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Web development is fun again

ma.ttias.be

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Re: Web development is fun again

#561

Post by prathamtharwani »

fragmede wrote: post #280
bitwize wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait till the VC tap gets shut off. You: Hey ChatGPT, help me center a div. ChatGPT: Certainly, I'd be glad to help! But first you must drink a verification can to proceed. Or: ChatGPT: I'm sorry, you appear to be asking a development-related question, which your current plan does not support. Would you like me to enable "Dev Mode" for an additional $200/month? Drink a verification can to accept charges.

Just you wait until the powers that be take cars away from us! What absolute FOOLS you all are to shape your lives around something that could be taken away from us at any time! How are you going to get to work when gas stations magically disappear off the face of the planet? I ride a horse to work, and y'all are idiots for developing a dependency on cars. Next thing you're gonna tell me is we're going to go to war f…

This is a poor analogy. Cars (mostly) don't require a subscription.

Re: Web development is fun again

#562

Post by 9rx »

beaker52 wrote: post #499
9rx wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The important difference is the reduction in boilerplate, which allows programs to be written with (often) significantly less code. Hence the time savings (and fun) spoken of in the original article. This isn't really a new phenomenon. Languages have been adding things like arrays and maps as builtins to reduce the boilerplate required around them. The modern languages of which we speak take that same idea to a whole…

No, when we write code it has a an absolute and specific meaning to the compiler. When we write words to an LLM they are written in a non-specific informal language (usually English) and processed non-deterministically too. This is an incredibly important distinction that makes coding, and asking the LLM to code, two completely different ball games. One is formal, one is not. And yes, this isn’t a new phenomenon.

It's different in some ways (such is evolution), but is not a distinction that matters. Kind of like the difference between imperative and declarative programming. Different language models, but all the same at the end of the day.

Re: Web development is fun again

#563

Post by e12e »

efilife wrote: post #506
jszymborski wrote: post #20

I remember those times, and it was a lot of fun, but there's really nothing stopping you from running a LAMP stack today, writing PHP without frameworks and with manual SQL queries. In fact, it's a lot more fun for me to approach this today. Modern PHP is a joy. MariaSQL is very much MySQL (and switching to Postgres isn't exactly a bump in complexity). It's way easier to write code that won't get injected. If you wan…

> but also the best way to get your box popped what do you mean? why?

https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=phpmyadmin

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Re: Web development is fun again

#564

Post by williamcotton »

user34283 wrote: post #171
sublinear wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so weird to see this take repeated over and over. I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web? The only part where I agree is that you don't need PHP or server-side rendering in general.

I used to think the same about server-side rendering until I more closely looked at React SSR. I think it makes a lot of sense and allows for faster initial rendering of the page while automatically setting up the JS and interactivity in the background.

React has always supported server-side rendering and there have been many tools over the years to "rehydrate" data from the server to the client for when the client-side React application "takes over".

Re: Web development is fun again

#565

Post by dcre »

mbirth wrote: post #415
chung8123 wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it all the build stuff and scaffolding I have to get in place before I can even start tinkering on a project. I never formally learned all the systems and tools and AI makes all of that 10x easier. When I hit something I cannot figure out instead of googling for 1/2 hour it is 10 minutes in AI.

The difference is that after you’ve googled it for ½ hour, you’ve learned something. If you ask an LLM to do it for you, you’re none the wiser.

This is just not true. I have wasted many hours looking for answers to hard-to-phrase questions and learned very little from the process. If an LLM can get me the same result in 30 seconds, it's very hard for me to see that as a bad thing. It just means I can spend more time thinking about the thing I want to be thinking about. I think to some extent people are valorizing suffering itself.

Re: Web development is fun again

#566

Post by b112 »

naasking wrote: post #554
Akronymus wrote: post #535

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far, eqch and every time I used an LLM to help me with something it hallucinated non-existant functions or was incorrect in an important but non-obvious way. Though, I guess I do treat LLM's as a last resort longshot for when other documentation is failing me.

Knowing how to use LLMs is a skill. Just winging it without any practice or exploration of how the tool fails can produce poor results.

"You're holding it wrong"

99% of an LLM's usefulness vanishes, if it behaves like an addled old man.

"What's that sonny? But you said you wanted that!"

"Wait, we did that last week? Sorry let me look at this again"

"What? What do you mean, we already did this part?!"

Re: Web development is fun again

#567

Post by NoSalt »

A LOT of what is mentioned for today's frontend and backend developers is really companies dumping more and more responsibility onto developers so they can fire SEOs, Configurations Management specialists, DBAs, etc., so that the company can save more money while burning out more developers.

Re: Web development is fun again

#568

Post by phil21 »

girvo wrote: post #438
phil21 wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t find this to be true. I enjoy computers quite a bit. I enjoy the hardware, scaling problems, theory behind things, operating systems, networking, etc. Most of all I find what computers allow humanity to achieve extremely interesting and motivating. I call them the worlds most complicated robot. I don’t find coding overly fun in itself. What I find fun is the results I get when I program something that has the…

See, I do though. I enjoy the act, the craft of programming. It's intrinsically fun for me, and has been for the 25 years I've been doing it at this point, and it still hasn't stopped being fun! Different strokes I guess

Oh I totally agree! I have a lot of fun chatting with friends/coworkers who are super into programming as an art and/or passion.

I just was pushing back on the “you aren’t into computers if you don’t get intrinsic joy out of programming itself” bit.

Re: Web development is fun again

#569

Post by sublinear »

wesammikhail wrote: post #461
sublinear wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so weird to see this take repeated over and over. I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web? The only part where I agree is that you don't need PHP or server-side rendering in general.

> I have to assume you have never written a large scale project for the web? Can I ask, what classifies as large scale project for the web? I previously created and exited a trading platform that did billions in transactions via our servers with thousands of users streaming real time data. It's certainly more complicated and "larger" than 99.9% of things you'll ever do. So does that qualify? If so, I can tell you tha…

Congrats to you, but yeah the other comments have already said it.

I'm talking about projects that have a lot of people working together across multiple teams where not everyone is even a dev. This is routine with e-commerce. The build will have assets from design teams, copywriters, analytics scripts, etc. and a CMS isn't always the correct or even scalable solution for that. The original commenter I was replying to seems to be stuck in the past. These days it can all be done with a simple CI script, but yeah ultimately that means build tools.

Above all else, like I said in another comment, there cannot be server-side rendering because it deploys to a CDN for hosting. These are projects that require huge amounts of content, but need to stay responsive. The final build result and upload is many files, but the initial load for the site is minimal JS and HTML to render for the user.

> billions in transactions via our servers with thousands of users streaming real time data. It's certainly more complicated and "larger" than 99.9% of things you'll ever do.

Large scale doesn't have to be complicated, but it does need some way to coordinate the effort which means there's a build and there will be requirements that are beyond any one person's control and expected for the modern web.

I want to also point out the obvious that there's insane money being made in e-commerce since it's now the default way to shop for everyone. It's a very common type of web project and if the typical HN web dev is getting paid a decent salary it's likely that the sites they maintain have several orders of magnitude more users than what you're talking about.

Re: Web development is fun again

#570

Post by alwillis »

naasking wrote: post #557
alwillis wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I keep struggling to figure out the point of view of the CSS designers. Before 2017, the web had no page layout ability. Think about it. Before the advent of Flexbox and CSS Grid, certain layouts were impossible to do. All we had were floats, absolute positioning, negative margin hacks, and using the table element for layout. > They don't think like graphic designers or like programmers. It's not easy for beginners…

Developers can learn a new programming language in a few weeks to months of just using it. If they can't learn to reliably and predictably use CSS in the same way, then I'd say that makes CSS flawed.

> If they can't learn to reliably and predictably use CSS in the same way, then I'd say that makes CSS flawed.

It's not the fault of CSS that most developers don't learn to use it correctly. That's like blaming the bicycle when learning to ride one.

Frankly, it's not a priority for most of them to learn CSS; they don't see it as a "real" programming language; therefore it's not worth their time.

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