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Why is modern web development so complicated?

vrk.dev

301–310 of 731 posts

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#301
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It means the underlying problem is not the tooling, but the use of the tooling. In other words, "I can choose the correct tool but still fail from poor approach of problem."

If the tool allows you to shoot yourself in the face without warning, and has a reputation/history of doing it to a lot of other people, then the tooling is indeed the problem.

Most tools out there allow you to shoot yourself in the face. In this case, the guy replaced client-side JavaScript (very notorious for its amazing face shooting abilities) with server-side PHP (also, a very notorious face shooter).

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#302
post #49

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…

Damn, you broke into my top-secret consulting role ;) I completely agree with all of this. There is probably a billion-dollar market out there for rewriting garbage business apps that were developed using the hipster tech flavor of the week.

Avoiding the latest mainstream trends is actually a very hipster sentiment.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#303
post #206

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

> Someone else mentioned SPAs. I 100% guarantee that no user in the world ever wished for their “back” button not to work as they expected. This opinion invalidates the rest of your post. If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated.

> If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated.

Hi. I have a fundamental understanding of what people are building. Most of it's overcomplicated and the "web app or not?" decision's very often made due to hype, résumé padding, or making a project look more impressive to other internal folks. Some of it's justifiable as a "webapp" is truly a decent choice but still usually performs worse than is reasonable, indicating overcomplication under the hood—look at various Google "webapp"s performance dropping steadily over the years as features remain similar or drop off, and that's not even comparing them to older non-webapp incarnations which are universally much snappier (though usually missing some features, to be fair).

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The criticism makes no sense to me. jQuery is just there to make things nicer that you'd already be doing. It doesn't need to be an MVC framework.

For example, React isn’t an MVC framework. It’s a library. It allows rendering DOM declaratively based upon a state/props. jQuery just changes the DOM. It gets very difficult to keep the DOM in sync with the JavaScript backed data when there’s multiple moving parts.

jQuery just changes the DOM. It gets very difficult to keep the DOM in sync with the JavaScript backed data when there’s multiple moving parts.

Again I don't understand this argument. What's difficult about it? People have been doing it with win forms for well over a decade now.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#306
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment: > It replaced a site that was pretty much a home-grown PHP framework written by a single developer. Random mixed logic in templates, hard to update CSS and a poorly designed 'not-an-ORM' ORM. Not to say that your rewrite is like that, but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

And here's the trick to not building shit software: don't build shit software. It's a crude way to put it, but the reality is that you can build bad websites in any framework (including old PHP stuff and new JavaScript hype). You can also build good websites in any framework. It depends way more on the organisation or team developing it than on the libraries you use.

Define shit software.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#307
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn, you broke into my top-secret consulting role ;) I completely agree with all of this. There is probably a billion-dollar market out there for rewriting garbage business apps that were developed using the hipster tech flavor of the week.

I'm making top dollar remaking failed garbage react native apps to real native native. Clients love it

Out of curiosity, how do you support both iOS and Android with this approach?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#309

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…

I am reminded of the Picasso story where he meets a woman in a park and makes a 30 second sketch. The woman asks how much it would cost to buy it and he replies something like $1000 (insert large amount of money for 30 seconds of work). She asks him why so much money for 30 seconds of work and he replies that it took him 30 years to draw that sketch.

It's easy to build a simple website with no frills that does exactly what the client needs -- if you know how to do it. Even then, it is rarely easy to figure out what the client needs!

A colleague wanted to use a Javascript library for something I thought was probably pretty simple. I suggested we take a look at the library and see what it was doing and determine if it was worth the extra dependency. He joked, "If I wanted to know how it worked, I wouldn't have chosen a dependency". Luckily, it's not how my colleague really feels, but this is exactly what's happening most of the time.

Things are over complicated because people don't know how to build them -- they glue together a patchwork of stuff so that they don't have to know. In the end, they tend to build something whose complexity is many orders of magnitude higher than the complexity of the problem they are working on.

Your two years of job security was not for avoiding framework-of-the-day hype: it was for knowing how to do it. It's the simple 30 second, single line sketch that captures the picture perfectly with no extra complexity. That takes years and years of experience to develop -- and a desire to even get there at all.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#310
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment: > It replaced a site that was pretty much a home-grown PHP framework written by a single developer. Random mixed logic in templates, hard to update CSS and a poorly designed 'not-an-ORM' ORM. Not to say that your rewrite is like that, but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

If something works well for the business and customers it isn't garbage. Fast websites that don't break are good for everyone.

Except for the developer who is statistically going to change jobs every two or three years and all of the openings want someone with “$x years of experience with $framework_of_the_day”

And the hiring manager who can’t find anyone that doesn’t want to pad their resume for the same reason.

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