Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#231

Post by circlefavshape » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:42 AM UTC

wvenable wrote: post #163

astrodust wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages, we built entire operating systems in C which is notorious for quickly becoming unreadable, and we've somehow built an entire world of content using HTML and CSS. JavaScript is just a language, and while improvements to it are being made constantly, the biggest obstacle is not the language, nor the way browser makers support it, but the absurdly slow p…

> We put people on the moon without benefit of "scalable" languages The computer for the Apollo missions had approximately 64Kbyte of memory and operated at 0.043MHz. My wrist-watch is many orders of magnitude more powerful than that. But the programming effort that went into it was huge (literally: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/800/1*qJnPOGdtk1q7dq17tx... ). If we were stilling coding things that way, we might…

> If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars

Erm ... we actually don't have self-driving cars

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#232

Post by dozzie » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:48 AM UTC

apatters wrote: post #147

jaredklewis wrote: post #77

I think it's worth noting that back-end web development is an usually pleasant place. In most other types of programming, many technical decisions are made by the platform and working with tons of legacy cruft is the norm, not the exception. For example, where else can you so freely choose the programming language? Linux Driver? Use C. Mobile App? Java or Swift/Objective-C for Android or iPhone, respectively. GUI App…

This is exactly why I've always been puzzled by the urge to move more and more logic to the frontend. In backend development you have a choice of many mature languages, tools and frameworks which are fairly sane. I'll take that environment as the foundation of a web application any day and apply the mania of client-side javascript to it selectively in cases where we need to minimize server roundtrips.

> [...] I've always been puzzled by the urge to move more and more logic to the frontend.

Moreover, we've already had applications written in client-database architecture, and it was nowhere near pretty. Fortunately they died long ago, but unfortunately they're resurrected now again.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#233

Post by TeMPOraL » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:48 AM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #150

TheMagicHorsey wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Exactly what you said. It bothers me when people think solving broken Javascript problems is a valuable way to spend our civilizations scarce skilled manpower.

Angry Birds and Candy Crush are clearly superior uses of time.

Well, they at least provide value to people without too much externalities which makes them much better than both fighting in the mud and all the adtech work that drives this mess.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#234

Post by Aaargh20318 » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:49 AM UTC

ivanhoe wrote: post #170

pixie_ wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's sad is the zillions of hours wasted by engineers on an inherently flawed stack. What's sad is how ridiculously complicated it is to create and manage relatively simple UIs. What's sad is an entire generations of programmers growing up and thinking this is normal. Programming is supposed to be about creating platforms for each other so we can continue solving higher (and higher) level problems. This web crap ha…

Interesting, what native UI system is in your opinion easier to work with than web? Why then so many devs choose to use WebBrowser wrappers to render their desktop/mobile UIs because it's way faster and easier to develop with?

> Interesting, what native UI system is in your opinion easier to work with than web?

I'll answer that: every single one. I haven't ever seen a GUI system more complicated than the HTML/CSS/JS mess. The problem with these is that at first glance they look easy. Doing 'hello world' in HTML is little more than actually typing 'Hello world'. They only become a mess if you try to do something reasonably complex. The end result of this is that there are many people who start out with HTML and stick with it. They simply never experienced anything different.

> Why then so many devs choose to use WebBrowser wrappers to render their desktop/mobile UIs because it's way faster and easier to develop with?

No, it's cheaper to develop with. There are many more 'web developers' out there than mobile developers and they are usually very cheap to hire. The goal of corporations is not to build the best UI or to use the best tools, it is to make the most profit. A web-UI is usually considered good-enough by the suits and web 'developers' are a dime a dozen.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#235

Post by philplckthun » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:51 AM UTC

flukus wrote: post #159

lobster_johnson wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

React is, in my opinion, a big step forward in reclaiming the front end as a mature UI environment. I have also found that CSS becomes a lot more tolerable with CSS Modules, in combination with React, which allows you to write CSS that targets one component and only that component. By eschewing cascading, you can finally write modular, reusable CSS that avoids side effects and still allows fine-tuning (overriding) by…

IMO react is a big step backwards. Adding an abstraction layer almost never produces a better result, it just makes things more complicated.

Abstractions make things more complicated? I think you're missing the basic definition and purpose of abstractions. So how do you define "almost"?

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#236

Post by gildas » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:56 AM UTC

jorblumesea wrote: post #124

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

String.prototype.endsWith is native [0], it was added as part of ES2015. If you're supporting older platforms, you need to polyfill it. [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

How well supported is ES6 across browsers? Chrome for sure. Not sure about FF or IE.

The support is quite good today, see https://kangax.github.io/compat-table/es6/.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#237

Post by freyr » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:56 AM UTC

Yes. Web programming is a mess. It's layers and layers of half-baked solutions, each patching deficiencies in the previous layer while introducing new deficiencies. It's a convoluted Rune Goldbergian contraption, attempting to make a general application framework out technologies originally designed to display hypertext.

The individual parts make sense once you're familiar with them. Some are even designed by conscientious and competent people. But the feeling that, taken together, it's an ugly hack is inescapable.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#238

Post by narrator » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:56 AM UTC

wazoox wrote: post #165

narrator wrote: post #61

>Can you recommend any good resources to help me orient my mind to this new way of thinking? The thing about web frontend development is that it suffered from the browser wars and having to appeal to amateur developers. Amateur developers love "Worse is Better"[1]. Basically sacrifice all consistency in favor of simplicity and getting started quickly. "Worse is Better" makes things simple to the point of making ugly…

Angular feels clean enough, but how do you implement internationalisation properly? How do you switch to angular 2 now that angular 1 is obsolete? Same thing with bootstrap (v2 is largely incompatible with v3 which is mostly incompatible with v4)... Backend is okay; frontend really is a clusterfuck, because it seems all built for short-lived, one shot applications. I build professional applications that have to live…

I was using node.js for a while and having to deal with the same bugs over and over again. Usually the bug would be passing the wrong type or mistyping a name. I started using Typescript and things got a lot better. Scala.js is great and all, and probably a good choice if you're using Scala on the backend, but Typescript works a bit better because the Javascript it generates is pretty close to the original. If you search the HN archives, people seem pretty happy with it.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#239

Post by jazoom » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:56 AM UTC

flukus wrote: post #206

copperx wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have been waiting for the dust to settle on the "Node is the worst idea of mankind" vs "Node is brilliant" before taking a look into it.

The amount of breakages I get using my static site/blog generator has my leaning toward worst ever. If that's any indication then anything actually complicated would be breaking all the time.

This doesn't sound like a NodeJS problem.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#240

Post by jacquesm » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 9:56 AM UTC

Definitely yes. I'm on the sidelines until things will settle down into something that makes more sense and if it doesn't then I won't be doing any web development.

Software is such a huge field there are a ton of interesting challenges outside of the web and the current mess does absolutely nothing to keep me interested. It's a veritable tower of Babel without a clear sense of direction or longevity.