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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#401

Post by robocat »

heyoni wrote: post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

> rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application

You can fix race conditions on single threaded JavaScript code now we have async (and promises): it scares me how little this is recognised as a downside and in my experience few people are good at recognising or writing code that avoids race conditions (I have seen competent programmers in denial about the risks).

Before async I found race conditions in popular (and well written) JavaScript code that used setTimeout().

Personally I think anyone that enjoys chasing race conditions is mad: I loath reproducing transient errors. I have mostly tried hard to avoid async code in my own JavaScript, but sometimes it is forced upon me :-(

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#402

Post by hootbootscoot »

oeijfgoierjg wrote: post #367

I think part of the reason so many of this type of article exist is because it seems the common expectation is that things should automatically make sense to us on first glance. So many products and tools are this way. But they are that way by design. The builders / inventors of those things hide you from the reality behind the scenes. People seem to get openly frustrated if they can't learn overnight all there is to…

... except that broken or ignored browser standards, and Javascript's lack of dealing with Timezone, for example, are not the result of complexity, per se, but of social inability: a committee or industrial consortium being unable to come to an agreement... kicking the can down the road in some cases, building-in complexity for ulterior motives in some cases by some parties, etc...

the web is a mess on the front end for political, rather than computer science, reasons

(say, you don't want to include the 2mb outdated moment.js? well, even though every browser included this code to fetch and update it's IANA timezone database in it's source, and has compiled against it, you can't access it via a public API from JS though LOL... you can figure out a way to run this code to get your data muahahahahahah.... https://www.iana.org/time-zones)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#403

Post by wolco »

ng12 wrote: post #332
asark wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 stil…

You think an _entire industry_ has been built up around a desire to pad resumes? I don't even know how to respond to that.

It's a filter during interviews to filter out the older candidates with a different culture.

Bootcamps are something that grows out of this desire to pad your resume with newer tech.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#404

Post by my_usernam3 »

renke1 wrote: post #148
goatinaboat wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers who don’t care if anyone thinks they’re real developers, I guess!

For what it's worth, I can confirm that a lot of backend developers look down to frontend developers, but if you dig a little deeper you often (not always) see that frontend development is simply intimidating to them and they rather stick to what they know. At least in my country/region this leads to a lack of good frontend developers; good developers being those that apply well-known and established (backend) practi…

> good developers being those that apply well-known and established (backend) practices to the frontend

100% agree with this. From my experience good front end developers are much harder to come by in silicon valley. We use a general coding interview process, and really struggle finding experienced front end developers because its a hard position.

When I have to touch javascript, I break everything, beg for help, then run back into my enterprise java code. This elitist backend attitude to me seems to stem from insecurities of us nerds. I personally feel inferior to front end developers, the ones I know are freaking magicians.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#405

Post by duderific »

blhack wrote: post #114
goatinaboat wrote: post #63

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…

I think this is it more than anything. People wanted to make the web complicated because it made them feel cooler developing it. Some SPAs are cool. Easyeda.com is pretty cool. But also: storing information about a page in the URL is pretty cool too. It makes it possible to link to the page, for instance!

> I think this is it more than anything. People wanted to make the web complicated because it made them feel cooler developing it.

That is patently false. What happened is product managers wanted their websites to feel cooler to their customers, and work more like native apps. Developers then respond to the requests from the product managers. For example, charts that refresh data without a page reload when you click a button. The requirements get more and more complex, and the web was never meant to be an application platform. So you end up with what we have today.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#406

Post by wolco »

relativeadv wrote: post #249
renke1 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who is considered a "real" developer these days?

The person who is writing their own game engine and doing everything from the ground up. They haven't shipped anything yet. They're five years into this with a few more to go.

With kickstarter campaigns and medium blog insights.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#407

Post by jacobsenscott »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #333
afarrell wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The trouble is that "don't build shit software" isn't actionable advice on how to avoid building shit software. For someone seeking to be a more skillful web software engineer, there's no information there.

This is fundamentally because our industry is built on opinions, not standards. You talk to one software engineer, and they'll say, "that's built in PHP, so it sucks; it should have been built with npm, obviously." Then you talk to another and they say, "I can't believe they built that with npm, the package management system is just terrible and the whole mess is bloated and there have been a ton of security issues.…

Likely in that other industry the engineer built 100+ other basically identical items that are two or three orders of magnitude less complex and where all the costs and techniques are pretty well known.

Also, those mature industries routinely overrun by millions of dollars and months or years, event though they are dealing with a fraction of the complexity and the costs and techniques are well known.

Software is the only industry where you are asked to build systems that have never been built before but that are more complex than anything ever built in the history of "mature industries", on top of astronomically complex systems, and estimate it with an accuracy of 5 to 10 days and a few thousand dollars.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#408

Post by iamleppert »

This could be rephrased, "Why is kernel development so complicated?" or "Why is FPGA development so hard?"

In any given technical environment that has sufficient time to mature there will be more information to process, more choices, and more surface area. It's just the principle of intellectual entropy. Stuff tends to get larger and more complicated and specialized because it is.

If you want something simple, why not invent it? There's nothing stopping the next person from coming along and coming up with something that gets the same job done a lot easier than what we have now.

Of course, the first time you try to implement a tiny portion of a browser primitive like drawing a table you'll quickly see why things are complex.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#409

Post by bsder »

bgdkbtv wrote: post #355
mixmastamyk wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> PHP, MySQL Agreed in general, but there are better free/libre choices. I don't recommend these for greenfield projects.

What would you recommend instead of those?

PostgreSQL is my database choice under practically all circumstances.

I'd replace PHP with practically anything written by grownups. (Django, Rails, etc.)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#410

Post by gerbilly »

slx26 wrote: post #11
heyoni wrote: post #2

I don't know, but I do know I would rather fix a race condition on a multithreaded application than figure out how flexbox works or even understand all the different parts of the DOM.

Heh. I kinda felt: "hey, I agree with that", so I started asking myself why. What's the difference? Somehow, it looks like the difference is that on one side you have a very complicated problem but in a potentially well defined and bounded environment, and on the other you may have "smaller" problems, but on an environment so vast and complex that's kinda impossible to assert that you are doing things "properly". The…

It's the difference between a difficult problem, and a complex one.

I think most of us here would find complexity more interesting.

Most difficult problems are difficult for uninteresting reasons (uncertainty about how some API works, having to maintain poorly written code, unclear requirements or business rules...)

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