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Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

frankchimero.com

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Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#21

Post by fordsmith »

enriquto wrote: post #13
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…

You are spot on. And now, try OpenBSD. It's the next step in removing useless abstractions.

I'm an avid Linux user, completely unfamiliar with BSD. Could you shed some light on how it further removes abstractions? I don't mind trying it out by booting it from a usb

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#22

Post by BiteCode_dev »

hivacruz wrote: post #7

> simply npm your webpack via grunt with vue babel or bower to react asdfjkl;lkdhgxdlciuhw Nice summary. While I understand that yarn was a good thing to integrate frontend dependencies management just like we do it for the backend, Webpack is still a mystery to me. Just trying to add a simple JS library to make it work is a headache sometimes (DataTable with Rails for example).

I fought with webpack for years, then ViteJS came out.

It works out of the box, is uber fast, support Vue + React and does everything webpack did for me.

I stopped thinking about my tooling and could go back to spend those CPU brain cycle on solving my clients problems.

Peace of mind.

Thanks Evan You.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#23

Post by rectang »

MereInterest wrote: post #11
papertokyo wrote: post #5

Frank is right, of course. Staying up to date with the tooling, best practices, and user expectations of the web requires an unreasonable amount of attention if making websites is only a small part of your service offering. One reason I prefer frontend libraries like Vue and Svelte is they feel closer to the grain of the web (HTMLesque templates with JS and CSS sprinkled in), and provide a reasonable level of abstrac…

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)

#24

Post by nanna »

rectang wrote: post #23
MereInterest wrote: post #11

Earlier 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.

'Typically' meaning...? Jekyll? Gatsby?

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#25

Post by bestinterest »

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…

I wish wish wish I could move over to Linux but its font rendering situation is terrible [1] I've tried Manjaro and Ubuntu to no avail.

I have no idea what causes it or if people on Linux are not as sensitive to it or its a specific hardware setup which causes terrible fonts but once you read Windows fonts stuff looks so much better to me. Apparently its a hot debated topic but its so obvious to some it seems.

[1] https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#26

Post by grawprog »

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…

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but

>By cutting away abstraction,

I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction.

>Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the Windows filesystem look like a joke in comparison

It's arranged more simply and straightforward, masterfully though, I dunno...

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.

User configs are also scattered in random places at times. They could be in .config they could be in .local they could be in .$APP_NAME they could be in the app's directory, they could be in /usr/ somewhere. Maybe in a couple different places at once. Who knows? It's a mystery until you track it down.

Dependencies and libraries are a huge pain to deal with, especially when you start mixing and matching distro provided libraries with custom built ones.

I'm not trying to disagree with your post or anything. I love the way Linux lets you have control over your computer and doesn't try to stop you. But, it's definitely got some issues. I've only touched on a few related to your comment itself.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#27

Post by jwilber »

hivacruz wrote: post #7

> simply npm your webpack via grunt with vue babel or bower to react asdfjkl;lkdhgxdlciuhw Nice summary. While I understand that yarn was a good thing to integrate frontend dependencies management just like we do it for the backend, Webpack is still a mystery to me. Just trying to add a simple JS library to make it work is a headache sometimes (DataTable with Rails for example).

I encountered the same trauma after building a react site and told myself surely there must be something more simple.

Check out parcel! Zero configuration required, just add a couple of commands to a package.json and you’re off.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#28

Post by enriquto »

fordsmith wrote: post #21
enriquto wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are spot on. And now, try OpenBSD. It's the next step in removing useless abstractions.

I'm an avid Linux user, completely unfamiliar with BSD. Could you shed some light on how it further removes abstractions? I don't mind trying it out by booting it from a usb

> 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.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#29

Post by mikepurvis »

grawprog wrote: post #26
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…

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

There's also a lot of sub-ecosystem issues which are more prominent on Linux, like the long-standing surprise that NPM doesn't have a global rc file in /etc:

https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/533

The argument from the maintainer is reasonable that distros can just patch it, but realistically, everyone wants a newer version of things than what their distros ship—a similar tug-of-war ends up happening in the Python world, where distros like Ubuntu and Debian ship patched versions of pip/setuptools, and then users are encouraged to self-upgrade those tools to the upstream versions.

Anyway, this kind of thing isn't necessarily anyone's fault, but it is just a pretty different experience from Mac or Windows where you tend to have things be more self contained, like "here's where my Python installation lives because it's the path I put in the box when I ran setup.exe."

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#30

Post by ur-whale »

I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said:

Front-end infrastructure and tools design unfortunately does not attract the cream of the CS graduate crop (and even less so Front-End design work).

For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards systems, compiler, DB, back-end infra, language design, back-end, ML, etc ...

But not front-end.

The net result: the front-end ecosystem looks like the first BASIC program written by a 10 year-old who just got his first computer: it's a mess, it's unprincipled, it's grown organically, it's driven by fashion and immediate business needs, it's an unmaintainable tarpit, and it's increasingly a nightmare to build with.

I'm just ranting, I don't know what the solution is, but I gotta say: the WEB in 2021 is in a very sorry state.

[EDIT]: and if I try to think of a root cause for this state of affairs, I believe a lot of the blame can be attributed to Javascript, a language which sort of gave the "slapped together quickly because we need something now, damned be the warts" tone for the entire ecosystem.

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