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Is the madness ever going to end?

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Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#491

Post by resonious »

bmeski wrote: post #186
phailhaus wrote: post #85

I feel comfortable with asserting that the author has never worked on a complex web application. This web-dev hate borders on pathological: this is a guy that seems to specialize in Unix/Linux tooling, doesn't have a single tutorial on web app development [1], and yet has an intense hatred towards a space that he barely understands. These types of arguments are incredibly embarrassing to read, not only because they b…

I work on a massive CMS and he’s correct. There is an insane groupthink going on in webdev. Another team in my org has spent a year reinventing our client side js so that our templates are now mixed with the svelte runtime. All to render/update cards on the page that can update when an api pings the page. So 6 months later they’re still building the svelte integration and have only shipped 2 pages to users. This is a…

I'm not sure if this one org making a mess is good evidence that there is groupthink occurring in the entire industry. There are places that are using these frameworks well, and it really does improve productivity.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#492

Post by beowulfey »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #303
rdiddly wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that's what's offensive to the purist engineer mind. These aren't engineering decisions, they're business decisions (or maybe the closest thing you could call them would be "financial engineering" decisions). The best thing, by pure engineering criteria, is not what gets built. The best thing for the business is what gets built. In that context it's a complaint as old as the hills. ...and not specific to comp…

Its best to understand early that an Engineer deals in two commodities: money and time. Their job is not to create ivory-tower ideal solutions. The whole problem, the reason Engineers exists, is to manage technology such that the constraints of money and time can be met.

See, this is interesting to me, because I come from a different engineering background and was taught that the constraints were safety first, then cost. Time to build was a part but not as important as those other two.

Obviously safety is a bit less important in the software world, but hearing time be a key part of an engineer’s focus makes me uneasy for some reason, even though it makes a lot of sense from a business perspective.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#493

Post by pjmlp »

mschuster91 wrote: post #459
pjmlp wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess DevOps also need jobs, when I compare team sizes between both approaches.

As if "devops" were a job... at most companies the sad reality is that the ops team gets fired and the developers who often enough don't even have more understanding of a Linux shell than ls/cd/cat/rm get told "you're also doing ops now, have fun!". Inevitably, issues will plop up - hacks, data loss, site going down over the weekend because there's no 24/7 on-call any more - and then management comes down to the devs…

It is, at most companies it is just Systems Engineer rebranded.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#494

Post by pydry »

jack_pp wrote: post #488
pydry wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, I hear this argument a lot for e.g. why Slack is a dog slow electron beast. The thing is, slack has not been short of time OR money for at least the last 5 years. They could have easily built leaner, faster native apps and customers would have appreciated it. This "ivory tower" stuff smacks of just world/just market fallacy. I suspect there are deeper issues here. For example, vendor lock-in inhibiting comp…

So once you have an app up and running, with millions of satisfied users you would hire another team of more expensive developers to build a native app.. for each platform? so make that 2 more teams or rather 4 more teams? (iOS, Mac, Android, Windows)

They're a $24 billion company. Hiring 4 small teams probably shouldnt be too much for them.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#495

Post by sofixa »

anthk wrote: post #473
sofixa wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's still a huge advantage for Electron - it's still fundamentally the same tech underneath - HTML, CSS, JS. Any semi-competent web developer can use Electron and ship cross-platform apps with it, and heck, lots of code can be shared between Electron apps and the web "app". None of the other options provide these facilities.

QT is much faster than Electron.

Thanks for the information, however that isn't really relevant to the points I'm making.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#496

Post by taurusnoises »

root_axis wrote: post #23

The author is fighting a strawman. Rather than engage with the specific problems these solutions were built to solve they dismissively regard them as just flavor of the week trends purely for the sake of chasing newness. This is true of the entire post, but I'll tackle just one since it's emblematic of my issues with all the rest: The argument for Electron and React Native isn't "it's modern", it's "it's much cheaper…

The author isn't "fighting a strawman." It's called venting. The author is venting. It's really quite harmless.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#498

Post by Joeri »

phailhaus wrote: post #85

I feel comfortable with asserting that the author has never worked on a complex web application. This web-dev hate borders on pathological: this is a guy that seems to specialize in Unix/Linux tooling, doesn't have a single tutorial on web app development [1], and yet has an intense hatred towards a space that he barely understands. These types of arguments are incredibly embarrassing to read, not only because they b…

I have been in professional web development since 2004 and I mostly agree with the author that there are massive amounts of groupthink going on. "Modern" web development has standardized in tool stacks which are insanely complicated, far beyond anything that is warranted in most cases. We have forgotten how to make simple things in simple ways.

At a minimum you need node, npm, webpack, babel, an spa framework, a frontend router, a css transpiler, a css framework, a test runner, a testing functions library, and a bunch of smaller things, and that's just what is "needed" to build a static website with a bit of interaction. We're not even talking about the dockerized insanity that happens as soon as you want to slide an API under that beast.

I understand why every piece is there, I was there when they arrived on the scene, I understand what problem they solve. What I don't understand is why as a group web developers have decided this is the only way to solve the problem of web development. What we don't have are simpler web stacks. Why do we need npm or babel at all to make a simple web frontend? Modern browsers are good enough that with the right tooling we don't need build pipelines or package managers. Similar arguments can be made for the server-side parts.

Anyway, here's my own two cents to a simpler web dev stack: a version of create react app that is entirely self-contained and has no build steps. https://github.com/jsebrech/create-react-app-zero

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#499

Post by moonchrome »

pydry wrote: post #467
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its best to understand early that an Engineer deals in two commodities: money and time. Their job is not to create ivory-tower ideal solutions. The whole problem, the reason Engineers exists, is to manage technology such that the constraints of money and time can be met.

You know, I hear this argument a lot for e.g. why Slack is a dog slow electron beast. The thing is, slack has not been short of time OR money for at least the last 5 years. They could have easily built leaner, faster native apps and customers would have appreciated it. This "ivory tower" stuff smacks of just world/just market fallacy. I suspect there are deeper issues here. For example, vendor lock-in inhibiting comp…

>They could have easily built leaner, faster native apps and customers would have appreciated it.

Example of such apps ? There should be plenty since it easily built.

Re: Is the madness ever going to end?

#500

Post by kevincox »

kelnos wrote: post #333
deft wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack isn't feature complete in their webapp if they even still have it. vscode.dev is new, the app existed for a long time. In practice, its the reverse; it allows you to turn an app into a website and add yet another supported platform.

> Slack isn't feature complete in their webapp if they even still have it. It isn't? I use it daily and haven't noticed anything missing, except that voice calls don't work on Firefox, which is fine, because I never use them.

Actually the newest Firefox ships with a user-agent override for slack so that voice calls work now.

But same, I haven't noticed any missing features from the web version.

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