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I can only think that modern front end development has failed

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Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#161

Post by Drew_ »

darkhorse13 wrote: post #110
caseymarquis wrote: post #25

I'd like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It's all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provide…

>Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure I think this is the important thing here. Everything feels less stable, and more prone to breaking, on the modern web. You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is…

> You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is essentially a black box, ready to break (or misbehave) any time.

Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#162

Post by tazjin »

tffgg wrote: post #125
tazjin wrote: post #47

HN seems to be pretty split on this issue. I concur with the linked tweet. Using the web beyond very simple pages like HN feels like wading through garbage. Everything is slow, laggy, loads ridiculous amounts of stuff (I live in a country where traffic is very expensive at the moment, so this becomes more noticeable). Things are also flaky and need reloading whenever they get into broken states. The only way I use th…

Why would you want server side rendering? As a user it's painful if you have to wait after each click

There is - by definition - more overhead in client-side rendering. Think of it this way: The server needs to first serialise data, the client needs to deserialise it, then it needs to construct the DOM to update.

The server can just do the first step and things like Hotwire can add the dynamic bits you need - all overhead and extra processing is now gone.

I can list a lot of websites that don't render client-side that are fast, but very few that do which are.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#163

Post by danjac »

avl999 wrote: post #97

Hacker News and the old reddit is the pinnacle of user experience for a site of its "genre". The new reddit perfectly exemplifies what @antirez is saying. It's amazing to me that hundreds (thousands?) of people who work at Reddit thought that that user experience was an "improvement" over the old reddit.

If it forces us to download a native app because the website is unusable, that's a "win" in their eyes.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#164

Post by q-big »

Drew_ wrote: post #161
darkhorse13 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure I think this is the important thing here. Everything feels less stable, and more prone to breaking, on the modern web. You write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid. You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is…

> You start a new project with a framework, and it seems like there is this whole area of your project that is essentially a black box, ready to break (or misbehave) any time. Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks.

> Any framework you're not familiar with will feel like this. This isn't something unique to frontend frameworks.

But the frameworks get out of fashion faster than you can obtain deep knowledge of them.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#165

Post by clairity »

bit_logic wrote: post #156

What upsets and concerns me the most is when I see poorly developed SPA on really important sites. For example, government service application websites. If reddit or nytimes has a bloated, intermittently failing SPA site, that's an annoyance. When it's a form to apply for unemployment, ACA health care, DMV, or other critical services, it's a critical failure. Especially since these services are most often used by exa…

what concerns me more than that is how government sites require google and the like (captcha and analytics at the very least), giving them opportunity to hoover up all of our sensitive data in one convenient place.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#166

Post by rantwasp »

leephillips wrote: post #91
rantwasp wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not saying that you’re wrong, but do you have the same constraints as the “crappy” websites? there is definitely an explosion of tooling, frameworks, etc, but past some obvious things, IMHO most websites are crippled by business people (that will likely not be using the website) make all sorts of technical decisions what must go in and how it’s supposed to work (ads and tracking crap is one of the things that jumps u…

No, I don’t have all the same constraints. For example, I would walk away if any of the organizations that I work with insisted on tracking visitors. I stopped taking paying customers years ago for this and similar reasons. But if a site is bad for the reader, it’s bad. The developer has failed, even if the customer got what it wanted.

i get it and i am in the same boat as you (ie make it awesome for the reader), but unfortunately this is not what happens in the real world :(

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#167

Post by verisimilidude »

peanut_worm wrote: post #11

It makes me really angry when a simple informative site is a bloated SPA app for no good reason.

It's not just simple content sites.

The other day, I placed an online order for curbside pickup (with a national brick-and-mortar chain). When the time came, I drove up to their curb. But I couldn't access their "I'm at the curb, bring out my stuff" page. It just kept loading and loading. I had to go into the store to get my order.

When I got back to my PC, I discovered a massive webpack bundle on that page, along with an absurd level of tracking software. The page had transferred 50MB before I could even use it.

They knew their curbside page would be used exclusively by people on their phones, in their cars. They knew some of those people would pull up to stores with poor cell reception. That page should've been as light as possible. The page was ultimately just a simple form, so it should've been possible.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#168

Post by tazjin »

mrweasel wrote: post #133
tazjin wrote: post #47

HN seems to be pretty split on this issue. I concur with the linked tweet. Using the web beyond very simple pages like HN feels like wading through garbage. Everything is slow, laggy, loads ridiculous amounts of stuff (I live in a country where traffic is very expensive at the moment, so this becomes more noticeable). Things are also flaky and need reloading whenever they get into broken states. The only way I use th…

The reason I’m interested in Hotwire is because the Javascript frameworks are confusing. Every new Javascript framework I’ve looked into has been impossible to figure out. There are simply to many moving parts for me to be able to figure out where to start. It may be a bad example, but it the latest I’ve attempted to use. It took me maybe an hour to get an Angular project started. It somehow managed to install 1000+…

My honest take is that the frontend development stack focuses almost entirely on the developer experience (mostly oriented towards shiny things), and the user experience is only a secondary effect of that.

That the developer experience also doesn't work is just an effect of the real-world, where people will end up using stuff outside of the small designated bucket of things that somebody attempts to keep compatible with each other.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#169

Post by anthk »

sdfhbdf wrote: post #111
coldtea wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and…

The articles you're linking are proven to be misrepresenting. They for example look at a really small subset of music "Million song dataset" and only analysed basic metrics that could be automatically measured. To be honest I think the linked Spanish paper and the senationalist "Science proves modern music is bad" should be retracted since the methodology is flawed. Don't take my word for it, take Tantacrul's - compo…

>(synths, electronic, hip-hop)

Synth began in the 70's, and Moroder/Jarre is far better than the 90% of today's crap.

Re: I can only think that modern front end development has failed

#170

Post by darkwater »

selfmodruntime wrote: post #118
caseymarquis wrote: post #25

I'd like to add a bit more nuance. Modern frontend development provides many opportunities for failure. These failures often make their way into production. I, personally, get great results with modern FE development. My users are happy. I am happy. It's all very successful. All the defenders of modern FE development will likely chime in with the same sentiment. I also get great results with C, which arguably provide…

I love modern frontend development. I can build apps that scale easily to hundreds of thousands of users. They are fast where they need to be fast, and building components means complexity lives only where it's needed. Static parts are rendered statically, dynamic parts are rendered dynamically. I can write all code for the entire stack in Javascript. The entire workflow is streamlined in a simple way (webpack really…

I guess you are a talented developer working in the right environment. But the vast majority of sites outside there (not controlled by some tech behemoth) are usually not optimized, work on Chrome, usable only by abled people and a long etc etc
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