391–400 of 504 posts
The only way out of this is to rethink the web. Which is a hard one to tackle.
From a Reddit comment: > While I do share the general sentiment, I do feel the need to point out that this exact page, a blog entry consisting mostly of just text, is also half the size of Windows 95 on my computer and includes 6MB of javascript, which is more code than there was in Linux 1.0. Linux at that point already contained drivers for various network interface controllers, hard drives, tape drives, disk drive…
> Today’s egregiously bloated site becomes tomorrow’s typical page, and next year’s elegantly slim design.
The least competent programmers are the once writing slow code. The least competent programmers are the ones working at the top of the stack.
From a Reddit comment: > While I do share the general sentiment, I do feel the need to point out that this exact page, a blog entry consisting mostly of just text, is also half the size of Windows 95 on my computer and includes 6MB of javascript, which is more code than there was in Linux 1.0. Linux at that point already contained drivers for various network interface controllers, hard drives, tape drives, disk drive…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is better? Jquery? It comes with its own can of worms and React designers had solid reasoning to migrate away from immediate DOM modification. In general UI is hard. Nice features like compositing, variable width fonts, reflow etc come with the underlying mechanisms that are pretty complicated and once something behaves different to the expectations it might be hard to understand why.
jQuery: 88KB, standard everywhere, one entity responsible for all of it, people know what it is and what it does, if it breaks you know what went wrong and who to blame. Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) c…
React is just so, so much nicer to work with. It's easy to be dismissive if you've never had to develop UIs with jQuery and didn't experience yourself the transition to React which is a million times better in terms of developer experience.
I feel like people that don't build UIs themselves think of them too much in a completely functional way as in "it's just buttons and form inputs that do X", and forget about the massive complexity, edge cases, aesthetic requirements, accessibility, rendering on different viewports, huge statefulness, and so on.
> Would you buy a car if it eats 100 liters per 100 kilometers? How about 1000 liters? I think the analogy here is backwards. The better question is "how much would you prioritize a car that used only 0.05 liters per 100km over one that used 0.5? What about one that used only 0.005L?". I'd say that at that point, other factors like comfort, performance, base price, etc. become (relatively) much more important. If bas…
or... something.
The car analogy does remind me of one I read a while ago, comparing cars and their cost and performance with CPUs.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Virtually all of my accidental inputs are caused by application slowness or repaints that occur several hundred milliseconds after they should have. I want all interactions with all of my computing devices to occur in as close to 0ms as possible. 0ms is great; 20ms is good; 200ms is bad; 500ms is absolutely inexcusable unless you're doing significant computation. I find it astonishing how many things will run in the…
How about the i-am-about-to-press-this-button-but-wait-we-need-to-rerender-the-whole-page. At which point you misclick or not at all. Especially some recent shops and ad heavy pages use this great functionality ;)
Software today is in the snake oil era. "Secure", "privacy-friendly", "robust"...
We need the government to create the FDA of software, to protect the consumers against potentially harmful software, marketed using false advertisement.
We also need job applicants to be protected against predatory companies that hire people that want to do right by the customer, but are forced to produce rushed, poor quality stuff.
Here's why I'm slightly annoyed by articles like this one. Oftentimes the "Software is slow" mantra rings true, but here's the thing: everyone repeating it claims it's the shit further down the stack that's the cause of the slowness, this is often untrue. V8 is fast; it's your shit JS code that is slow. PostgreSQL is fast; your shit queries are slow. We live in the age of the Stack Overflow programmer. Think about it…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is better? Jquery? It comes with its own can of worms and React designers had solid reasoning to migrate away from immediate DOM modification. In general UI is hard. Nice features like compositing, variable width fonts, reflow etc come with the underlying mechanisms that are pretty complicated and once something behaves different to the expectations it might be hard to understand why.
jQuery: 88KB, standard everywhere, one entity responsible for all of it, people know what it is and what it does, if it breaks you know what went wrong and who to blame. Literally anything built with NPM: megabytes? tens of megabytes? in size, totally inscrutable, code being pulled in from hundreds of megabytes of code in tens of thousands of packages from hundreds or thousands of people of unknown (and unknowable) c…
So initially an equivalent React and jQuery app would have React look a lot faster, due to smart / batched DOM updates. However, because React is so fast it made people create apps differently.
As always in software development, an application will grow to fill up available performance / memory. If people were to develop on intentionally constricted computers they would do things differently.
(IIRC, at Facebook they'll throttle the internet on some days to 3g speeds to force this exact thing. Tangentially related, at Netflix (iirc) they have Chaos Monkey which randomly shuts down servers and causes problems, so errors are a day to day thing instead of an exception they've not foreseen).