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Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

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Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#141

Post by gher-shyu3i »

midrus wrote: post #126
kgin wrote: post #72

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 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…

I echo this. Currently working on CRUD app in golang. What an absolute mess and much slower than using established technologies.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#142

Post by 8bitsrule »

riskable wrote: post #47
megameter wrote: post #14

Phrases like "the content is what is important" come to mind. The whole project of graphic design has the same kind of abyssal qualities as other arts with a technical element - you can always go deeper, more specific. And in a competitive market it's really tempting to sell yourself on one-upping the techniques of others. With a computer in the mix, you can just add specification without end and it will soak everyth…

> "the content is what is important" The only problem there is that users have come to expect certain UI elements on any given web page and those things are far beyond "content". For example, let's say you want to allow comments on articles. Now you have opened an enormous can of worms by requiring logins, storing of passwords (hashes! with salts! using modern algorithms!), permissions management, password reset mech…

>users have come to expect certain UI elements on any given web page and those things are far beyond "content".

Usually I visit pages to see if the content is worth my time. If the 'UI elements' somehow contribute to that content, great. That's rare.

Most pages I hit are hiding poor content in swathes of katchi-vatchi. Do I really care if the headline slides down that big photo? Am I really going to scan those glaring sidebars?

Once again I sigh and mouse-up to Firefox's 'Reader view' to cut through all that bandwidth-wasting crap.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#143

Post by Jiejeing »

kgin wrote: post #72

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…

The difference is that now everybody wants complex web apps, a split backend/frontend, a SPA, PWA, done usingthe javascript framework of the week, etc…

Yes, doing complex things has gotten easier, mostly due to the improved tooling, but the number of things developers are asked to solve (for no real reason other that "it is now doable") have skyrocketed.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#144

Post by watwut »

danShumway wrote: post #133
watwut wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I loved Flash, deeply, I learned to program in Flash. But I am slowly in the process of doing a 180 on this, where before I felt like we had lost something with Flash that nobody had ever replicated. People have different things they liked about Flash. I liked the animation-centered workflow (and I still think there's room for innovation in this space with modern tools). I miss the ability to export vector animations…

Roblox is not comparable to flash in the ease of development. You don't have kids creating mini games and sharing them either. Scratch is not comparable either.

The ease of creating something is just not there in general. The current tools are harder to use for beginner and beginner achieves less with more effort.

And open source have bad track record in terms of creating user beginner friendly tools.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#146

Post by enriquto »

anthk wrote: post #69
enriquto wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Top itself is enough, you don´t need htop.

Totally agree. But I'm somewhat used to silly things about htop, like selecting a process to kill using the arrow keys, or a default refresh rate of less than 1 second.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#147

Post by grishka »

austincheney wrote: post #140
kgin wrote: post #72

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…

> If you want to make a complex web app today, that's easier than it was 20 years ago. The tools are infinitely better. 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…

I'm able to make what people call a "web app", yet I honestly have no idea what React and Redux are, besides buzzwords, and what they are supposed to solve.

But then there's also the problem of people relying on JavaScript at all for websites that would've been fine as a bunch of fully static HTML pages. It's as if these days you can't do software development without overengineering everything into oblivion.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#148

Post by rzzzt »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #53
riskable wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hah: I am very particular about fonts myself but what bugs me most isn't sub-pixel hinting (which is "good enough" with the latest freetype IMHO) it's the size of fonts. Windows is so far off the mark on 99% of computers and it drives me crazy! Repeat after me: 72pt is one inch tall! 72pt is one inch tall! 72pt is one inch tall! The "point" scale of fonts is actually a precise, real-world measurement like inches, mil…

I have never seen a display with non-square pixels, except maybe on cameras. Where are those typically installed?

CGA displays had non-square (logical) pixels. The ratio for 320×200 resolution is 1.6, but it is shown on a 4:3 (1.333) screen.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#149

Post by grishka »

smoldesu wrote: post #10

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…

> My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind.

Were you forced to update to Catalina? I'm still on Mojave right now. My 32-bit apps still work, happily unaware of the fact that they're no longer supposed to.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#150

Post by midrus »

gher-shyu3i wrote: post #141
midrus wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I echo this. Currently working on CRUD app in golang. What an absolute mess and much slower than using established technologies.

I don't blame the language tbh. I blame the frameworks and tools (or the lack of) for web development.

Look, I love node and javascript. But I can't deny it is is total mistake to use it in a business context for web dev when you have django, rails or Laravel. Same for Go and many other trendy tools.... Reinventing the well is not a good business unless you're in the wheels business.

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