Second-guessing the modern web (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#291

Post by acemarke » Sat, May 29, 2021, 4:00 PM UTC

jkaplan wrote: post #276

kristopolous wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? It's the most painful, difficult, slow, frustrating, confusing programming experience I've ever had in my 25 years. It's made me want to leave the industry completely and I honestly think I will after this project. It has single handedly slaughtered and destroyed my quarter century love affair with programming. It's a wildly inflexible architecture that aggressively forces their users to conform to an orthodoxy…

There are for sure lots of bad ways to use React, and lots of bad React developers. I actually had a very poor experience with React my first project using it. But that's true for any framework (or lack thereof.) It's definitely possible to find good React patterns too. My 2nd project with React was a great experience, and was infinitely more maintainable and reusable than the framework-free frontends I had worked on…

Glad to hear that RTK is working well for you!

Out of curiosity, what sort of "tinkering" did you find yourself doing, and what sort of patterns did you end up with?

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#292

Post by catlifeonmars » Sat, May 29, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

disjoinder wrote: post #285

catlifeonmars wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I made no such suggestions. I was suggesting that it’s certainly plausible that QBE influenced aspects of GraphQL. The “prior art” being QBE, not GraphQL.

Were you suggesting that GraphQL is a homoiconic language? In QBE the request resembles the response.

Yes they are both homoiconic. I said that was one of the key selling points of GraphQL. I don’t understand the conflict.

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#293

Post by kristopolous » Sat, May 29, 2021, 7:24 PM UTC

mekkkkkk wrote: post #280

kristopolous wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Redux is a good example of this. It requires a load of boilerplate and seemingly contrived ways of reacting to interactions. What most people don't understand is that this is the primary feature of it. It is a rigid flow of data that enforces you to go through the same steps each time. As such, you can get into a Redux powered app and understand it relatively quickly. No this is totally completely wrong. Tools don'…

I don't really understand what you are suggesting. If everyone would stop using mainstream frameworks, the result would be endless bespoke ones. As long as programmers want to simplify, innovate and accelerate their work, they're going to leverage and implement abstractions if there is room for it. I have worked on plenty of projects using their own, homegrown bespoke frameworks, and it ain't pretty. On top of that i…

This imagination that there needs to be a framework is nonsense. It's done by people who have drunk the koolaid and don't have a long view of programming.

The complexity implicating the overhead is an imposed illusion.

All software lays bare the organizational structure that it's created in.

The structures work within other organizations similarly structured.

It's why ruby shops look the same along with php, java, etc. Why it looks like their is a consistency of dynamics among these channels of development.

Some of these institutional structures are healthier and more productive than others.

React, as a codebase is an autocratic hierarchy ultimately run by ignorant indecisive incompetency that fosters cult adherence to achieve ultimately banal ends through a needless level of strife and overhead.

That's effectively most programming teams which is why it's ultimately so popular. It's also why there seems to be so many cocky buffoons in their early 20s doing it.

Those who see a need for frameworks are speaking more to their rigid notions of the organizational structure upon which software is built then upon the technical need at the software level.

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#294

Post by kristopolous » Mon, May 31, 2021, 12:34 AM UTC

wonnage wrote: post #197

kristopolous wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? It's the most painful, difficult, slow, frustrating, confusing programming experience I've ever had in my 25 years. It's made me want to leave the industry completely and I honestly think I will after this project. It has single handedly slaughtered and destroyed my quarter century love affair with programming. It's a wildly inflexible architecture that aggressively forces their users to conform to an orthodoxy…

I'm sorry you have this experience. I think the most confusing part of React for me was that even though JSX looks like HTML, you're actually not interacting with HTML at all. At its most basic you're just giving React a `[{ type: 'div' }]` and it will create and manage an actual for you.

it's not that. it's the rationalization through imagined differences. A forceful separation and grouping of equivalent things into difference categories and a dictation of their interaction by segregation in the name of more "organized code".

Things do adhere to a structure under its guise, it's an accurate statement. But it's an arbitrary one that's of dubious and most likely negative value.

The reality of maintenance, deadlines, budgets and number of engineers working on the projects seem to suggest the impact is overall negative.

There's two reasons this stuff sticks around:

1. Counterfactual testing can't ever be done to test without ... You can't rerun the project with the same initial conditions and do some kind of clean demonstration of it being a hindrance.

2. Even if #1 was achievable, there's other reasons people do not want to admit to it. And this is especially applicable to an authoritarian framework such as react that enforces doctrine by explicitly disallowing heretical code

Political scientist Adam Przeworski claims authoritarianism can reach a stable configuration "mainly on lies, fear and economic prosperity":

* There needs to be an economic value to the doctrine perceived in the mind of the prospect.

* There has to be a fear of losing out or falling behind by not adhering to the orthodoxy

* The core claims have to be fundamentally, exhaustively and obviously fraudulent.

React checks #1 and #2 and for #3 they claim simplicity, painlessness, ease of use, all of these are profoundly fraudulent claims as anyone who has extensively worked with it knows.

This is why it's become a stable authoritarian system.

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#295

Post by JustSomeNobody » Mon, May 31, 2021, 7:57 PM UTC

arsome wrote: post #134

7thaccount wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're building a desktop app, just plain C# in visual studio has an extremely powerful GUI (WinForms) that is fairly easy to use. Lots of widgets abs very good charts and graphs that you can zoom-in on and annotate in a million ways. It's miles ahead of Python (saying this as a Python guy). Click Once means installs are fairly simple (assuming a Windows deployment).

That's true, but it seems like WinForms is basically a dead end at this point, not much maintenance work is put into it and you have to jump through some serious hoops to make basic stuff like DPI scaling work even last I checked. Completely agree though, the 3rd party component story is very good on .NET, but the applications you're producing don't exactly have a modern look and feel unless you're investing serious…

Everyone always says WinForms is dead. And yet it is consistently the go to GUI year after year for a lot of people.

WinForms is alive. And will be for some time.

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#296

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 7:13 AM UTC

catlifeonmars wrote: post #292

disjoinder wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you suggesting that GraphQL is a homoiconic language? In QBE the request resembles the response.

Yes they are both homoiconic. I said that was one of the key selling points of GraphQL. I don’t understand the conflict.

Who said there was a conflict? The two are related. That was the original point.

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#297

Post by kristopolous » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 7:46 AM UTC

jkaplan wrote: post #276

kristopolous wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How? It's the most painful, difficult, slow, frustrating, confusing programming experience I've ever had in my 25 years. It's made me want to leave the industry completely and I honestly think I will after this project. It has single handedly slaughtered and destroyed my quarter century love affair with programming. It's a wildly inflexible architecture that aggressively forces their users to conform to an orthodoxy…

There are for sure lots of bad ways to use React, and lots of bad React developers. I actually had a very poor experience with React my first project using it. But that's true for any framework (or lack thereof.) It's definitely possible to find good React patterns too. My 2nd project with React was a great experience, and was infinitely more maintainable and reusable than the framework-free frontends I had worked on…

Here's things that are super simple to do with Javascript but extraordinarily difficult in react:

* a function your code can access

* data your code can access

* a dom node you can access

The very core parts of basic programming have been slaughtered and perverted in some kind of repulsive overengineering porno show.

I've worked 3 months on something that should have literally taken 2 days. React is giant sack of bullshit that's made it take months.

Instead of managing say a global object there's this sheer utter insanity of redux store. Something that I could explain in 10 words now takes 9,525: https://www.valentinog.com/blog/redux/

The pythonic notion of "we're all adults here" has been replaced with "we're all completely utterly incompetent children here that need safety locks on everything". I no longer know what works.

I'm actually astounded, I'm not joking in the slightest, in any way whatsoever that

   var a = 10 + 5;

still works and I'm not forced to do something like:

    let a = [...new Array(10).fill(0), ...new Array(5).fill(0)].length;

as a workaround.

I am quite literally shocked by this. Just thinking that this is still possible made me actually shout in happiness at my desk. I really just did that.

I wish I was being sarcastic. I'm not. React breaks programming that much. At that fundamental of a level. It's that profoundly bad.

Coding in react is like if you wanted to get out of bed and take a shower but then find out your town has been carpet bombed and you're sitting underneath piles of collapsed concrete. So first you need to survive the day, get rescued, clear out the rubble, then rebuild everything, then you can go take the shower. Shit's so much easier this way!!!

No.

No it fucking is not.

Just no.

This vile framework is the most vulgar code in an already repugnant front-end javascript ecosystem. It's utterly shameful.

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#298

Post by joelbluminator » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 8:16 AM UTC

kristopolous wrote: post #147

jkaplan wrote: post #64

I agree with a lot of these points, but differ slightly in two regards: 1. In my experience React DOES lure people into the "pit of success" in at least one important aspect -- modular and re-usable front-end code. React is certainly not the only way to get this, but it does help force you into some good patterns. 2. The "sweet spot" for React is pretty large. If your site is truly static (e.g. a blog, a product land…

How? It's the most painful, difficult, slow, frustrating, confusing programming experience I've ever had in my 25 years. It's made me want to leave the industry completely and I honestly think I will after this project. It has single handedly slaughtered and destroyed my quarter century love affair with programming. It's a wildly inflexible architecture that aggressively forces their users to conform to an orthodoxy…

Hey woha wow hold on a second. Quitting engineering over this? Just find a job thats pure Rails / Django / .NET. Those jobs are around, usually its smaller projects companies but they are super pragmatic. Anyway quitting is extreme, take some time off you are burned out probably.

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#299

Post by joelbluminator » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 8:22 AM UTC

phist_mcgee wrote: post #216

Toutouxc wrote: post #160

> unloved, unpopular, uncool things like Django, Rails, Laravel Oh they're loved all right, it's just that they're (all three) very mature, packed with features, easy to pick up and people who work with them don't have a reason to sit around and discuss the tools. I work for a smaller Rails shop and the atmosphere is just so nice there. We work on small (think $20k) projects for different niche customers, we absolute…

Good you have found your niche, and it's great that you haven't overextended yourself when it comes to delivering value to customers. I would say though that your work is a subset of web dev, and while totally valid in that area, I don't think it applies as concretely to other domains, particularly those with larger audiences, or those with needs for greater reactivity.

Yes sure Rails cant scale. Lets sprinkle React and Node on the code so everything magically scales...

Re: Second-guessing the modern web (2020)

#300

Post by webmaven » Tue, Jun 01, 2021, 3:27 PM UTC

noisem4ker wrote: post #286

webmaven wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And kids, that's the story of how I met your templating system. > ALL of them suck. ALL of them are incredibly hard to lint, test, get right. They scale badly. They're all awful. That's not really true. But fairly incredibly, it seems relatively little attention has been given to the design of HTML templating languages (certainly there are a lot of them, but most seem to have accreted rather than been designed). An…

Thymeleaf templates are also valid HTML when not rendered. Of course you still have to put some thought into them to make them believable, by e.g. providing placeholders for elements that would be rendered in cycles. Yeah, I find Thymeleaf to be nice, especially when coupled with Spring. I'm always happy when we decide to use it instead of bloating everything up with a separate Angular application.

I'm not a Java developer, so I wasn't aware of Thymeleaf.

How does it compare to the Java implementations of TAL?