41–50 of 717 posts
Mobile apps and app stores are not a replacement for the open Web, and it can't reasonably be argued that locked-down mobile devices loaded with craplets and no root access are better than the WWW.
gee, those statements are bold. Not only JS or even the front-end stack, the author wants to kill the whole web and make a new one.
I can say it is not a first time I've seen an engineer seeing something imperfect and suggesting that everybody should immediately abandon it to make something better from the scratch.
Like many of you, I am looking forward to see the second part for a web alternative. What I am interested in is how the author wants to make his proposal as beginner-friendly as the web already is.
Even though it's a bit forced, I agree that the whole mainstream computer field as a weird non ROI. Machines 10000x faster, personal value/productivity: flat or below.
I'd love to hear an argument for this, personal value/productivity has increased massively in the last 15 years.
After this I thought that it makes no sense to read the article further.
For me the problem with web apps is low performance, slow load time. Another problem is people who try to push programming patterns from functional languages (like immutable values) into mainstream JS libraries. Please use Haskell instead if you love immutable values that much.
I sympathize with the sentiment, but the web app only sucks if you're using the stuff that sucks. Like any technology with decades of evolution it has a thick sediment of peat. Half of Javascript, half of Windows, even half of *nix is garbage you should never use, but it's all there because old things would stop working without it. It's just that the web has a very low barrier to entry and very high reach, so the com…
I find this unconvincing. Every negative thing said about the web is true of every other platform, so far. It just seems to ignore how bad software has always been (on average). "Web development is slowly reinventing the 1990's." The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs. "Web apps are impossible to secure." Programs in the 90s were written in C and C++. C is impossible to secure. C++ is im…
> The 90s were slowly reinventing UNIX and stuff invented at Bell Labs.
Yes, this reminds me of: "Wasn't all this done years ago at Xerox PARC? (No one remembers what was really done at PARC, but everyone else will assume you remember something they don't.)" [1]
> "Buffers that don’t specify their length"
> Is this really a common problem in web apps? Most web apps are built in languages that don't have buffer overrun problems. There are many classes of security bug to be found in web apps, some unique to web apps...I just don't think this is one of them. This was a common problem in those C/C++ programs from the 90s the author is seemingly pretty fond of. Not so much web apps built in PHP/JavaScript/Python/Ruby/Perl/whatever.
Most injection attacks are due to this; if html used length-prefixed tags rather than open/close tags most injection attacks would go away immediately.
It's probably not realistic, but I would love to see the web be completely thrown out and replaced with something reasonable. I write a decent amount of native code. I write Rust, C, and x64 assembly. I think I'm pretty good at this stuff. But the web is too much for me. Any time I think I'd like to do something with the web and sit down to learn, it's completely overwhelming. I've never been able to put together a c…
Throwing that out because it's less than optimal at a use case it was never intended to serve would be monumentally short-sighted. Just build something else and leave the web be.
Nothing is reinventing anything. The code you write these days in Go, JavaScript whatever is still following the same principles as in the 1980s. All we do is swap out tools and languages, add comfort.