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Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

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Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#31

Post by christophilus »

bestinterest wrote: post #25
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 wish wish wish I could move over to Linux but its font rendering situation is terrible [1] I've tried Manjaro and Ubuntu to no avail. I have no idea what causes it or if people on Linux are not as sensitive to it or its a specific hardware setup which causes terrible fonts but once you read Windows fonts stuff looks so much better to me. Apparently its a hot debated topic but its so obvious to some it seems. [1] ht…

I have a 4K and 5k display, and I find it as pleasant as my 2019 MacBook. I’m not sure if it’s because I’m not sensitive to it, or what. (I’m using Fedora with Gnome 40.)

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#32

Post by ruffianeo »

rossdavidh wrote: post #8

I think one driver of this cycle is: 1) need for capability that old method doesn't meet, so new tool is made 2) dev working on both simpler and more complex sites, wants everything to use the same tools 3) even sites with simple needs now get done using tools powerful enough to satisfy needs of complex sites 4) experienced dev doesn't see a problem, because they are conversant with those more complex tools, and also…

I think you forgot one driver, which IMHO is a major one:

Imagine you are just getting into the business and are confronted with complexities, which would let you come to a grinding halt for the next 6 months until you have at least a foggy idea of what is going on. (Angular, Elm, PHP, React, ...) And once you worked through your initial list of "need to know", 5 more have popped up, like a hydra where chopping off heads just results in... more heads staring at you.

So, in this situation, it is quite reasonable to try and "get ahead of the curve" instead of lagging behind the ever changing world. You decide to write your own framework (based on your current and imperfect understanding), ignore what is already out there and pass the ball to anyone else. They have to look what you did now and read your stuff and scratch their heads, while you can be productive. And it feels good. You feel like a messiah. You can publish even a book, maybe and hold some enlightened talks.

This is the result. New generations are literally forced into re-inventing the wheel to even stand a chance at getting something done.

And its not only in web design/javascript/web-assembly/call-it-how-you-will.

The same happened e.g. in the Microsoft ecosystem (desktop programming). MFC -> ATL -> VB6 -> .NET WinForms -> XAML -> Silverlight and back to XAML -> .NET core -> however it will go on (I detached at that point, having run 'too many laps').

And since someone mentioned Linux... what is the canonical way to write GUI apps in Linux these days? Tcl/Tk? xlib? xcb?, SDL2, wayland over X? Gtk, that huge google framework? QT? SDL2? Motif? Pure wayland? Also a huge mess and people "innovating" just to be ahead of the curve. Yes, there are always reasons, if you need them to be...

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#33

Post by jayd16 »

ur-whale wrote: post #30

I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said: Front-end infrastructure and tools design unfortunately does not attract the cream of the CS graduate crop (and even less so Front-End design work). For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards systems, compiler, DB, back-end infra, language design, back-end, ML, etc ... But not front-end. The net result: t…

Eh, I think it has more to do with the fact the front end is the most visible to the product people. You get a lot of poor technical decisions to bend to the whims of the product design. Backend is usually free to do as they see fit.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#34

Post by [deleted] »

dbolgheroni wrote: post #18
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 don't know if you are talking about Linux the kernel, Linux the entire distro, Linux the filesystem (out of tens of supported filesystems), but "arranged masterfully" is big statement. From 2 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26821298

[deleted]

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#35

Post by ahartmetz »

bestinterest wrote: post #25
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 wish wish wish I could move over to Linux but its font rendering situation is terrible [1] I've tried Manjaro and Ubuntu to no avail. I have no idea what causes it or if people on Linux are not as sensitive to it or its a specific hardware setup which causes terrible fonts but once you read Windows fonts stuff looks so much better to me. Apparently its a hot debated topic but its so obvious to some it seems. [1] ht…

FreeType and slight hinting + subpixel antialiasing looks great to me, really... Windows has strong pixel-fitting and at the same time softer outlines. That is after using the ClearType tuner to tweak it to my liking. I'm not particularly fond of that look. You talk about hardware. The gamma of your screen makes a difference - antialiasing relies on it. The ClearType tuner has a page or three about that. I guess on Linux you better set your display gamma to the standard value, there is no good reason (except visual impairment or something) to set it to anything else anyway.

By the way, font rendering in Chrome for Linux used to be really awful (no subpixel AA or something). It was fixed a few years ago - it looks like any other app now.

I omitted some detail that you can easily find in your favorite search engine.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#36

Post by riskable »

bestinterest wrote: post #25
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 wish wish wish I could move over to Linux but its font rendering situation is terrible [1] I've tried Manjaro and Ubuntu to no avail. I have no idea what causes it or if people on Linux are not as sensitive to it or its a specific hardware setup which causes terrible fonts but once you read Windows fonts stuff looks so much better to me. Apparently its a hot debated topic but its so obvious to some it seems. [1] ht…

Hah: I am very particular about fonts myself but what bugs me most isn't sub-pixel hinting (which is "good enough" with the latest freetype IMHO) it's the size of fonts. Windows is so far off the mark on 99% of computers and it drives me crazy!

Repeat after me:

    72pt is one inch tall!
    72pt is one inch tall!
    72pt is one inch tall!
The "point" scale of fonts is actually a precise, real-world measurement like inches, millimeters, etc. Fonts may differ in how much space each glyph takes up but in general they should at least be close to the correct size.

Test it: Open up a word processor and load some reasonably normal font (e.g. Arial) and make some text that's 72pt. Then hold a ruler up to your screen: Is it about 1 inch tall? How far off the mark is it?

If you're using a modern, high-DPI display it's probably waaaaay TF off, haha. Even with regular displays it'll be off and there's actually no way to fix it because you can't tell Windows the precise DPI of your display! It tries to guess based on the DDC data given by your display but then averages the X/Y together to scale fonts. So if your X DPI is higher than your Y DPI it'll always get it wrong. Always!

Macs cheat in this area by always having displays of a fixed DPI. For the longest time all Apple displays were precisely 96 dpi (with perfectly square pixels) but recently changed it to 220-ish and made adjustments in their font rendering engine to match. I have no idea how they're handling non-Apple displays these days.

Linux, on the other hand does it right (at least X11 and KDE do) in that it scales fonts very accurately based on the DPI presented by your display via the DDC protocol (or if your monitor doesn't provide that you can set both X and Y DPI manually).

Gnome and GTK applications have the same problem as Windows though in that they only take one DPI setting and if the DDC protocol gives separate X/Y values it'll just average them and the results can be... Ridiculous. You don't really notice the weirdly-stretched fonts until you open a KDE application side-by-side with a GTK one.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#37

Post by mauvehaus »

Confession: as a recovering programmer who made a career change to non-programming, it took at most 30 minutes to say "fuck it" and go with Squarespace.

I've never been on the web side of things, but I knew enough HTML in the early aughts to put up a basic informational website. After digging in to some sites I admired, I decided that it was too much distraction from my actual work to roll my own.

Granted some of this complexity comes from the legitimate need to support mobile gracefully, but damn are there layers upon layers upon yet more layers of stuff just to get some pictures to show up nicely with some text and look consistent across devices.

Props to everyone who does this for reals and does a good job achieving that consistency. For my money, I'll hire it out.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#38

Post by reader_mode »

ur-whale wrote: post #30

I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said: Front-end infrastructure and tools design unfortunately does not attract the cream of the CS graduate crop (and even less so Front-End design work). For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards systems, compiler, DB, back-end infra, language design, back-end, ML, etc ... But not front-end. The net result: t…

Frontend has the problem of being stuck with JavaScript and DOM, even in the modern iterations it's a patchwork structure built on top of a cesspool - no wonder everything smells like shit.

Agreed about the tooling, npm and node were basically hacks everyone kept building on - there is zero architecture behind most of it.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#39

Post by crazygringo »

ur-whale wrote: post #30

I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said: Front-end infrastructure and tools design unfortunately does not attract the cream of the CS graduate crop (and even less so Front-End design work). For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards systems, compiler, DB, back-end infra, language design, back-end, ML, etc ... But not front-end. The net result: t…

Regardless of whether or not your observation about CS graduates is true, I don't think that has anything to do with it.

The difference is that with the backend, you have choice over what technologies to use. There's competition between languages and ecosystems, so a better more elegant one can replace a worse crufty one.

But with the frontend, there is no competition. You have to use HTML, CSS, and (roughly) JavaScript.

If, when the web had started, it had been based on some kind of primitive bytecode for rendering, that HTML+CSS+JavaScript compiled to, then we could have had language competition and better technologies today. But that's not what happened. Front-end is stuck with an old, crufty tech stack that simply can't ever be replaced. Back-end doesn't suffer from that.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#40

Post by cblconfederate »

ur-whale wrote: post #30

I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said: Front-end infrastructure and tools design unfortunately does not attract the cream of the CS graduate crop (and even less so Front-End design work). For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards systems, compiler, DB, back-end infra, language design, back-end, ML, etc ... But not front-end. The net result: t…

Most of the web runs php/jquery that's maintainable
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