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Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

frankchimero.com

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Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#51

Post by _0w8t »

muglug wrote: post #4

Customer needs for most websites basically haven't changed in two decades. Outside of a few complex SPAs doing interesting things, structurally we're building the same things we were building back then (blogs, brochure sites etc) — it's just that the way we're building them has become (optionally) much more complex.

20 years ago one could assume 1024x800 and it would mostly work. Then smart phones came with small vertical screens and touch input. Then tablets made it necessary to support screen rotation. Then retina displays required to support dpi-aware images. Then dark/light mode came and general color management...

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#52

Post by em-bee »

grawprog wrote: post #26
smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

i strongly disagree with this:

Every flavour of Linux uses a different layout for its root directories, stores configs in different places and generally is not consistent from distro to distro.

there are differences, but it's 90% the same in the major distributions.

and while you do have a point about user configs, it is getting better. .config and .local are getting used more and more and are an improvement over every app dropping stuff in $HOME.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#53

Post by rhn_mk1 »

riskable wrote: post #36
bestinterest wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wish wish wish I could move over to Linux but its font rendering situation is terrible [1] I've tried Manjaro and Ubuntu to no avail. I have no idea what causes it or if people on Linux are not as sensitive to it or its a specific hardware setup which causes terrible fonts but once you read Windows fonts stuff looks so much better to me. Apparently its a hot debated topic but its so obvious to some it seems. [1] ht…

Hah: I am very particular about fonts myself but what bugs me most isn't sub-pixel hinting (which is "good enough" with the latest freetype IMHO) it's the size of fonts. Windows is so far off the mark on 99% of computers and it drives me crazy! Repeat after me: 72pt is one inch tall! 72pt is one inch tall! 72pt is one inch tall! The "point" scale of fonts is actually a precise, real-world measurement like inches, mil…

I have never seen a display with non-square pixels, except maybe on cameras. Where are those typically installed?

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#54

Post by zozbot234 »

crazygringo wrote: post #39
ur-whale wrote: post #30

I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said: Front-end infrastructure and tools design unfortunately does not attract the cream of the CS graduate crop (and even less so Front-End design work). For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards systems, compiler, DB, back-end infra, language design, back-end, ML, etc ... But not front-end. The net result: t…

Regardless of whether or not your observation about CS graduates is true, I don't think that has anything to do with it. The difference is that with the backend, you have choice over what technologies to use. There's competition between languages and ecosystems, so a better more elegant one can replace a worse crufty one. But with the frontend, there is no competition. You have to use HTML, CSS, and (roughly) JavaScr…

What's wrong with HTML+CSS as a rendering primitive? It's quite successful in decoupling semantics from presentation, which is a requirement for a platform that's as widespread and universal as the modern web. JS is a bit crufty, but you don't have to deal with it. You could write everything in some other source language and compile down to JS/WASM. (Even low-level languages like C/C++/D/Rust can support this via Emscripten.)

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#55

Post by craftinator »

crazygringo wrote: post #39
ur-whale wrote: post #30

I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said: Front-end infrastructure and tools design unfortunately does not attract the cream of the CS graduate crop (and even less so Front-End design work). For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards systems, compiler, DB, back-end infra, language design, back-end, ML, etc ... But not front-end. The net result: t…

Regardless of whether or not your observation about CS graduates is true, I don't think that has anything to do with it. The difference is that with the backend, you have choice over what technologies to use. There's competition between languages and ecosystems, so a better more elegant one can replace a worse crufty one. But with the frontend, there is no competition. You have to use HTML, CSS, and (roughly) JavaScr…

> If, when the web had started, it had been based on some kind of primitive bytecode for rendering

Which is WASM! Well, sorta.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#56

Post by yarcob »

grawprog wrote: post #26
smoldesu wrote: post #10

The delineation of this argument is what made me switch to Linux. On Windows, things that should have been getting easy were getting harder for me: software management was getting worse, updates were getting worse, and everything that should "just work", just wouldn't. My experience on MacOS was just as bad, with all of the 32-bit apps I used gone in the wind. Now the 64-bit apps are up on the chopping block, and I h…

I love Linux based operating systems and I've used them pretty much exclusively for at least a decade now, and I agree with a lot of your post, but >By cutting away abstraction, I don't think I agree with this take. You haven't cut away abstraction, you've changed to a different kind of abstraction. Linux's 'everything is a file' abstraction is just that, an abstraction. >Linux is arranged masterfully, and makes the…

My early web dev experience was mostly just figuring out where the hell config and log files for apache, php and mysql were. If the docs told you the default location of the config file, you could be sure that on your distro they are somewhere completely different.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#57

Post by mLuby »

ur-whale wrote: post #30

I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said: Front-end infrastructure and tools design unfortunately does not attract the cream of the CS graduate crop (and even less so Front-End design work). For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards systems, compiler, DB, back-end infra, language design, back-end, ML, etc ... But not front-end. The net result: t…

> I'm going to get downvoted into the the ground for this, but I think it has to be said:

Ditto! All in good fun. 0:)

> it's a mess, it's unprincipled, it's grown organically, it's driven by fashion and immediate business needs, it's an unmaintainable tarpit, and it's increasingly a nightmare to build with

Can't tell if you're talking about front-end or back-end here; I've certainly seen both.

> For some reason, cream of the crop CS graduates usually veer towards [back-end]

Setting aside the implication that getting good grades in computer science is the same as being good at creating business value with software, I see two reasons:

1. academic inertia: old professors teach what they know (e.g. lisp) regardless of how useful it is in the industry. I bet a rockstar professor who loved front-end/UX would find the cream of their crop biased toward front-end work.

2. this very bias you're perpetuating: where a bright student looks into the world, sees front-end work derided, and so steers clear of it (and maybe even starts parroting this bias of those they respect, as youngsters so often do).

I don't know what the solution is, but it's definitely not whining. 0:)

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#58

Post by _0w8t »

devchix wrote: post #17

At some point in my organization's press toward Ansible, I came to the realization that Ansible the product is yet another layer of abstraction that is there for its own sake, and of dubious value. I converted a simple script to patch stuff, something that is trivial to write and run, and the yum module behaves different enough from the command-line yum that I have to learn a different way to get and parse the output…

This is the my experience as well. For an activist website that I maintain I just use a PHP script to install everything and to ensure that everything has proper permissions. The site uses Wordpress and patching config files in PHP is simpler than in bash. I am glad that I have not bothered with Ansible, as I would most likely ended up with YAML programming which is way worse than bash.

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#59

Post by rhn_mk1 »

honkycat wrote: post #49
devchix wrote: post #17

At some point in my organization's press toward Ansible, I came to the realization that Ansible the product is yet another layer of abstraction that is there for its own sake, and of dubious value. I converted a simple script to patch stuff, something that is trivial to write and run, and the yum module behaves different enough from the command-line yum that I have to learn a different way to get and parse the output…

I agree ansible is bad, but it is NOT the state of the art. Honestly its kind-of old and dead at this point replaced by stuff like CDKs. Programming in YAML sucks. YAML based solutions will always come up short because you cannot develop proper abstractions so you end up with a big bowl of copy-pasta amd indecipherable work-arounds. IMO the modern web is all based around adding types to systems because we've realized…

What are CDKs?

Re: Everything Easy is Hard Again (2018)

#60

Post by em-bee »

honkycat wrote: post #49
devchix wrote: post #17

At some point in my organization's press toward Ansible, I came to the realization that Ansible the product is yet another layer of abstraction that is there for its own sake, and of dubious value. I converted a simple script to patch stuff, something that is trivial to write and run, and the yum module behaves different enough from the command-line yum that I have to learn a different way to get and parse the output…

I agree ansible is bad, but it is NOT the state of the art. Honestly its kind-of old and dead at this point replaced by stuff like CDKs. Programming in YAML sucks. YAML based solutions will always come up short because you cannot develop proper abstractions so you end up with a big bowl of copy-pasta amd indecipherable work-arounds. IMO the modern web is all based around adding types to systems because we've realized…

when i evaluated ansible and saltstack a few years ago, i went with saltstack because the ansible example felt much more like programming in yaml, while the salt example was much more declarative.

i am still not happy with yaml, but i haven't seen any better alternative than saltstack yet.

cloud development kits seem to target cloud APIs only and don't look like they could work for just a bunch of computers

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