I can only think that modern front end development has failed • Hacker News Board

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

#281

Post by y2bd » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:46 PM UTC

withinboredom wrote: post #136

vikingcaffiene wrote: post #132

People trot this one out every now and again and what they mean is “front end used to be the easy part of the stack”. If you lived in the bad old days of jquery spaghetti and in-line php templates you’d realize what a bad take this is. Yes it used to be that anyone could jump into the front end. And the front end _sucked_ because _anyone could jump into the front end_ and so they did. There was no organization. No ar…

> I think it’s fair to say that we often put too much business logic into the front end. As a back-end dev, this reminds me of the time I used our own product and saw a read-only field on the UI. It was some interesting bit of data that only existed in the database (we didn’t expose it in the API) and I brought it up how cool it was that we were doing that now. The front end dev said, “oh, it’s not from the database,…

Man I’d love it if our backend teams were that willing to make changes for us. So often I stumble across bizarre, complicated business logic in our various client code bases and ask the devs “why is this here? surely this is better put on the backend/already exists on the backed” and am greeted with “we agree, but when we asked the backend teams to make a change on their end they told us it would be done in the next year or two”.

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

#282

Post by bilater » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:47 PM UTC

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…

This. People see one shitty implementation of SPA and put every new tech stack in the same bucket. We live in a golden age of tooling and the front end is right at the front (pun intended).

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

#283

Post by coldtea » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:49 PM UTC

cuddlecake wrote: post #259

anthk wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(synths, electronic, hip-hop) Synth began in the 70's, and Moroder/Jarre is far better than the 90% of today's crap.

If it's better than 90% of today's synth music, does that mean that 10% of today's music is better than Moroder/Jarre? That's a lot!

No, just means it's equal but derivative...

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

#284

Post by antirez » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:49 PM UTC

arcturus17 wrote: post #272

antirez wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a different opinion. When we moved from the old way to semantical HTML5 generated still server side but which the layout was defined by the finally mature CSS, with the dynamic parts handed by JavaScript and RPCs, everybody agreed it was better. Such web was faster, more compatible, simpler to parse, and so forth. I think that, if in the 20 years that followed, frontend development would progress in the same d…

I’ve heard and read stories from seasoned engineers, here on HN and elsewhere, that say that FE dev was as prone to tire fires back then as it is now, so I don’t think that point is as incontrovertible as you claim it to be. Some of those seasoned old-school engineers have, believe it or not, embraced modern FE frameworks and architectures and wouldn’t go back to the old thing if you paid them to do so. I’ve seen tes…

My point is different: I said that true evolution from tables to create the layout, continuos refreshes of the page to update the state, to a better development environment was universally recognized. And if it was again a case of good design, everybody would see it. If many voices are talking about over engineering now I bet there is a reason.

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

#285

Post by goatinaboat » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:50 PM UTC

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 write some simple HTML, style it with CSS, and write vanilla JS for the parts that need it, and everything feels solid.

Bootstrap + jQuery on the front end, Flask or similar with CherryPy on the backend. SQLite or Postgres if you need it. That will handle 99.9% of websites, it will be cheap and easy to develop and host, and deliver a great experience to the end user.

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

#286

Post by coldtea » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

sosborn wrote: post #140

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 thing about music is that "more complex chords, more harmonies, more timbral variety, etc..." doesn't say anything about whether or not the music is better. It's a silly pursuit anyway given that music is a subjective experience.

That's neither here, nor there.

This is not about whether or not this or that particular song is better, is the top (most listened/streamed/talked about) music in general losing variety in all these aspects (harmony, melody, timbre, lyrics, genres, dynamics, etc).

That's not subjective, that's objective, and has been measured to get worse.

The "subjective experience" could be good, the same way people can prefer McDonalds over a wholesome meal by the best chef. Doesn't mean its also good by other metrics, and I for one don't believe individual taste is everything. There are people with shit taste, loads of them.

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

#287

Post by murm » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:53 PM UTC

tomc1985 wrote: post #245

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…

Why do these things even need to be an SPA? What function does that serve when the standardized and infinitely more compatible form-with-a-bit-of-javascript approach works just as well if not better? I work on one such project and it absolutely drives me nuts -- it's a rails app, but the customer front-end (which is literally just a form to fill out) is a React SPA. There is nothing there that couldn't be done with T…

When the only tool you know is a hammer you tend to just go around smashing things

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

#288

Post by coldtea » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

debaserab2 wrote: post #179

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 top 100 hasn't been a relevant indicator of modern music since Napster. The top 100 is a record industry owned entity with a tremendous amount of self-interest. If you can't find more diverse modern music than the top 100 offers today you're not trying that hard.

That's neither here, nor there.

This is not about being able to find this or that niche musician that's great or even greater than any in the past, but about what the masses listen getting worse.

Music isn't just a solitary experience, but also a part of general culture.

As streamed music is getting cruder over time, the majority of the people are listening to increasingly shitty songs. That's chilling, regardless of whether someone can find 10000s of niche bands to listen themselves.

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

#289

Post by toast0 » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:54 PM UTC

polynomial wrote: post #273

tomc1985 wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do these things even need to be an SPA? What function does that serve when the standardized and infinitely more compatible form-with-a-bit-of-javascript approach works just as well if not better? I work on one such project and it absolutely drives me nuts -- it's a rails app, but the customer front-end (which is literally just a form to fill out) is a React SPA. There is nothing there that couldn't be done with T…

How can a government contractor reasonably justify a price tag that's on par with fancy bloated non-government sites, for an no nonsense form + js approach?

Costs the same as what you would otherwise pay, plus it actually works?

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

#290

Post by pessimizer » Sun, Apr 04, 2021, 6:55 PM UTC

bryanlarsen wrote: post #68

throwawayfire wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Not "just" survival bias. I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers. Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot…

I think you've got that completely backwards. 2000 is about the time that the "long tail" exploded, where Youtube and Spotify made non-top 40 music a lot easier to find. In consequence there is a lot more really good music available today than there was pre-internet and it's a lot easier to find. It's not on the radio, but that's always been the case.

I don't think so at all - there's a lot of pastiche, some of it loving, but there's only so many ways to do a pop song. It's alright for forms to die. The real "long tail" that the internet introduced is that we now had access to all of the good music we missed before the internet. There's no reason to bitch about modern music anymore because there's no reason to be exposed to it other than aggressive fandoms and marketing.

I honestly don't even understand the impulse to listen to new music. The quality of "newness" is not a desirable one for me in music; I prefer qualities relating to sound. To me it seems like a distorted version of the impulse to be cool in high school.

The real problem is that commercial, recorded music crowds out local, live music. For local music I understand wanting to know what's new - you may miss out because bands aren't live forever.