Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#251

Post by MereInterest » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:48 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #236

nirui wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... are done with plain JS, with as few libraries as possible ... I was having the same opinion and practice. However, I'm kind regret it as well. Even if you done everything with plain JS, eventually, one day some idea will float into your head such as "Hey... I want to automatically compress the script file/snip", "Hey I wonder if I can polyfill all my script", "Automatically bundle assets?", "Compress assets ima…

> Hey... I want to automatically compress the script file The trick is to write so little JS that its bandwidth usage does not even register. I'm recently going as far as to include licensing headers and extensive comments in my website JS, see e.g. https://xyrillian.de/res/chapter-marks.js >.

I can't find a link at the moment, but there was an article on Hacker News a few years ago defending the use of plain text web pages with minimal styling. The page loaded amazingly fast, rendered well on both desktop and mobile, and had fast interactions with the page. The author had also included the full text of Moby Dick, more content than is ever served in a typical webpage. It was a fun and cheeky demonstration that it isn't the content of a webpage that results in poor performance, but all the frameworks, ad targeting, and client-side compiling of a webpage.

(Side rant: I refuse to use the term "client-side rendering", because dang it, "rendering" makes an image. "Client-side rendering" as web developers use the term doesn't actually render anything, but instead compiles the page down to HTML, which is then rendered by the browser.)

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#252

Post by inglor_cz » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:51 PM UTC

tasuki wrote: post #247

inglor_cz wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1. Political commentary for a local newspaper. They pay reasonably well. 2. Popularization of science and technology for a few web outlets. 3. Books about interesting historical events, these are by far the most popular and earn me majority of my writing income. 4. I dabbled a bit in fiction, but long forms like novels seem to be out of reach for me. My strength is in shorter texts that can be written in an afternoon…

Mind linking any of your work?

This is my profile at Goodreads.

https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/18339067.Marian_Kechli...

Everything I write is in Czech, though. Automatic translation from Czech to English sucks.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#253

Post by MereInterest » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 4:53 PM UTC

winphone1974 wrote: post #79

lenkite wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A micro-library like https://redom.js.org/ does make things easier though. I have also given up on mega-frameworks - just too many things to keep in mind as I get older.

Easier through ignorance seems like cheating IMO. you're basically saying yes things are harder but I just ignore them. How would a newbie decide what's safe to skip?

While agree with your conclusion, I don't agree with your argument to reach it. Any software development sits on such a tall and wobbly stack of dependencies that no one human can even understand every layer, let alone build it. For most projects, I don't hand-solder together transistors into the logic layer, write my own bootstrapping compiler out of hex assembly instructions, or directly interface with graphics drivers to display the program's output. That doesn't make these be bad programs or bad projects, just because they are focused on only one part of the program space.

My concern isn't in "ignorance" or "cheating", but in spending time to learn a technology or framework that may quickly become obsolete.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#254

Post by blacktriangle » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #191

dleslie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big da…

The difference between web devs and coal miners is that coal miners were losing their jobs due to the government regulating them out of business, web devs were losing their jobs due to underlying changes in technology.

We have a precedent for dealing with government intervention in established industries which usually involves providing support to transition to other industries. Fisheries management is full of examples of government paying fishermen to fish less for example. Yet somehow coal miners became a target of derision by a certain branch of American politicians who gleefully cackled about regulating them out of work.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#255

Post by blacktriangle » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 5:01 PM UTC

nanna wrote: post #24

rectang wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've had this exact issue with my Middleman sites.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#256

Post by dolni » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 6:14 PM UTC

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…

> 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.

If I try to interpret the bit about abstraction, I lean more towards "less opaque" being the intended meaning. On Windows and Mac, it's harder to see what is happening. On Linux, it's all exposed and there to tinker with.

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

I would argue that simple and straightforward is masterful!

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#257

Post by runawaybottle » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 6:26 PM UTC

cglace wrote: post #242

dleslie wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

App Development is the next to go; there's already a handful of competitive tools that will build an App, complete with cloud services, without any need for writing code. And yah, there's only so many ways to write CRUD, auth, profile, and presence; backend is already commodified as B2B products.

And yet I’ve never worked on a product that was just simple crud.

Then you aren’t thinking hard enough.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#258

Post by earthboundkid » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 6:40 PM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #191

dleslie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big da…

TIL, I don’t have a job? Guess it’s an Office Space situation. Better get my own stapler.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#259

Post by scsilver » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

runawaybottle wrote: post #191

dleslie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, services like Squarespace are devouring the VPS and small-site design industry. Rolling your own services, managing them with cPanel, and paying local kids to build and design it is a quaint throwback.

It’s non existent. It’s weird how people were obsessed with coal miners losing their jobs, but right here in tech we literally saw a profession vanish. There is no ‘website developer’ anymore, not really. It just ... went away. That group had to shift overnight (in relative terms) to app development. This might be more foreboding than people realize. Aside from those who need to write complex queries stitching big da…

Web devs learned how to program, coal miners didn't.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#260

Post by midrus » Sun, Apr 18, 2021, 7:37 PM UTC

gher-shyu3i wrote: post #228

midrus wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This. I've already stated it a lot. Go is great if you're building a CLI application, a DNS server, a database, some core infrastructure service, Kubernetes extensions/plugins, etc. But people learn it, get hyped, and want to use it for everything. So now we're spending months doing things that already exist in popular frameworks. Go is not for web development.You're not Google.

I'd argue that golang's application is even less than what you mentioned. CLI app perhaps, and some simple use case here and there. Databases and infrastructure services need more expressive languages. I agree with you otherwise.

By database I mean the actual database servers. Like postgresql or the actual thing storing data to disk, those things are usually implemented in C/C++.

By infrastructure services I mean things as DNS servers, network queues, etc.