Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#151

Post by adrianratnapala » Thu, May 31, 2018, 5:08 AM UTC

bjterry wrote: post #133

meredydd wrote: post #56

Web frameworks are churn-y because they are incredibly leaky abstractions covering really awkward impedance mismatches. This means that they are never quite satisfactory - and that just to use one, you need to be capable of building a new one yourself. Think of a typical web app. Your data exists: 1. As rows in a database, accessed via SQL 2. As model objects on the server, accessed via method calls and attributes 3.…

This is a great comment and an amazing insight. What's particularly interesting is that people have attempted to collapse (almost?) every stage of that abstraction hierarchy individually, but none of them have been so successful as to take over the world. If you were writing a desktop application, you would still have at least three of the layers (serialized data on disk, in-memory data, and the rendering of the obje…

Even on the desktop those three layers involve impedance mismatch and much the same pathologies as meredydd describes. But I guess three layers of it are better than 6.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#152

Post by zoul » Thu, May 31, 2018, 5:12 AM UTC

collyw wrote: post #60

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm finding the growing celebrity culture of programming to be troubling. I find that programming is becoming less and less about code or architecture and more about evangelism and marketing, but I'm not sure what changed in the incentive structure for this to happen, and I would like to find out. Aside: This has made me reconsider being a career programmer.

I got asked if I had a blog in an interview. I am a software engineer not a self marketer.

I am a software engineer that loves to help others. Nothing to do with self-marketing, at least not intentionally, but a welcomed skill in the team. So the question makes sense to me.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#153

Post by burakemir » Thu, May 31, 2018, 5:16 AM UTC

Achshar wrote: post #129

I always find it curious that almost no one is talking about not using a framework to begin with. I have been writing complex UI with vanilla js for some time now, never had any issues or took longer than I expected to get a job done.

You have to ask yourself whether, in the process of building that complex UI, you haven't invented another framework.

After the first few web apps, one necessarily sees the repetitive elements and wants to capture that in libraries and abstractions. Routing URLs? Reuse that widget? This is just coding instinct.

I think it is possible to have a stream of projects where each new one gets its framework copied and pasted from the previous. That does not mean it's not a framework, just one without name and documentation.

Then there are projects of a certain size that you wouldn't want to do like this. Stakes too high, more than 1-2 developers. Then you can either brush up your framework and give it a name and documentation and contribute to the 'problem' of too many frameworks.

Or use something that others use and is just as suitable.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#154

Post by endgame » Thu, May 31, 2018, 5:18 AM UTC

aaron-lebo wrote: post #80

no1youknowz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think more developers should use jquery to prototype an app and move torward a framework when it is needed. They really shouldn't. With VueJS it's not that difficult to get setup and running with the CLI and components is such a game changer. Don't get me wrong. I love jQuery, there's nothing better than taking someone else's library and then extending it. Here's an example [0]. However, one thing that I have lea…

Mithril is similarly small and very easy to get started.

There is a sibling comment by RodericDay that is [dead], and I have no idea why:

> Mithril is my favorite by far.

> It's not even close. It's depressing how little-known it remains.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#155

Post by bartread » Thu, May 31, 2018, 5:24 AM UTC

freshhawk wrote: post #105

zeth___ wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not sure what changed in the incentive structure for this to happen, and I would like to find out. People started getting paid more for doing this because managers have no idea what programming actually is.

Which is why it is so much more cost effective to spend your time marketing to those managers than writing code to market to the developers.

Ha! I'm not sure how serious this comment is in terms of how you choose to spend your time at work, but a person with that attitude isn't going to last long working for me. I expect them to deliver.

I'm not a tyrant, and I avoid setting hard deadlines as much as reasonably possible, but I do expect concrete evidence of output that delivers customer and/or business value.

Still, in many organisations I think you're right. So much energy is expended on marketing to/currying favour with managers that not much is actually delivered. It's how you end up with 100+ people taking more than 6 months to deliver two pages that allow customers to register for a service (names omitted to protect the guilty).

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#156

Post by _ZeD_ » Thu, May 31, 2018, 5:32 AM UTC

for the same reason of the eternal september

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#157

Post by nostrademons » Thu, May 31, 2018, 5:33 AM UTC

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #30

freedomben wrote: post #8

This is a really well-written and well-thought out piece. The author touches on a number of points but never gets polemical. This piece resonated with me particularly well: > Be wary of self-promotion > Over the last few years I’ve seen much more aggressive self-marketing in the JavaScript world, possibly due to the rise of paid online training materials and the employment/consulting advantage of being a Github ‘cele…

I'm finding the growing celebrity culture of programming to be troubling. I find that programming is becoming less and less about code or architecture and more about evangelism and marketing, but I'm not sure what changed in the incentive structure for this to happen, and I would like to find out. Aside: This has made me reconsider being a career programmer.

Is this actually a new phenomena? I remember when I started programming c. 2000, the big-name programming gurus were folks like Kent Beck, Ward Cunningham, Uncle Bob, Ron Jeffries, Dave Thomas, Joel Spolsky, Jeff Atwood, Martin Fowler, et al. While some of them mostly knew their stuff, some were outright hacks (Peter Norvig's vs. Ron Jeffries' attempts to create a sudoku solver is one of my favorite examples [1]). Most of their names wouldn't be recognized by someone just getting into programming now.

As I've gotten older, I've learned that there's often an inverse correlation between how good a programmer is and how likely you are to have heard of them, because the folks who get good at programming are actually programming and not writing blog articles about programming. Most of the latter are really content marketing, trying to drum up business for consultancies, and so you should treat them as advertisement rather than advice.

[1] http://ravimohan.blogspot.com/2007/04/learning-from-sudoku-s...

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#158

Post by tlrobinson » Thu, May 31, 2018, 5:53 AM UTC

So here’s the thing... browsers are generally excellent at maintaining backwards compatibility (see “SmooshGate” for christsake). Old frontend frameworks still work just fine, therefore when you complain about frontend development be “unstable” you’re complaining about other people creating or adopting new frameworks/tools. If these things really aren’t worth learning you are free to continue using the old ones.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#159

Post by thisrod » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:03 AM UTC

paulddraper wrote: post #128

spankalee wrote: post #121

Asking this question without looking at the underlying platform is ignoring a huge source of insight into the problem and its solutions. Growing up from a document viewer to an app platform in the particular way it did left the web as the most important and ubiquitous GUI app deployment and runtime platform, but without a dev-accessible native GUI component system. No other major modern UI platform was _ever_ in this…

> Growing up from a document viewer to an app platform in the particular way it did left the web as the most important and ubiquitous GUI app deployment and runtime platform, but without a dev-accessible native GUI component system. Exactly this. Web technologies cannot be understood without understanding the history of the web itself. You could just as easily imagine, say (random example), Internet + Gopher + Lisp p…

> It was somewhat inevitable chain of events

The question that intrigues me is why Tcl/Tk didn't take off around 1995. We could have had internet apps about a decade before web apps were feasible.

The only answer I can think of is that no one in 1995 would have contemplated running a Tcl script that their computer had just downloaded from a random host, but Javascript boiled that frog gradually. I'd be keen to hear other ideas.

Re: Why Is Front-End Development So Unstable?

#160

Post by freetonik » Thu, May 31, 2018, 6:05 AM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #82

At some point, when modules get "micro" enough, the effort of managing them and learning their usage outweighs the effort of implementing the thing yourself. Most JavaScript projects seem to walk that line quite closely. I'm a React developer at work, but I recently gave Vue a try at home. This is one of the things that most stood out to me about it. React makes a selling point out of the fact that it's "just renderi…

If I remember correctly, first versions of React were similar in that respect: you could just add a script tag to your page and you that’s it (save for the mount-point thing).