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In web design, everything easy is hard again

frankchimero.com

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Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#61

Post by skrebbel »

innocentoldguy wrote: post #48
k__ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't find JS any worse than Java, PHP or Python. They all have really ugly parts at least in JS they don't slow you down.

I disagree. While Python, for instance, certainly has its quirks, it doesn't have multiple ways of declaring a function, each with their own scope and hoisting gotchas. In Python, self isn't ambiguous the way this is in JavaScript. Python's datatypes are straight forward, unlike JavaScript, where 1 + "1" produces a valid result. In Python, 9999999999999999 is precisely 9999999999999999, however in JavaScript this is…

Both ESLint and TypeScript solve all of that except the integer thing.

But I'd wager that the "no integers over 2^53" is seldomly a problem, and in most other languages there's a similar problem at 2^64. If you reasonably expect to get integers above 2^53, you probably want to think about how to deal with integers above 2^64 as well. So really it's the exact same thing except JavaScript's numbers are easier to complain about on the internet.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#62

Post by matthewmacleod »

pleasecalllater wrote: post #57
nawitus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Modern JavaScript is not a very badly designed programming language. It's a good, productive programming language. Most of the quirks can be disabled with a linter, and optionally a lot safety can be brought in with typing (using e.g. TypeScript). On the other hand, many developers don't know much about programming and JavaScript, and therefore tend to have unjustified criticism of the language. JavaScript was a perf…

Yea, modern JS... it's just a joke, no integers, still funny effects with []+[] and {}+{} and []+{} and {}+[]. Good luck with writing anything serious using such a crap.

Modern ECMAScript is still stupid, yes. Weak typing is 100% a bad idea, and no new language would take this approach. It has, however, obviously improved to the point where it's actually quite okay to use – a modern ES7 app exploiting features like class sugar, async/await, improved syntax etc. is perfectly serviceable, alongside a linter to prevent the stupid features from old versions biting you.

But a whole bunch of 'serious' applications have obviously been written using JS, and it's a totally stupid view to think otherwise. Frankly the people who are the most concerned with 'my language is better than yours' litigation are by far the least productive developers I've encountered.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#63

Post by cc81 »

randomsearch wrote: post #9

This is my experience of web development, every time I return to it. I’m really not an expert in web dev, but it _feels_ like web dev has been badly engineered. JavaScript is a very badly designed programming language (yes, even in its modern form), which I think has caused a lot of problems. Many JS developers don’t know much about programming language design, so they can’t see how bad it is, and they make matters w…

I would argue that web development have never been as easy as it is now and that a lot of people just does not take it seriously enough to bother to learn it properly. People think that just because that they did some jQuery development 10 years ago they should be able to use to the same skills now and discard all new developments.

Being able to use modern JavaScript and with linting/prettier will in practice make it pretty rare that you end up doing stupid things due to language limitations. And if you want types you have TypeScript that works very well in most work flows.

html/css is pretty ok to work with these days and libraries like React and that echo system makes it pretty easy to scale web development so that many people can be involved in the same code base.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#64

Post by baq »

nawitus wrote: post #54
randomsearch wrote: post #9

This is my experience of web development, every time I return to it. I’m really not an expert in web dev, but it _feels_ like web dev has been badly engineered. JavaScript is a very badly designed programming language (yes, even in its modern form), which I think has caused a lot of problems. Many JS developers don’t know much about programming language design, so they can’t see how bad it is, and they make matters w…

Modern JavaScript is not a very badly designed programming language. It's a good, productive programming language. Most of the quirks can be disabled with a linter, and optionally a lot safety can be brought in with typing (using e.g. TypeScript). On the other hand, many developers don't know much about programming and JavaScript, and therefore tend to have unjustified criticism of the language. JavaScript was a perf…

this is all wrong, sorry.

modern js is still js. the fact that linters are _required_ to keep code sane is proof enough. typescript is a different language, i'd wager it doesn't count, even though i agree it's a considerable improvement.

au contraire, many developers know exactly what programming in js looks like, especially compared to other languages. i used to think that c++ and boost compilation was crazy. now i look at glorified web pages with 200MB+ of dependencies and wonder how we got there.

i agree that js was a perfect choice for node.js, because it was the only choice for node.js - to use the same language that runs in the client. that doesn't make it a good - or even sane - choice in the greater perspective. python was and still is a good choice - twisted was used to create async services before ajax was a word. you can also take a guess from where the promise/deferred pattern took at least some of its inspiration.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#65

Post by BjoernKW »

laythea wrote: post #30
BjoernKW wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the often-heard premise that HTML is a somehow inferior tool for creating GUIs that we somehow ended up with despite better choices beings available. Yes, native GUI frameworks and widget toolkits like Swing, Qt, Cocoa and MFC have their place but it's precisely the nature and features of HTML (most notably: The link) that enabled most of the innovation we've seen on the web. If building web apps was…

HTML is inferior than a technology that is purpose built. It was not originally designed to handle the job it does today. It is possible to create a much better user experience with eg. C# using some network code to talk to the server than trying to shoe horn an application over HTML just because it hides the low level complexities of E.g C#/C++ communicating with a server. This is a classic case of HTML/web apps are…

HTML is not inferior it's different. In the late 90s some people said the same about Java and Java applets in particular. The UX of those however often was significantly worse than that of roughly equivalent (but at that time less dynamic) web applications.

Apart from the usual benefits like being able to easily link to and consume resources HTML affords you a great deal of flexibility. Desktop UIs for very good reasons both follow OS-specific style guides and if cross-platform capable also have to settle for the lowest common denominator.

As for your last point: Absolutely. Being accessible and easy to create perhaps is the single most important feature of HTML.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#66

Post by BigJono »

usernam wrote: post #35
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #6

I completely share the thoughts of the author of this article. However, I'm not sure if his proposed solution would work for most people. It's not that I want or like to use npm etc. - I'm forced to use them as it's the new default way of working with almost anything useful in today's web development work. An alternative would be to start from scratch - and then reinventing all these things again, making another full…

You're trying to conflate document design with UI design. By the writing of the author, he is clearly doing just fancy documents. He didn't even touch the problematic issues you normally face in web development. You can do pretty neat things with trivial html/css these days, where you needed quite a bit of JS just 5 years ago. Platform GUI toolkits are designed for controlling an interactive program from the start, a…

I guess it really comes down to the trade-off between customization and familiarity. IME in any given company there's plenty of people going to bat for the former, and hardly anyone that cares about the latter.

On the "sliding scale of giving a fuck" [0], there's usually plenty of graphics designers and managers whose job revolves around giving an '8' for customisation and branding, and most devs seem to consider usability at about a '5' relative to their other work, so they don't offer up a lot of resistance.

[0] http://blog.capwatkins.com/the-sliding-scale-of-giving-a-fuc...

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#67

Post by aaron-lebo »

nawitus wrote: post #54
randomsearch wrote: post #9

This is my experience of web development, every time I return to it. I’m really not an expert in web dev, but it _feels_ like web dev has been badly engineered. JavaScript is a very badly designed programming language (yes, even in its modern form), which I think has caused a lot of problems. Many JS developers don’t know much about programming language design, so they can’t see how bad it is, and they make matters w…

Modern JavaScript is not a very badly designed programming language. It's a good, productive programming language. Most of the quirks can be disabled with a linter, and optionally a lot safety can be brought in with typing (using e.g. TypeScript). On the other hand, many developers don't know much about programming and JavaScript, and therefore tend to have unjustified criticism of the language. JavaScript was a perf…

It's getting frustrating how much these discussions get dominated by people who self-admittedly haven't used a technology very much and then rant about it. Besides what you brought up, the package manager thing doesn't even make sense.

I'd suggest that inexperience/ignorance isn't a great place to analyze anything from. Some of the "major" issues that dominate these discussions are not problems in practice.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#68

Post by skrebbel »

sureaboutthis wrote: post #51

I have found lately that many web things today are based on fads and they have found their way into the standards. In the past, standards were developed through engineering and computer science. Today it's based on fireworks, explosions and emojis. Speed trumps quality. Do not want to think is the motto or slogan. If there is a framework or library I can use then, great, I don't have to know how it works so I won't b…

I wonder which recent new web standards you think are fads. Push notifications? Offline web apps? Multithreading? async/await?

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#69

Post by TeMPOraL »

BjoernKW wrote: post #56
dvfjsdhgfv wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, web applications today are so much more than their desktop equivalents from the 80s and 90s both in terms of what's possible with them and as to how accessible they are to developers. Could you elaborate on that? From the point of view of the user, an app from the 90s works much faster than Google Docs. From developer's point of view, using a visual widget in an app was as simple as dropping it on a form,…

Yes, the 90s app is faster but can it consume and provide data over a network? Does it afford collaborative editing? Sharing data with others? You can now even use Google Sheets for creating web applications much like Excel has been used for creating desktop applications. Lazarus and Delphi in general certainly are great tools but they're also limited in terms of what types of user interfaces you can create with them…

> Yes, the 90s app is faster but can it consume and provide data over a network?

Yes, AFAIK, though I haven't used the features much.

> Does it afford collaborative editing?

That's a new one, but probably less difficult to bolt on top of a desktop app than to make a desktop app in a browser.

> Sharing data with others?

Yes! Current model is actually a huge regression here. On the desktop, you have a file system. You can share files. In the cloud, each application defines its own half-assed abstraction over data storage, and you're limited to what the service allows you and/or the company was bothered to implement.

The problem with the web application is, unfortunately, a mix of multiple big issues. Browser becoming a worse-is-better incrementally evolved runtime for applications. A shitty technology (JS) used as the main language of said runtime. User-hostile business practices that became easy - and thus popular - to implement on the web. And the very popularity itself, which sucks out oxygen from more sane areas of computing and tries to port bad engineering everywhere.

Re: In web design, everything easy is hard again

#70

Post by BjoernKW »

usernam wrote: post #47
BjoernKW wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree with the often-heard premise that HTML is a somehow inferior tool for creating GUIs that we somehow ended up with despite better choices beings available. Yes, native GUI frameworks and widget toolkits like Swing, Qt, Cocoa and MFC have their place but it's precisely the nature and features of HTML (most notably: The link) that enabled most of the innovation we've seen on the web. If building web apps was…

I'm not sure I've seen any "user interface innovation" done with HTML. Pick a book on GUI interfaces of the 80ies (for example: Computers Graphics by Foley & al), and see that pretty much all UI paradigms themselves were pretty much explored back then. The concept of the "hypercard" was already there. HTML just improved on the presentation of it, often worsening everything else. Somehow web apps lowered the expectati…

I'd say that the web page itself is a pretty innovative concept. The concept might've existed before (Apple's HyperCard dates back to 1987 for example) but the web expanded on that by making use of resources distributed across the network.

There have been many smaller improvements, too. Google's Material Design for instance.

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