Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 688 posts

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#341

Post by TimJYoung »

regularfry wrote: post #178
ivanhoe wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting, what native UI system is in your opinion easier to work with than web? Why then so many devs choose to use WebBrowser wrappers to render their desktop/mobile UIs because it's way faster and easier to develop with?

Delphi 4's VCL and IDE was the high point. It's been downhill ever since.

You should try a newer version of the IDE/compiler. Delphi 10 Seattle and 10.1 Berlin are pretty damn good. Fast load times, editor is solid. The only real downside to the whole product is that the VCL (still) needs better layout management and easier ways to cope with scaling on high-DPI displays.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#342

Post by unclebucknasty »

chx wrote: post #311
erlich wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally use Javascript for all of this.

That leads to the MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) and I am not so sure whether that's where the rosy future is.

Exactly. Intuitively, I don't think the problem can be solved with the same "let's glue together a bunch of stuff and call it a stack" approach that got us here.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#343

Post by gr3yh47 »

chx wrote: post #311
erlich wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally use Javascript for all of this.

That leads to the MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) and I am not so sure whether that's where the rosy future is.

it's not, because Mongo has huge issues [0] and angular is generally a giant mess and a pain in the ass [1]

[0] http://blog.runnable.com/post/149000201856/think-before-you-...

[1] if you haven't used angular, ask someone who has

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#344

Post by gr3yh47 »

chx wrote: post #311
erlich wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can literally use Javascript for all of this.

That leads to the MEAN stack (Mongo, Express, Angular, Node) and I am not so sure whether that's where the rosy future is.

it's not, because Mongo has huge issues [0] and angular is generally a giant mess and a pain in the ass, with very poor separation of concerns.[1]

[0] http://blog.runnable.com/post/149000201856/think-before-you-...

[1] if you haven't used angular, ask someone who has

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#346

Post by mirages »

sesutton wrote: post #329
meredydd wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, this understates the problem. A modal web application today takes an absolute minimum of five programming languages and three frameworks: * HTML * CSS * JS * A server-side language (eg Python) * SQL And then come the (leaky) abstractions on top of them: * A framework to make JS bearable (eg Angular) * A framework to make server-side bearable (eg Django) * A framework to make CSS bearable (eg Bootstrap) .…

HTML, CSS and SQL aren't programming languages, if Turing completeness is a requirement to be a programming language.

HTML + CSS seems to be Turing complete : http://lemire.me/blog/2011/03/08/breaking-news-htmlcss-is-tu...

As does SQL : http://stackoverflow.com/questions/900055/is-sql-or-even-tsq...

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#347

Post by goatlover »

collyw wrote: post #225
adrianratnapala wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember MS-DOS also succeeded because of its "strengths" in some very special, narrow sense. In the more ordinary sense, it succeeded in spite of its weakness, but Windows has slowly recovered from that and is now a good system. The modern web is somewhat the the reverse: it is worse than its progenitor. HTML, HTTP and what would eventually be called ReST were all good ideas and succeeded because (a) they were a goo…

That was the promise of Java - write once run anywhere. JavaScript managed to achieve it instead.

You mean the browser achieved it instead of the JVM. It could have been something other than JavaScript as the scripting language. What mattered was the platform everyone ended up using.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#348

Post by aabajian »

Some people have already mentioned GWT. I think this is the best evidence that yes, web programming is extremely hackish. GWT is an entire framework to write web applications in a strongly typed language - it compiles Java down to JavaScript. GWT was made in an era that we're just now escaping: the era of browser quirks.

IMHO, GWT didn't take off because of one reason: Its target demographic, web developers, do not have the same technical training as traditional computer scientists. What I mean by that is courses at places like General Assembly, CodeAcademy, and even KhanAcademy emphasize JavaScript/CSS/HTML paradigm. This triad makes it easy to create very nice looking website in very little time, but there's little focus on code organization, software design, efficiency, etc. It's much more of, "Now we want this box to fade out when we click on this button, let's see how we can write a function that makes this happen."

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#349

Post by sotojuan »

jacobush wrote: post #272
dcposch wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The really funny thing is that the OS runs a simple event + render loop, then the browser implements a wildly complex stateful/declarative structure on top of that (the DOM), then React apps create a simple event + render loop again, this time with special diffing logic to update the underlying DOM as little as possible

And no doubt this layering will continue... "Look how I easily render this document decription into react primitives".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12473549

I made this comment in another thread, but it fits right into this one too.

Post reply on HN