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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)

#131

Post by hliyan »

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…

One theory I have is that JavaScript's originally low entry barrier as an untyped scripting language that works very close to the front end, allowed many programmers who might have found other programming languages too challenging (especially those without a comp sci degree), to be productive. This in itself is a good thing. It democratized programming to some extent. But at the same time, it populated the community with a large number (majority?) of programmers who were not well grounded in computer science or engineering practices. I worked with C++ for ten years before getting into JavaScript, and over the years I have seen some old concepts and solutions being excitedly reinvented in the JavaScript world, often suboptimally.

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

#132

Post by anonzzzies »

al_borland wrote: post #111
anonzzzies wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Javascript seems to attract the most horrible frameworks that stimulate this more than in other languages, but agreed, not the fault of the language. It's a horrible language as well, but that's another story.

This is largely because all of these frameworks are a collection of hacks to get Jacascript to do things it was never designed to do. It seems if we want to have single page application that act like desktop apps, maybe we need a new language/technology that browsers can handle that is designed for this. Maybe WASM is supposed to be the answer there, but it doesn’t feel like it (I haven’t really looked into it much).…

> Though I could just be wearing rose colored glasses.

> al_borland

Borland had a nice and not complex solution. Which made for very fast, low latency interfaces. Everyone starts crying when you don't have the react, downward reactive (well, for some definition of this leaky abstraction thing they call reactive because javascript doesn't support anything to help), but with simple events, getters and setters it was much much clearer what was happening every tick and you could optimise, even as junior, accordingly because everyone gets it all after 10 minutes of tutorial of how it works. I have seniors asking me (every few days) why something doesn't or does update in react or why it's so slow to input something in a field in react (we fix or patch horrible software for a living, so we see 100s of different companies over the months / years; these are not the same seniors asking me this; there are very very few people actually understanding how it works and how not to crash and burn because it LOOKS like you can do something in 'this way' (even on the official react site), but when you do it, you machine gun yourself in your legs).

Not to mention that you would end up with a consistent UI with shortcuts that every user could use immediately instead of the shitshow of 'designer' choices.

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

#133

Post by owebmaster »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #21
Lapz wrote: post #15

I often see people say “JS is unstable,you’re always rewriting your code for the latest and greatest framework” and I always wonder where do you work? If I told the people I report to I can’t deliver that for you because we’re rewriting the app, I’d be out of the door soon. The JS ecosystem is like any technology ecosystem, things change over time but you don’t have to chase the trends, be pragmatic about what you fo…

There was a time between 2015 and 2020 when framework fatigue was a real thing. People were jumping between angular, ember, react, vue, and if you were unlucky enough to choose react, Crazy Mad Scientist Dan Abramov was telling you YoureDoingItWrong(TM) every other tuesday and prompting everyone to rewrite their app in shame (even though they wrote it the way that was trendy LAST tuesday). Since then, things have set…

> Since then, things have settled down a LOT.

Truth being told, Crazy Mad Scientist Dan Abramov is still doing the same thing (React Server Components) but we are not falling for it anymore

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

#134

Post by brulard »

al_borland wrote: post #105
brulard wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It may be resume-driven, but that's the state of the world. If you fail to keep your team members and attract new ones as the team needs to grow, you are fighting a losing battle.

Maybe all these needless technology shifts are the reason the team members are leaving.

I didn't see many needless ones, but I've seen many team members not wanting to hear about any change. It's hard enough to push a greatly needed change through management. Maybe there are places where they do it just for fun.

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

#136

Post by jonoalderson »

Thanks for all the delightful feedback, folks!

Some people rightly pointed out that it was a bit hypocritical of my site to be loading a bunch of third-party JS and resources(!), which I've now addressed.

In my defence, this was only due to loading ReCAPTCHA on blog posts as a quick protection mechanism from an influx of spam - which I've now replaced with Turnstile (and only lazily trigger the JS+resources for that when the comment form enters the viewport).

Also, no, the post wasn't written by AI / ChatGPT / etc. :)

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

#137

Post by cyanydeez »

serial_dev wrote: post #78
onion2k wrote: post #7

Saying JS broke the web when your website loads 754kB of JS across 13 separate requests makes me wonder if you're very serious about the problem.

> This isn’t about going back to table layouts or banning JavaScript. It’s about building with intent. > It’s not about purity. It’s about outcomes. > Use what works. I think the website is fast and the majority of that JS is for the comment section+recaptcha (that's also for comments?), website works without it, I can tab through things, and the site is accessible, so I don't think that hundred KB of JS is a big "go…

Someone should write a meta forum that just overlays related posts.

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

#138

Post by sotix »

neya wrote: post #76

In 2010, Facebook was one of the best websites to browse. It was everything you wanted a central social media platform to be. You could stay updated about your friends, family and even host pages for your business on it. Everything was just so simple - because they respected what a "hyperlink" actually meant. Fast forward today, I click on a dropdown on a post with barely 3-4 options, there's a spinner, a dozen reque…

The Facebook iOS app used to be great too when it was developed by one man. Or at least I thought so at the time. I can’t remember if that was the app designed by Joe Hewitt or Adam Ernst.

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

#139

Post by vlucas »

> It’s easier to win an argument by citing SSR compatibility issues than it is to ask, “Why are we using React for a blog?”

I've asked myself this a LOT - the past few years especially.

I think the biggest reason, which the author doesn't touch on, is that *React won*. React won vs. alternatives so much and so thoroughly that it started to be used for everything - even in places that it clearly should not be, like static content pages. The reality is that in most frameworks, it's easier to make the whole page with React for the once piece of the page you needed to be interactive than to make the whole page static and do some vanilla JavaScript manually. The React ecosystem is HUGE, and most developers out there are just gluing things together.

Some "interactive islands" frameworks like Astro and Hyperspan (my own project) are starting to finally change this approach and make the "mostly static with JS sprinkles" approach easier, but they are a late reaction to the core problem described in this post. It will take time for these approaches to gain traction.

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

#140

Post by farseer »

dudeinjapan wrote: post #30
farseer wrote: post #5

That is because the actual alternatives to JS such as Flash, Silverlight and Java Applets were much worse. Native apps are bound by the platform's walled garden and practically undiscoverable, hence the need for web apps.

Come on now. Flash, security holes aside, was way better! It even had ActionScript which was essentially JavaScript.

I was a professional flash/flex/air developer once. And Steve Jobs put me out of a job when he refused flash on the iPhone. The security and performance bottlenecks were real and by the time Adobe mostly fixed them in later version of the flash player, it was too late. Most devs and companies had abandoned the sinking ship.
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