Why is modern web development so complicated? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#451

Post by rvn1045 » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:13 AM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

The point of using a good framework is that conventions and best practices are enforced. If your building a Rails sits there are a set of conventions everyone follows. When a new developer onboards onto the project they know how to extend the code base.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#452

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:17 AM UTC

sedeki wrote: post #120

vcanales wrote: post #82

These "i hate debugging wandering pixels" and "i don't want to figure out why my css doesn't work" opinions sounds like they come from people who aren't really front end developers; like they come from the kind of dev who would sit and complain about the frontend devs on their company, thinking that they're a lower class of people. I've been working on the server- and client-side of the web for about 10 years now, an…

I believe I am one of the devs that complain a lot about frontend devs, generally speaking... Don’t get me wrong — being a skilled developer (in the traditional sense) with significant competence in frontend development is extremely attractive. But this profile is actually quite uncommon imo. I have to ask, do you really think the problem with frontend development is about performance? That FE is hard because of the…

[deleted]

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#453

Post by ggregoire » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:18 AM UTC

If you think learning react and setting up a webpack build is complicated, I recommend you to stay away from modern backend development.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#454

Post by icedchai » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:23 AM UTC

adt2bt wrote: post #192

icedchai wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the first part (they are real developers!), but agree with the second. We have grafted an application platform on top of a document delivery platform.

What would an application platform look like that isn’t a ‘document’ delivery platform? In my opinion, the ability of your browser to be essentially the OS of the web was responsible for the second great explosion in usefulness of computers (the first being the PC itself). Mobile apps were the third, but it’s unclear to me if there’s any benefit to rewriting many (most?) web applications as desktop applications. Disc…

It's hard to imagine given we've been stuck in this world for so long. However, I have to believe there is a better way. Building an app with HTML/CSS/JS just feels like a mess. I'd start by looking at some good ideas from the past... Sun NeWS perhaps.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#455

Post by gigatexal » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:25 AM UTC

I have been saying the same thing for years: webpack, Babel, react, the million or so CSS edge cases per browser, and then that’s just to get started.

I found backend development much saner to reason about.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#456

Post by buboard » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:36 AM UTC

neya wrote: post #51

Because, Webpages have become complicated. Suddenly, you have all this interactivity going on, which you didn't have a decade ago. We went from a series of simple hyperlinked inter-connected webpages to all these popups shoving onto our face, useless fake computer bots pretending to be tech-support and finally big co. tracking every single click, every pixel of your mouse movement. The web has come a long way to supp…

> I miss those days where everything was just a bunch of tables and default system font-powered webpages with plain blue links. No CSS, no popups, just html and pure content.

You mean like HN? You 're not missing it. The old web never left. It's still here to catch all the misguided cloud walkers when they fall.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#457

Post by buboard » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:40 AM UTC

Karawebnetwork wrote: post #264

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…

> Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex Well, that sure is an arrogant way to present stereotypes as fact. At first, I read this as satire. You can follow the history of web development and see exactly why the current stack is as it is. It's people building solutions to problems. For example, nobody thought "I should create a front-end build process to impress my peers!". What happened instead is that re…

> It's people building solutions to problems.

It most definitely doesn't seem so. People build multiple solutions to nonexistent problems, or problems that are only relevant to google (which classifies them as nonexistent problems for everyone else). Then they push those solutions where they don't fit (e.g. SPAs for blogs)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#458

Post by buboard » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:44 AM UTC

ng12 wrote: post #206

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…

> Someone else mentioned SPAs. I 100% guarantee that no user in the world ever wished for their “back” button not to work as they expected. This opinion invalidates the rest of your post. If you lack a fundamental understanding what people are building obviously it seems overcomplicated.

sorry, but if a front end interface is not easily understood, it is bad. its entire purpose is to have usability attributes, like predictability. SPAs break back buttons , new tab buttons, scrolling positions etc, the most basic stuff of web navigation

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#459

Post by icxa » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:45 AM UTC

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.…

I think a more eloquent way is to say fundamentally creating long lasting software structures is more of an art rather than a science, and you can't just tell someone "go practice these 5 things and you'll be the next Picasso" you just have to do it a lot of times, over and over, learning from your mistakes.

There are no shortcuts. You have to build a ton of software, and make a lot of mistakes, and most importantly, learn from them. Then there's the other half of the equation and some people just have the creative mind to imagine the right framework, or tool or library or abstraction or architecture for the problem at hand.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#460

Post by FussyZeus » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:47 AM UTC

chews wrote: post #400

FussyZeus wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think jQuery got a bad rap because so many script kiddies would drop the entire damn framework into a page when they just didn't feel like writing a standard selector to do a mobile menu.

funny, that is the pattern I use, I don't consider it kiddy... it's just efficiant and easy to drop in. le sigh

I mean, if all you're doing is showing and hiding a mobile menu, you can do that in a really expanded form in like 5 lines of vanilla JS, and not have your user download 90 KB* of crap.

*And you BETTER be using the minified version for production.