A Front End Engineer's Manifesto • Hacker News Board

Re: A Front End Engineer's Manifesto

#41

Post by malandrew » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 8:15 PM UTC

Progressive enhancement is the main reason HTML-based apps can't compete with native apps. Progressive enhancement is synonymous with not pushing things forward.

I know of at least one stealth startup who have built up a javascript library that is indistinguishably performant with native apps, but that performance comes at the cost of progressive enhancement. It's a tradeoff worth making.

I believe in an open web too, but one that is as powerful as native apps, not a crippled second-rate one that loses users and developers to proprietary platforms. Any browser feature that developers find useful and actively adopt will quickly be incorporated into the remaining browsers.

Re: A Front End Engineer's Manifesto

#42

Post by spacemanaki » Mon, Sep 03, 2012, 10:17 PM UTC

Evbn wrote: post #36

spacemanaki wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I pretty strongly disagree. > this sure sounds a lot like the people who insist that you can't be a good programmer unless you've learned some kind of assembler. This isn't a very good analogy. JavaScript is a high level language, and jQuery is just a library with features that make it a high level DSL. But when you "write jQuery" you're really writing JavaScript, not some other language, so I don't think the analogy…

99% of devs building the popular sites on the Internet have never needed to think about GC beyond maybe the vaguest terms of "if you keep too many references to too big things your app will slog." 0.5% write tools, libraries, and compilers that worry about this, and 0.5% debug extreme cases in their apps. Numbers made up, of course.

I think you're wrong, and I don't know what the point of making up numbers is. It might be your experience that you've been able to treat garbage collection as magic, and that's nice, but it's not been mine. I was speaking generally, about all programmers, not just web developers.

My point was that if you don't have any understanding of how garbage collection works, you simply don't have all possible tools at your disposal when you need to debug a memory leak. I'm not suggesting every programmer needs to have spent years hacking on garbage collectors and studied all of the literature, just that having some familiarity with the tools available to you is important.

And this was just one example meant to support my main argument that gaining understanding below the level of abstraction you are working at is not a bad thing.

Re: A Front End Engineer's Manifesto

#43

Post by zachleat » Tue, Sep 04, 2012, 2:38 PM UTC

Please read the associated blog post that went along with the site. http://www.zachleat.com/web/manifesto/

"I’ve been reluctant to share the slides because I certainly don’t want developers to take them as dogmatic truth. Rather, I’d love for people to see a forest using trees they’ve planted themselves."

Certainly scrolling could be improved. I'll definitely look into improving the performance. I honestly had no idea this slide deck would get this much attention.