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

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

#521

Post by nigelg »

This thread is just a big circle jerk of non web-developers hating on web development.

Minimize you dependencies, organize your code into easy-to-fit-in-your-head, single-responsibility modules. Write a simpler solution instead of including another 100kb minified mess.

Someone else said it, but I'll repeat it: systems scale, languages don't. Javascript can be as good a language as any if you use it correctly. People bitch about the footguns but don't take the time to design their systems correctly. Yeah, Javascript fucking sucks when you write 10k lines of incoherent JQuery-soup in a single index.js file that provides all the functionality of your shitty asp.net page from 2001. Well no shit? You can write garbage in any language.

/rant

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

#522

Post by barefootcoder »

kinkdr wrote: post #38

Without specific examples on what your frustrations are, my best guess is that you are just overwhelmed. It was not long ago that I was in a similar situation like you, all these overlapping technologies looked unnecessary and redundant. Just the node ecosystem by itself, felt like a pile of crap that depended on a bigger pile of crap. For a simple application like "hello world" in React, I have to choose between a l…

That may be, and some of my frustration may come from being thrown in the deep end in a very large project that uses a lot of different technologies -- it seems that every other page is using a different framework -- it's a lot to learn all at once.

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

#523

Post by emodendroket »

goatlover wrote: post #492
emodendroket wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For practical purposes it's the same either way.

But it's not the same, because not all platforms use a markup language with a separate style language in addition to the actual programming language. A JVM or .NET based web would have been a very different kind of platform.

What I mean is that the VM and the language are a package, in this case.

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

#524

Post by sheriffderek »

mashlol wrote: post #69
jorblumesea wrote: post #51

While I hate css, sort of like js and hate html layout, a lot of the problems come from accessibility. In that, it's so accessible anyone can do "web". This means you get non-engineers with no engineering background put into situations where thinking about things from an engineering perspective would really help and might produce actual workable solutions. Like wtf is this: https://www.npmjs.com/package/string.protot…

I don't understand the problem with those modules. Just because you can do something one way, doesn't mean you shouldn't add an easier and better to understand way. The intention of `string.endsWith('Blah')` is easier to understand then `string.indexOf('Blah') === string.length - 4`. Java String has both `indexOf` and `startsWith`, do you think that is also problematic?

I prefer writing instead of :p

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

#525

Post by wvenable »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #275
porker wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think that not only we would have self-driving cars, they'd be working much more reliably than proposed solutions of today, and would utilize some pretty clever analog-driven methods. More info please?

Consider this - the 50-80s era was known not only for putting men on the Moon, military and space agencies were doing a lot of crazy shit like space shuttle that could start and land autonomously (Buran), or capturing small items dropped from orbit mid-flight over the ocean (Corona program, see [0]), precisely targeting cruise missiles [1], etc. - all without the benefits of microcomputers we know today, without high…

It required unbelievable amount of man power and money to do those things. The real benefit to all our modern technology is to do more with less. It's not that people were more focused; it's just that there were many more of them and there was way more money involved.

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

#526

Post by niccaluim »

webXL wrote: post #460
niccaluim wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree—I loathe frontend development, but React made it tolerable to do for limited periods—but it's still a hack on a teetering Jenga tower of hacks.

loathe ? I loathe public speaking and flossing, but these things are good for me, and I'm sure you wouldn't be doing frontend dev if there wasn't a big upside that it made possible. > teetering Jenga tower of hacks? How is any programming language not capable of being brittle?

This isn't about a language. It's about the whole stack.

I've been programming since before the web was invented. The web, as a development platform, is the worst layer-cake of kludges I've ever seen.

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

#527

Post by jedberg »

HeavyStorm wrote: post #370
rtpg wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really square pegs for round holes? I don't think that the web as a mechanism for distributing applications would look much different even if it hadn't gone through the HTML stage. If not JS, it would have been Java applets. If not HTML, then some weird XML layout schema. There might have been a time where the web as a platform for applications was beyond silly, but this is not htat time. The platform is decide…

It's, but not by design.

> It's, but not by design.

As a side note, when I read this, I thought you forgot a word. Then I realized expanding the contraction yields a complete sentence.

Interesting choice of construction. Out of curiosity, is English your first language?

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

#528

Post by barefootcoder »

elg0nz wrote: post #126

" In Richard Feynman’s popular book “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!” he tells how during his college years he “often liked to play tricks on people”. Most of these tricks were designed to show how dumb people are. For example, in a mechanical drawing class at MIT where the students were taught to use a drawing instrument called a French curve (a curly piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves), Feynman informed…

Somehow I feel like this comment is meant to be directed toward me (OP), but am struggling to see how it applies to what I was asking. In fact, I specifically asked for resources to assist me in orienting my mind to the web development way of doing things.

Perhaps I've misunderstood and you're actually directing the comment at the hodge-podge of web frameworks that don't seem to follow the principles of design that other languages do?

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

#530

Post by lucb1e »

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…

> Same problem, read-only, it only gets bigger

I think that's write-only

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