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The self-hating web developer
61–70 of 214 posts
Re: The self-hating web developer
#62There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the existence of it. Choose wisely and re-evaluate that choice periodically to see whether your peer group continues to represent your goals and values. Why? Your peer group literally gets arbitrary code execution on your brain. (It's a flaw in MonkeyBrainOS 1.01 whi…
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Re: The self-hating web developer
#63The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous. I know several people who started programming only to get twisted and turned around by experienced developers saying, "Don't learn PHP" then "Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well." I talk to them a week later, and they're trying to build a simple web app in functional Haskell, and their environment is all messed up because they are using a zsh configuration the…
I think its a double-edged sword. On one hand, it does have the disastrous effects described in the article. On the other, those kind of comments from some FP programmers did turn my attention to FP languages. Turns out, there is this amazing group of people that are trying to build an entire ecosystem that stands on solid mathematical foundations. That was really exciting stuff for me. For years I've been watching o…
Haskell us perfectly fine to start with. It's just Haskell + zsh + git + archlinux + vim + cool-tech aren't things you should learn all at once. Heck, 12 years in, and I'm still lot fluent in all of those.
We can still tell people about cool stuff, just encourage them to take one step at a time, in their own time.
Re: The self-hating web developer
#64Like many here, I don't believe in the OP's premise that web development isn't real programming, but likewise, I really hate it too! When I have to do it, I much prefer getting involved with the backend-side of things; I loathe frontend development. My main reasons being: 1. The framework churn at this point is beyond ridiculous. In my last/current project, I just gave up and wrote everything by hand with a bit of jQ…
On 1) I choose Knockout.js a few years ago and I still use it for everything (they have proven backwards compatibility, they've been around a while, the core devs are friendly, it's "modern" (3.3 added components and such) and it plays well with others (jQuery particulary, you can wrap jquery plugins in 15-20 lines of code and lo-dash), it's also 'just' MVVM so it doesn't impose any structure you don't really need, checkout https://vimeo.com/97519516 for what people do with it.
2) Agree on every point, 80% of the stuff I do day to day could have been done with Delphi 5 by dragging two components onto a canvas and connecting a data source and then going for coffee, We have the ability to render 3D scenes in the browser but paginating through a datagrid is still none-standard.
Re: The self-hating web developer
#65Yeah, modern web development is actually really fucking hard mainly because you have to know so many different things. To build an application from scratch, and do it well, you have to have deep knowledge of, let's see... * At least one server side language * Probably a server side framework * HTML * CSS * Maybe a preprocessor language like SASS or CoffeeScript * SQL * HTTP * Probably a SCM like Git * At least one se…
DNS, Javascript, JSON, TLS and certificates, client side frameworks. I always find it amazing that people recommend web programming to beginners. The amount of stuff you have to learn all at once as a programming beginner is really overwhelming when you are just writing a simple local program, never mind adding all the complexity of networking and deployment and server config and the half dozen web techs. I think a l…
Setting up something like XAMPP is not as friction filled as setting up something like a *NIX development / production environment. In some cases you could get away with using shared hosting or spinning up a simple DigitalOcean LEMP box to some degree.
On another note:
I personally prefer to recommend Python due to a lot less friction, and semesters of helping students with learning C as their first language: "Don't forget the semicolon, don't forget the parenthesis, don't forget the curly brace." All things Python lacks, and with a good editor, their white spacing would be automatically formatted, and at least when they get to their next language they format their code a lot nicer. But that's just my experience helping out students.
A lot of wonderful languages are perfect for first time programming languages. One of our teachers uses Processing for his Intro to Programming course. It's so easy to just download and install Processing, compared to downloading and setting up Java (at least in Windows).
Re: The self-hating web developer
#66There are few things in life more important than choosing one's peer group well. The Internet gives you many more options than we had available prior to the existence of it. Choose wisely and re-evaluate that choice periodically to see whether your peer group continues to represent your goals and values. Why? Your peer group literally gets arbitrary code execution on your brain. (It's a flaw in MonkeyBrainOS 1.01 whi…
Opinions come from passion. You don't care for opinions because you are not passionate about programming. You just want to get a job done. To you, these opinions are noise. The obvious counterexample: Linus Torvalds.
Linus is very talented. He is also a raging singularity of abuse who gets tolerated for it because he is extremely talented. I worry a little bit about logic which suggests that anyone who is insufficiently Linuxian in dealing with other people is thereby assumed simply to care less about programming.
Re: The self-hating web developer
#67The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous. I know several people who started programming only to get twisted and turned around by experienced developers saying, "Don't learn PHP" then "Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well." I talk to them a week later, and they're trying to build a simple web app in functional Haskell, and their environment is all messed up because they are using a zsh configuration the…
>The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous. I agree with you... except when it comes to PHP. PHP is more toxic than language wars are. (I am aware of the irony in that statement.)
I love PHP. I really do. Everyone knows about its flaws in syntax, function names, argument order, and so on, but as someone who learned PHP and used only it for years certain paradigms and programming styles it uses really messed me (and I think others) up when switching languages:
- arrays are hashmaps/multi-dimensional aka one-size fits all (no need for more complicated data structures)
- everything is single-request and single-process (no lifetime management or persistent state, lower need to worry about memory leaks, no threads or processes, no real timers or async)
- copy on write
Re: The self-hating web developer
#68Yeah, modern web development is actually really fucking hard mainly because you have to know so many different things. To build an application from scratch, and do it well, you have to have deep knowledge of, let's see... * At least one server side language * Probably a server side framework * HTML * CSS * Maybe a preprocessor language like SASS or CoffeeScript * SQL * HTTP * Probably a SCM like Git * At least one se…
DNS, Javascript, JSON, TLS and certificates, client side frameworks. I always find it amazing that people recommend web programming to beginners. The amount of stuff you have to learn all at once as a programming beginner is really overwhelming when you are just writing a simple local program, never mind adding all the complexity of networking and deployment and server config and the half dozen web techs. I think a l…
This.
Now, the thing with web developers is that most of the Web developers I have worked with don't know anything of this in depth. They manage to get something done by copypasting together examples, tweaking code at random until it works for the single case they are trying manually, telling users to ignore certificate warnings, etc... and when the application finally crushes under its own impossibility, the consultants are called in.
The most beginner-friendly part about Web programming is in my opinion that you can get visible results quickly, especially if you can ignore the complexity of all the dependencies you are using.
Back when I was a kid, I could write "mode 2" in QBasic and immediately start drawing stuff on the screen. When more structure was needed, you could add it until you hit the limits of the language... which weren't very far. I don't know if there is anything as simple available today.
Edit: Reading other comments, Processing looks like a modern and much, much better language for the same use.
Re: The self-hating web developer
#69The "language hate" in programming is truly cancerous. I know several people who started programming only to get twisted and turned around by experienced developers saying, "Don't learn PHP" then "Rails is a joke and doesn't scale well." I talk to them a week later, and they're trying to build a simple web app in functional Haskell, and their environment is all messed up because they are using a zsh configuration the…
I agree with everything else you say, but please, for gods sake, do not put Php in the same basket as ruby or java. Just don't start with PHP. EDIT: I am being downvoted. But I will say this again. I do not care about what you use for programming in school. but, Do NOT, under any circumstances, start your programming career with P. H. P. Never. Never...ever.
PHP is perfect for newbies. It's flexible. Has lots of functions built in. Several mature frameworks available. It's in active development. Hugely popular so lots of people to ask. Easy to set up a dev environment. No need to learn server admin as almost all hosting services supports it. I could go on and on.
Re: The self-hating web developer
#70«Low level is easy» https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7538150