Earlier quoted context omitted.
i strongly disagree with this: Every flavour of Linux uses a different layout for its root directories, stores configs in different places and generally is not consistent from distro to distro. there are differences, but it's 90% the same in the major distributions. and while you do have a point about user configs, it is getting better. .config and .local are getting used more and more and are an improvement over eve…
>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…
Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
131–140 of 269 posts
Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
#132Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 I might pull in specific libraries, but I don't want to pull in a giant framework that will be outdated the next time I decide to work on that particular project.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.
Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Oh, you would want to use it. The games and similar mini software just don't have anything comparable to it. The loss of flash is very unfortunate.
There's a technical hole that I still think could be filled by other programs today. But often, I hear people lamenting the loss of community and the loss of universal publishing.
And on that note, aside from the animation-centered workflow, I'm less certain that the rest of that stuff is actually gone. Unity publishes to websites just as well as Flash did, if not better. Unity even lets you publish to Linux, which Flash never really supported well.
And honestly, I'm not sure the community is dead either, it's just moved on to platforms like Scratch, Pico 8, Itch.io, and Roblox. I see very similar energies when I interact with people on those platforms. It's a different community, it's younger kids with different norms, the old generation isn't as welcome anymore. But I'm not sure the reason for that is because Flash died. Sometimes generations grow up and younger generations go act creative in different spaces.
So yes, there is a very specific workflow for a very specific type of game that no longer works on the web. I've used Unity, and I don't really like Unity, I hate it's resource management, I hate that we're still using proprietary software after so many years. But I think more people are making games with Unity today than were making them back then on Flash. It's more accessible.
I'm very, very slowly changing my opinion on this. Part of it is that Flash is still available today under Animate, and while it is still chained to Adobe I've still never heard a really good breakdown of how it's worse or what features it doesn't support anymore. As far as I can tell, you can still use Actionscript 3.0 with Animate. It is proprietary and expensive, but so was Flash -- so if it's purely a technical problem, then I'm not 100% sure that you couldn't still make a Flash website/game today.
I still think there's a hole here that could be better served by Open Source toolchains, but I'm becoming less convinced that it is as big of a deal as I previously thought. If you're trying to make games, now is a really good time to be alive. It could be better, but if you give me the option of making games in 1999 or making games today, I'm not going back to 1999.
And aside from that, even if Flash is a hole, it's still very specifically a hole for games. Even during its heyday, building static websites in Flash was a sin. Almost everything else you want to use to build a static website is still available. Just not that specific sinful part :)
Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
#134The 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 agree with you, but the problem, the big problem, is that you're looked down if you propose to use simpler tools. It is horribly difficult to not use these advanced tools for simpler problems. At work my team does just f**ng CRUD forms, and for doing this we have the most overcomplicated stack I've seen in my life. Go backend with React, Redux, Rxjs,custom.webpack craziness, and 32 tons of internal weird libraries…
Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
#135Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
#136The 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…
>> The learning curve for Linux was larger than Windows or MacOS, but I only learned the truth. By cutting away abstraction, I can actually understand what my system is doing, and be a better citizen of my operating system. Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the Windows filesystem look like a joke in comparison. What windows filesystem (FAT, FAT32, exFAT, NTFS) look like a joke and compared to which Linux files…
I was referring more to the layout of the root directory (oftentimes referred to as "the filesystem", but now that you bring it up I also hate the Windows filesystems. FAT32 needs to go out to the pasture, and it wouldn't even exist if exFAT support was so broken on lower-end systems. NTFS is fine, but pathetically bare-bones. I'm a BTRFS evangelist, but even ext3 makes NTFS look old by comparison.
> It’s pretty clear that you never used Linux in the 90’s from your comment.
This is true.
> And the main problem with Linux at the time had nothing to do with the filesystem but mainly with the immaturity of the complete system.
"at the time" meaning 2018 or the 90s? Maybe 30 years ago Linux was immature, but now it's the benchmark of maturity. Very few *nix systems have share it's pedigree.
> I am very curious to understand what great truth you understood by using Linux. Would you kindly teach me this great knowledge and illuminating experience that I somehow missed?
Nope, probably not. If using Linux wasn't an enlightening experience because you last used it in the 90s or because you have an FAT fetish, I can't really help you.
Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't think you're smart enough to make any inference about when I started. But if you insist on this crusty bonafides peen measuring contest I got started serving php via cgi on apache deployed with scp.
I assumed that you might have started later than the author because you compared the current state to just a few years ago, while the article mainly talks about even further back in history.
The tools I mentioned were not meant for bragging. I just wanted to indicate that back then it was all way simpler, which you know as you apparently started in a similar timeframe to myself.
The main point I wanted to make was that back then things were so much simpler.
Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
#138The 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…
Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Oh, you would want to use it. The games and similar mini software just don't have anything comparable to it. The loss of flash is very unfortunate.
Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)
#140The 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…
That’s true if the web app is a SPA and uses React and doesn’t require much accessibility and uses Redux or doesn’t manage state and, and, and...
Most web developers are limited to those conditions and most currently posted front end jobs are limited to those requirements. Technically what you said is subjectively correct but it depends on a lot of factors and constraints for the average developer.