Why is modern web development so complicated? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#31

Post by xrd » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #25

slx26 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Heh. I kinda felt: "hey, I agree with that", so I started asking myself why. What's the difference? Somehow, it looks like the difference is that on one side you have a very complicated problem but in a potentially well defined and bounded environment, and on the other you may have "smaller" problems, but on an environment so vast and complex that's kinda impossible to assert that you are doing things "properly". The…

For me, having come from robotics/digital imaging/signal processing and now doing web dev, I feel exactly this. My old problems were far more technical, but I could always form a complete mental model of what was happening. Now I feel like I have little hope. I'm under the foot of 117 leaky abstractions which all have their own opinion as to how things should work. It's near impossible to peek too deeply inside, so I…

And the documentation is written by fanboys who are marketing it more than they are documenting it.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#32

Post by Dig1t » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

slx26 wrote: post #11

heyoni wrote: post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

Heh. I kinda felt: "hey, I agree with that", so I started asking myself why. What's the difference? Somehow, it looks like the difference is that on one side you have a very complicated problem but in a potentially well defined and bounded environment, and on the other you may have "smaller" problems, but on an environment so vast and complex that's kinda impossible to assert that you are doing things "properly". The…

To me, the difference feels like in one scenario you are solving problems fundamental to computing and the other you are struggling to wrangle with a dumb arbitrary API that someone made up. The former is much more exciting to me, and I suspect most CS people. That's not to say web development is all dumb arbitrary API's or you don't get to solve interesting problems, just much less cool/interesting IMO.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#33

Post by amiga-workbench » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

icedchai wrote: post #21

amiga-workbench wrote: post #7

Because web developers have massive a chip on their shoulder about not being """real""" developers. So now we have meme frameworks and transpilers and hysterical build toolchains all for a platform for sharing documents.

I disagree with the first part (they are real developers!), but agree with the second. We have grafted an application platform on top of a document delivery platform.

I should probably rephrase that part, because yes you are right, they are real developers. But there is this misunderstanding that what they do is simple and it couldn't be further from the truth.

So off they go and try to prove that perception wrong by piling on the complexity.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#34

Post by dexwiz » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:02 PM UTC

heyoni wrote: post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

I don't know, but I would rather weld steel together in a sky scraper than figure out how to hang cabinets or even understand all the different types of crown molding.

I always think the backend versus front end statements are hilarious when cast to other activites. They always carry a tone of derision while completely missing the point that they are different problem spaces and skill sets.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#35

Post by soren_dahl » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:03 PM UTC

I would argue that web development is less complicated than it used to be for the same quality of output. We now have source maps, debuggers, bundlers, more powerful languages, apis and a narrow range of browsers to hit with all that.

So now you can be more expressive, target more browsers easily, have greatly simplified script loading and module management, much, much better debugging tools, with less effort.

The tools make it easier for you to be a good developer.

Good web development was never easy.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#36

Post by EpicEng » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

xrd wrote: post #31

EpicEng wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, having come from robotics/digital imaging/signal processing and now doing web dev, I feel exactly this. My old problems were far more technical, but I could always form a complete mental model of what was happening. Now I feel like I have little hope. I'm under the foot of 117 leaky abstractions which all have their own opinion as to how things should work. It's near impossible to peek too deeply inside, so I…

And the documentation is written by fanboys who are marketing it more than they are documenting it.

Yeah, it's really hit or miss. I enjoyed my 320 page manuals written by cynical, hardened, life-worn EE's.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#37

Post by ayushgp » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

eswat wrote: post #15

tschellenbach wrote: post #10

It's complicated because the bar in terms of user experience went up (or so they say) and now everyone wants a SPA. Because of this you now have a generation of devs that only knows how to build SPA. I'm actually thinking to move some stuff from Django to Gatsby/React setup just because everyone knows React, and a lot of our new devs don't know Django/Python.

I think we’ve done a great job of convincing each other within our tech bubble than everyone wants a SPA. Not sure the general public cares for our enthusiasm though.

Everyone(well almost) wants a SPA or at the very least non reloading pages. No one wants to reload the page with every action they perform or if only a part of the area on screen needed to be updated and the page was reloaded anyways.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#38

Post by reaperducer » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:04 PM UTC

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above.

A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage.

It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on.

The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with the new no-nonsense site that they raved to the parent company about it. The parent company's IT department looked into the site, asked me some questions about it, and yesterday I was been asked to do the same type of cruft-free rebuild of three other sites that the company owns.

Not buying into the framework-of-the-day hype just landed me job security for the next two years.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#39

Post by rochak » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

s_y_n_t_a_x wrote: post #9

Because we're no longer making websites, we're making apps. Sure if you just need a simple website, make it from scratch, but good luck maintaining a full blown app using jQuery. It's not just web development that is hard. You can't honestly say any toolchain on the desktop side is any easier. That said, web development is getting easier now that the dust is settling and only a few major frameworks are used. Get star…

I disagree with your ending note. I like React and have been using it professionally for over 2 years, but I wouldn’t recommend anyone to use something just because it is an industry standard. At my work, for example, the upper management is now convinced that microservices are going to solve all of their current maintainability problems, while the fact is that there are a lot of employees that write shit code, who will also develop shit microservices.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#40

Post by heyoni » Wed, Aug 07, 2019, 8:05 PM UTC

hajile wrote: post #23

heyoni wrote: post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

Flexbox? That's way easier than float design and both of those are way easier than designing everything with tables.

I know...and I kind of got the gist of it except I had a lot of trouble developing an intuition for it by trying to understand the history, other methods and just basically copying source code from existing websites...it's just my process for learning new things and it quickly gets overwhelming with front-end development...