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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#471

Post by buboard »

Razengan wrote: post #436

As other comments here have said, in different ways: "Modern web development" tries to reinvent too many wheels. I wish more developers/directors would try to approach this from the other direction: Making native OS apps as easily discoverable, installable, accessible, navigable, sharable, restorable, updatable and uninstallable, as websites: • I want to be able to type "photo editor" and see Pixelmator on macOS, Pai…

Sounds like it would be easier to enrich the browser with native-look controls than create another cross-platform ecosystem. (Let alone that none of the platform owners want to share developoers with the other platforms / they have incentive to lock them in)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#472

Post by ummonk »

justinmeiners wrote: post #212
ummonk wrote: post #60

It isn’t. With modern frameworks (e.g. React + Typescript + some CSS framework), it is surprisingly straightforward to build the front ends for highly complex applications.

What does your react setup look like? Do you use webpack? Just babel? What about grunt/gulp? How often do these things change? If you left your project for 12 months, would it still work?

Usually typescript, with webpack to reduce bundle size in production.

As with desktop programming, you have a variety of build systems to choose from, and as long as you use something reasonably same it is fine.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#473

Post by iamwil »

aswanson wrote: post #440
nostrademons wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "sure, that material might not be the most durable on the market, but unobtainium would have added $35 million to the project cost and ongoing maintenance costs would have gone up by another $5 million / year." > That right there is a comparison that developers can never, ever offer anyone that's writing the checks for a project. Sure they can. At Google there was an internal cheat sheet of "numbers every engineer…

Ugh. You've basically made the case for me doing my next project in c++ 17 instead of using it as an excuse to learn Rust. Im morally opposed to c++....

isn't protection against de-referencing null pointers a good reason?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#474

Post by [deleted] »

bob1029 wrote: post #49
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…

Damn, you broke into my top-secret consulting role ;) I completely agree with all of this. There is probably a billion-dollar market out there for rewriting garbage business apps that were developed using the hipster tech flavor of the week.

[deleted]

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#475

Post by cutler »

In the early 2000s Jakob Nielson popularised website usability through his books and his deceptively simple website useit.com. Big companies were paying him big bucks to have him simplify their websites much to the annoyance of the Java astronauts peddling n-tier jumbo sites. I often wonder what Nielson make of the insidious trend of using React & Angular for minimally dynamic websites.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#476

Post by minism »

scarface74 wrote: post #314
dsego wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You missed the multi-page forms part. As soon as you have state of some fields affect how other fields or parts of the page display it becomes complex really quickly. There is an explosion of possible states. If you've ever seen code like this, you know why more modern js frameworks were invented: onSomethingChanged() { $('#foo').prop('disabled', true); $('#spinner').removeClass('invisible'); $('#error-1').prop('hidd…

My favorite combination for dead simple sites is HandlebarsJS. 1. Render model from your JS object. 2. attach events 3. Change model 4. Go to step 1

You're just describing MVC which is essentially what most frameworks contain at their core on some level.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#477

Post by buboard »

_hardwaregeek wrote: post #347

I think there should be a new razor, we can call it the Apple razor because Apple is the most common case. Basically, when tempted to ascribe the decisions of a successful entity to stupidity, consider that you may not be considering all the facts and facets. Yes, web development is complicated. Yes, that complexity is at times completely unwarranted. But , that does not mean that the originators of this complexity w…

Does facebook use react in its main, user-facing site? Does twitter ?

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#478

Post by jayess »

PopeDotNinja wrote: post #306
TotempaaltJ wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here's the trick to not building shit software: don't build shit software. It's a crude way to put it, but the reality is that you can build bad websites in any framework (including old PHP stuff and new JavaScript hype). You can also build good websites in any framework. It depends way more on the organisation or team developing it than on the libraries you use.

Define shit software.

Whatever the last developer did.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#479

Post by chopdcheez212 »

It’s not complicated, you kids are just spoiled.

JavaScript I was paid to write in 1995 had a shelf life of 6 months given Netscape’s release schedule and I had to compete on performance with Delphi 3 native compiled code.

If you think web development is too complicated these days, you should just dump it all and write cgi scripts in Perl again.

Or if you’re an academic, Smalltalk + Seaside.

If there is a problem with modern web development, it is the curse of too much choice. Focus on your end goal, and the choices available will become a blessing, not a curse.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#480

Post by buboard »

exabrial wrote: post #427

Conversely, why are modern web apps so terrible? Take the Google GSuite Admin Console. This is what I called "Turn based administration" [throwback to the old turn based strategy games]. You start by loading the page and the 15mb of random javascript. Now click on something! Wait. ::Javascript stuff:: Incoherent error. Click Help. New documentation webapp loads 15mb of javascript to display some static text.

Hello, i am the popup from the button you clicked 57 clicks ago. i just arrived asynchonously and i m going to destroy your entire form. but don't worry, i will do a slide-hover-twist-and-twerk animation when entering
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