth is not. It’s trivial to run into use cases with limited network bandwidth regardless of how fast your iPhone is. And if you broaden your idea of your user base a bit, even the fast computers aren’t ubiquitous. Try using a low end Android phone sometime, or a hand me down iOS device still on iOS 12.

bandwidth is not the problem. latency is.

a site where every interaction requires an http request and a reload of the page performs much worse over low latence than an SPA that is designed with a local first approach where all interaction is local and data requests happen in the background.

not all SPAs are designed like that. but none of the traditional sites are designed like that either because they can't.

take hackernews as an example. in order to write a reply i have to click a link, wait for the page to load, click submit, wait for the submission to complete and for the updated page to load.

i live with bad internet. submissions and pageloads on hackernews frequently time out.

with an SPA the first click would open a text field without any server request at all, and submit would happen in the background while i can keep reading. and it can be repeated if it fails without me noticing and having to worry about it.

likewise updating for new messages could happen in the background without me having to wait for a page load. on top of that new messages could show up in a different color without having to track that in the server.

Re: JavaScript broke the web (and called it progress)

#130

Post by andrewstuart »

It’s really weird these posts that come up with this weird fiction that somehow the web was better in the past.

I’ve seen the whole thing, was there every day for it, and it was never better in ye olde days. It was shit.

And I also don’t buy the moaning and bitching about how bad JavaScript is, and how terrible web sites are these days.

These curmudgeons invite you to join in their sad lament for the fabulous days of yore, and how everything’s just awful today.

The truth is it’s an embarrassing wealth of riches on the web. Sites are (mostly) fast, broadband is fast, content is rich, lots is free, and there’s just an unbelievable number of incredible apps and sites.

And it’s all driven by JavaScript, which isn’t a terrible language it turns out to be a warty, weird, inconsistent yet incredibly flexible and powerful language that has grown and stood the test of time.

So when this latest grumbler invites you to grumble with him, maybe instead see reality instead of the fictional past he presents.

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