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The Frontend Treadmill

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Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#471

Post by proc0 »

jmulho wrote: post #421
proc0 wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not an experiment though. The divide is clear, you have a client application, and then server applications that the client talks to. This is even more true if you want a lot of interactivity. This line isn't going away anytime soon. There will always be an application that runs on the edge device or machine, and it needs to talk to some other application to store and retrieve data.

The secret is to make the thing that runs on the backend the application, and the thing that runs on the edge device the user interface.

It just depends on the use case. The "interface" could be complicated enough that it needs a full blown application with state. I would say that's the typical expectation today from users.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#472

Post by krainboltgreene »

paradox460 wrote: post #443
ryan-duve wrote: post #432

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've only used Elixir/Phoenix as the backend with Elm as the frontend. If you're familiar with that, can you TL;DR what Phoenix Liveview does differently than a Phoenix/Elm/GraphQL stack?

Liveview nearly eliminates the boundary between backend and frontend. Your forms, inputs, outputs, whatever, just become another GenServer with a few special callbacks. You no longer have to worry about an API and syncing data from client to server. The transport layer becomes invisible

It's not even worth it to talk about GenServer or special callbacks. Any idiot can just think of it as "phx-{binding}" html attribute and "handle_event".

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#473

Post by [deleted] »

bobthepanda wrote: post #415
cxr wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Meanwhile in JS it seems like you can’t go more than six months without having to rewrite something. And by "in JS", you really mean, "in NPM land". So long as folks keep remaining seemingly (almost willfully) ignorant of the source of their pain and/or running right back into the fire the next time the opportunity presents itself, that pain is going to continue. NPM sucks. It's not the way to do JS. Everyone who h…

the problem is that as with everything else in FE it is kind of hard to tell what successor framework will "win" and not do this to you. Svelte and Vue were nice and stable until they were not, Deno as an alternative to NPM kind of never got any traction, and unfortunately no one has come up with a better sandbox that works the same everywhere other than the web.

[deleted]

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#474

Post by apeescape »

evantbyrne wrote: post #243
divan wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst thing is that it's a cultural aspect. This deprecation and breaking stuff hell is a result of millions of micro-choices. "Why not rename MultiselectDropdown into MultiSelectButtonDropdown! And maybe replace the API of that component to a completely new one! Sounds like a cool idea!". Thousands of person-hours are spent daily for fixing results of such 'extremely important'™ breaking changes. There is simply…

I suspect the cultural issues with JS primarily boil down to the fact that every org needs JS, which in turn results in 1) a glut of junior/mid devs and 2) it naturally being ground zero for hype cycles. At this point I honestly wonder if most orgs should even hire for JS skills, or if they would be better served by hiring backend engineers and training them to write progressively enhanced UIs.

It depends on what you want to build. If you want to build impressive B2C software, this sounds like a recipe for disaster. I've worked with many backend engineers masquerading as full stack engineers who couldn't carbon copy a simple mockup design into a working UI if their life depended on it. Yet they never seem to notice how bad their implementation is, sometimes not even if you point it out to them even if the end users would notice; I think these engs are so enamored with their work they're in some kind of denial about the shortcomings. And that's just the visual parts. There's also skill required to take accessibility and conformance with web standards into account (HTML/CSS/JS stack is devious in that it lets you do things in ways that are "wrong"), which you can't easily fix later on by tweaking a bit here and there. So without this understanding, you end up with a crappy UI that's overengineered for what it is. Of course that all won't be an issue if you're building software you can sell even if the UI makes its users depressed.

Not saying your typical frontend engineer is flawless either. It's probably true that they're, on average, not as skilled sw architects as backend engineers, simply because a lot of their work focuses on details instead of architecting, and, again, the HTML/CSS/JS stack is incredibly flexible, in good and bad.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#475

Post by josephg »

bloomingkales wrote: post #289
numinoid wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not interested in writing a testimonial for Remix, merely commenting on the absurdity of calling a project of this scale as nothing more than a grift to sell educational content. There's no reference to these paid courses anywhere on the landing page, there's no callout for paid courses in the main navigation. The only mention of tutorials at all is buried in the community section which leads to: https://remix.gu…

No personal vendetta. We sit here and punch the mysterious air as to why things are the way they are. I thought maybe we'd punch up at something that is plausibly a culprit. I'll admit it may be punching down, since this is just one dude. But then again, it's one dude who influenced a lot of people ... We can't just keep sitting here and blaming developers for being 1) New 2) Dumb 3) FOMO 4) Dumb 5) Unqualified You u…

> We can't just keep sitting here and blaming developers for being New / Dumb …

Well, as a cohort, I think the ratio of inept programmers to skilled programmers stays mostly constant regardless of stuff like this. Like, if programming is hard to learn, fewer people will try and learn it. But also the skill bar goes up - so people spend more time as inept developers before they’re skilled. Likewise if programming gets easier to learn, we get a swell of fresh faces eager to become frontend developers. And the ratio stays more or less the same. It’s kinda like a sales funnel, or a hiring funnel. You always have more leads in your funnel than conversions. (And if you don’t, you’re in trouble!)

We live in an anti gatekeeper era. Content is free, but nobody protects you from wasting your time watching edutainment. The downside of that is real - lots of people waste countless hours larping as students. But the upside is real too. It’s easier than ever to learn anything.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#476

Post by dogcomplex »

jchw wrote: post #145

> Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years. I am predominantly not a frontend dev, but when I do do frontend work, (and I don't avoid it by any means,) I have been using React for the past... 10 years now? And while some sentiment has been moving towards Svelte, by the time Svelte overtakes React, it will have been in production for just as long probably. And Angular might eventually run out of steam…

Yeah but we also got lucky there - like picking the right altcoin. React was just one of many then, and the rest all crumbled. And like OPs said, modern react is quite different than it was 10 years ago

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#477

Post by Swizec »

koreth1 wrote: post #463
ewzimm wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fascinating, and I had no idea web dev influencers were so big. I checked, and there really are people with millions of followers doing development. Personally, the idea of learning anything related to coding through a video is extremely frustrating. It's a text medium. I want to look at things, take time, think it over, compare code, follow references, look up functions. That people like video formats isn't r…

> That people like video formats isn't really surprising to me since it's everywhere, but I still don't fully understand the appeal. Me either, but I have a hunch about why. Are you a fast reader? I am, at least compared to the population at large. And one of the reasons I can't stand video as a format for learning about coding topics is that it is so frustratingly slow compared to my reading speed. To get anywhere c…

Alternatively: you can listen to audio while commuting or driving or cleaning or working out. I love audio for higher level things and to get an overview of the topic. Then text to dive into the details.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#478

Post by lolinder »

cube00 wrote: post #449
lelandfe wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This stability does mean that old React (or Knockout, or whatever) applications will still work just fine for the end users, likewise without a single line changed. The instability is on the tooling side (and peer deps). Getting back into a project that uses Broccoli and Bower is a nightmare. And that was just a handful of years ago. You have to become a detective, finding what combination of package versions and Hom…

> This stability does mean that old React (or Knockout, or whatever) applications will still work just fine for the end users, likewise without a single line changed. Not in the current enterprise cyberops environment of needing to pass dependency security scans at all times.

It still works fine for end users, just not for the compliance department.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#479

Post by kerkeslager »

incrudible wrote: post #64
kerkeslager wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been writing React professionally for over a decade and React from 5 years ago is obsolete. Like, literally won't build with current tools. To their credit, I think the React code itself has maintained reverse compatibility pretty well (it's not React's fault), but the build systems I was using 5 years ago have all changed and broken reverse compatibility. EDIT: Forgot about component lifecycle methods... Even a…

> To their credit, I think the React code itself has maintained reverse compatibility pretty well (it's not React's fault), but the build systems I was using 5 years ago have all changed and broken reverse compatibility. That's a problem with your build system then, not React. There is (or was) indeed a lot of churn in build systems, but you wouldn't have been spared unless you had chosen to not use a build system -…

I just had a thought and decided to look it up.

This side conversation started as an objection to the comment, "Whatever framework you choose will be obsolete in 5 years."

The first release of esbuild was November 2020, i.e. it didn't exist 5 years ago. And that release fixed... conditional statements in TypeScript--a pretty basic feature to be broken. Does that sound like something you want to use in production?

So maybe your strategy of only using things that work with esbuild doesn't address the problem as much as you think it does.

Re: The Frontend Treadmill

#480

Post by josephg »

jongjong wrote: post #405
pjmlp wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, back in my day being an "influencer" required being able to crack copy protection mechanisms and add an intro into the loading screen, or animations deemed impossible in the given hardware, while remaining anonymous behind a group handle. With fame being slowly propagated via tapes and floppies sent by mail, or some BBS archives. Now you comment on what others do, or commit single function packages.

True, the barrier to becoming a tech influencer are very low now and yet it's harder than ever. This suggests that dumb luck plays an increasing role. Current tech influencers are generally smart and qualified but they aren't experts in anything specific and they aren't innovative in any way. They are chosen by algorithms out of a large pool of possible candidates.

> This suggests that dumb luck plays an increasing role.

Nah. It’s not luck. It’s charisma. And skill at performance & in many cases clowning. Some people just have that certain something that makes people enjoy listening to them. It can be learned, but like programming it takes a lifetime to master. And like programming, some people are naturals at it.

I know because I’ve been training in improv theatre and clowning for the last 6 years. That’s enough that I could tell you in detail what people like the Primagen or Joe Rogan are doing. But I can’t replicate it. I’m way better than I was, but I’m nowhere near their skill level as a performer.

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