Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#501

Post by goatlover » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:35 PM UTC

SquareWheel wrote: post #193

cloakandswagger wrote: post #29

The internet as a whole is one giant, hacked together system. There's no doubt that, with a magic reset button, we could build an internet that is vastly more secure, efficient and reliable than the current one. But that's the nature of an emergent, distributed technology like the internet. Once the concept was born we ran with what we had, and once adoption hit a certain point it became impossible to start over agai…

I'm not sure a reset is really necessary. "The internet" is abstracted and modular enough that parts can be swapped out and improved without needing to start over. Internet Protocol is being upgraded to IPv6 (any decade now), HTTP/2 is replacing the old HTTP 1.x (thanks SPDY!), TLS has replaced SSL, brotli is stepping up for gzip/deflate. Who knows, maybe QUIC[1] will be next. Even on the programming side we have new…

The web isn't the internet. Someone else posted a quote (by Alan Kay?) about how the internet was an example of brilliant design, while the web was an example of amateurish engineering.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#502

Post by sheriffderek » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:36 PM UTC

sheriffderek wrote: post #493

meredydd wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, this understates the problem. A modal web application today takes an absolute minimum of five programming languages and three frameworks: * HTML * CSS * JS * A server-side language (eg Python) * SQL And then come the (leaky) abstractions on top of them: * A framework to make JS bearable (eg Angular) * A framework to make server-side bearable (eg Django) * A framework to make CSS bearable (eg Bootstrap) .…

I would exclude the 3rd framework. You do not need or want to use a CSS framework if you actually understand and have experience writing CSS.

Whenever I hear this argument, I think of those guys out there on the freeway laying asphalt in the middle of the night. Or those people who are dead - inside the dam's cement. They probably wish they didn't have to use tools or try new techniques or combine skills and continue to learn new ways of building complex structures. They probably wish things didn't go wrong. They probably wish there was a task manager that just put all the dirt into the wheelbarrow and rolled it where it needed to go. As we move to a computer-based way of building things, it seems that we have already become spoiled and self-deserving. It seems like most 'developers' took a "rails for zombies" tutorial and are angry that things aren't as easy as that. That's why front-end developers get paid 4 times a much as most people / to make crappy software for other developers to track their time or catalog their toys or rants with their friends about how much they hate programming. I think everyone who doesn't like writing code, should get a job on a contractor's team for a summer - if they'll have you. Then while you are thinking about how much that job sucks, dream up a new box-model CSS type thing and be the hero.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#503

Post by goatlover » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:37 PM UTC

dooptroop wrote: post #448

frostymarvelous wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, everything is an abstraction, down to zeroes and ones.

Oh, it goes so much further down than that.

It's all just fluctuating fields in the vacuum?

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#504

Post by goatlover » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:40 PM UTC

atombender wrote: post #464

aclsid wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a javascript point of view, React is great, but I wholeheartedly disagree on the CSS modules. What React did here breaks the whole purpose of CSS, even if it is messy, not to mention that now designers need to have help from programmers to do their job. IMHO, it is much better to user Sass to make CSS sane, and just do whatever makes life easier on the frontend. I feel something light like Backbone.Native with a…

I'm not very impressed with "the whole purpose of CSS". CSS made a ton of design mistakes which we're still living with today. A big design mistake was the global cascading/inheritance system. It's a huge pain to write CSS that doesn't leak into nooks and crannies where it shouldn't. CSS is supposed to be modular, but you can't just import someone's stylesheet (e.g. for embedding something in your page, like a video…

What about full on web components? Then the designers can just target components, and leave the programming to the component makers.

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#505

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:40 PM UTC

erlich wrote: post #306

meredydd wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything, this understates the problem. A modal web application today takes an absolute minimum of five programming languages and three frameworks: * HTML * CSS * JS * A server-side language (eg Python) * SQL And then come the (leaky) abstractions on top of them: * A framework to make JS bearable (eg Angular) * A framework to make server-side bearable (eg Django) * A framework to make CSS bearable (eg Bootstrap) .…

You can literally use Javascript for all of this.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#506

Post by circlefavshape » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

astrodust wrote: post #416

circlefavshape wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we were stilling coding things that way, we might be able to go to the moon but we wouldn't have self-driving cars Erm ... we actually don't have self-driving cars

Google and Tesla beg to differ.

For a very restricted definition of "self-driving" ... but fair enough, in the context of the parent post, the self-driving cars we do have are impressive pieces of software

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#507

Post by morenoh149 » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:43 PM UTC

tengbretson wrote: post #472

pixie_ wrote: post #24

Yes. I feel like we're in the dark ages right now. JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale what so ever. Code written in it becomes 'read only' very quickly. Impossible to refactor. CSS - Also becomes impossible to manage. Who knows if the class you wrote is or isn't being used in HTML or JavaScript somewhere. Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger and more unmanageable. HTML - At the heart of it, the fo…

> JavaScript - Dynamically typed, does not scale What does this even mean? I see the phrase "does not scale" bandied about all the time. In what way is a language supposed to scale? It seems like its just the latest semi-technical hand-wavy way to disparage something.

I think he means very large projects. > 10k loc. See http://www.pgbovine.net/migrating-legacy-codebase-to-typescr... for example

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#508

Post by david927 » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:44 PM UTC

We're a smart industry, but we're not a wise industry.

We focus on solving tactical problems, ignoring the mountains of technical debt that are created from it, and that it leaves the strategic problem worse. We will do this because we need the solution today, not tomorrow.

We can elevate out of this when we're ready, when we say "enough is enough."

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#509

Post by asolove » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:44 PM UTC

douche wrote: post #484

RussianCow wrote: post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's completely fine to write a website/blog/newspaper in React, provided you make it isomorphic and keep it as light as possible. Then you get all of the advantages of using React with almost none of the disadvantages. Of course, nobody does this in practice.

If your blog/newspaper/text+images website requires JS or it is not readable, you failed.

The two of you are agreeing: "isomorphic" in this context means "the server can render it to html and serve it like a normal webpage".

Re: Ask HN: Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

#510

Post by Klathmon » Mon, Sep 12, 2016, 4:45 PM UTC

goatlover wrote: post #499

Klathmon wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But i'm talking about complex applications. I'm not talking about your average website, but full blown 100k+ loc applications. It's so much nicer than the alternatives that many developers are making desktop-only applications using those technologies. I don't know if that is because of familiarity, or if it's actually a better platform, but I know that when I did the "move" from GTK and swing applications to HTML/CSS…

Keep in mind that JS is leverage the browser, which gets installed everywhere, and because of a persistent push to standardize, delivers mostly the same user experience across platforms these days. My point was that Java, Flash or Silverlight could have done the same if you replace the browser with a similar platform in those ecosystems. JS is getting to leverage the powerful browser platform with native integration,…

But they tried, and for the most part failed.

JRE is difficult to manage and maintain, and security wise is a nightmare compared to javascript (would you run random .jar's from any website?) Adobe had multiple attempts at a "browser-like" runtime for flash, none of which got all that far (although the Adobe Air system has done pretty damn well, and is actually still alive and kicking).

It could be any number of reasons why web won over the alternatives, but I just don't think that it won because of a mistake, or a fluke. The web was doing something better than the others, and while I can't exactly pinpoint it (hell, it probably isn't any one thing), it is winning.

And i'm in no way saying it's perfect. There are a ton of things i'd change about it if given the chance. But you can't just act like it's a horrible platform and that we should start over with something better (like many commenters in this thread and across the internet in general are saying).