Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why is modern web development so complicated?

vrk.dev

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

631–640 of 731 posts

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#631

Post by Xelbair »

testy3 wrote: post #372
thaumaturgy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fundamentally because our industry is built on opinions, not standards. You talk to one software engineer, and they'll say, "that's built in PHP, so it sucks; it should have been built with npm, obviously." Then you talk to another and they say, "I can't believe they built that with npm, the package management system is just terrible and the whole mess is bloated and there have been a ton of security issues.…

There are reasons why other industries are more mature, like: they've been waaaaaaaaay longer than CS/SE they do not change so robustly & fast in short peroids of time. >We can't even accurately estimate the cost of a complex project given our choice of tools Let's do not pretend as if that was limited to our industry.

>they do not change so robustly & fast in short peroids of time.

Not really, rapid prototyping - especially due to 3d printing - is a thing now - you can iterate on a model as fast as you can in CS/CE.

Also - a lot of engineering disciplines use simulations - civil engineering, avionics etc - so they too can iterate quickly.

We are absolutely horrible at estimating. I had article somewhere that analyzed plenty of CS/CE projects and found that we are good at estimating median, and if something goes wrong in most complex part - the time to delivery can skyrocket 100x.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#632

Post by [deleted] »

orf wrote: post #59
reaperducer wrote: post #38

It doesn't have to be complicated, if you get support from above. A few weeks ago I launched a new web site for a health care company. HTML, PHP, CSS, and MySQL. No frameworks. No javascript. No garbage. It replaced a site that was a mess of javascript libraries on top of frameworks on top of a half dozen jquery version and on and on and on. The company administrators, doctors, practitioners, etc... are so happy with…

Did you consider that the next developer might well come along and post a similar comment: > It replaced a site that was pretty much a home-grown PHP framework written by a single developer. Random mixed logic in templates, hard to update CSS and a poorly designed 'not-an-ORM' ORM. Not to say that your rewrite is like that, but one man's garbage is another man's treasure.

[deleted]

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#633

Post by Santosh83 »

goatinaboat wrote: post #545
Karawebnetwork wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex Well, that sure is an arrogant way to present stereotypes as fact. At first, I read this as satire. You can follow the history of web development and see exactly why the current stack is as it is. It's people building solutions to problems. For example, nobody thought "I should create a front-end build process to impress my peers!". What happened instead is that re…

You can follow the history of web development and see exactly why the current stack is as it is I have lived this history of web development. I remember when CGI was new and exciting. Now I see modern sites using literally thousands of times the memory and CPU to struggle to do things that were trivial even back in the 90s on a 486 with 8Mb RAM. A typical document, say a news story might be 2kb-5kb in size. Why does…

You're right about the document sizes exploding but I think the real reason is the suits swooped down when they found that mere hyperlinked documents could actually be monetized into profitability. The rest is history. 4.4Mb for those 5Mb per news article is javascript that exists for ads and tracking, which in turn exist for monetizing.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#634

Post by BlueTemplar »

robertoandred wrote: post #543
blhack wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is it more than anything. People wanted to make the web complicated because it made them feel cooler developing it. Some SPAs are cool. Easyeda.com is pretty cool. But also: storing information about a page in the URL is pretty cool too. It makes it possible to link to the page, for instance!

SPAs and useful URLs are in no way mutually exclusive. I think people who don’t understand the web talk it down to make themselves feel superior.

Well, I guess it's like Java : you can make a responsive Java GUI, but I only know a few examples...

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#635

Post by goatinaboat »

testy3 wrote: post #372
thaumaturgy wrote: post #333

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fundamentally because our industry is built on opinions, not standards. You talk to one software engineer, and they'll say, "that's built in PHP, so it sucks; it should have been built with npm, obviously." Then you talk to another and they say, "I can't believe they built that with npm, the package management system is just terrible and the whole mess is bloated and there have been a ton of security issues.…

There are reasons why other industries are more mature, like: they've been waaaaaaaaay longer than CS/SE they do not change so robustly & fast in short peroids of time. >We can't even accurately estimate the cost of a complex project given our choice of tools Let's do not pretend as if that was limited to our industry.

they've been waaaaaaaaay longer than CS/SE

Nah, this isn’t really true. Consider all the technology that came out of WW2: digital computers are contemporaneous with jet engines for example.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#636

Post by bpicolo »

mirimir wrote: post #494
bpicolo wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ironically, many actions are drastically easier to track on the server side. Frontend pageview tracking is trivially knocked out by ad block. Backend pageview tracking is impossible to block.

True. But lots of third-party tracking is harder, right?

Wouldn't say that. With something like Segment it's easy to shovel data from the backend to any analytics provider you can think of. The majority of analytics providers have a REST api of some sort.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#637

Post by buboard »

growlist wrote: post #627

To someone attempting to return to web dev after a break of a decade or so, my normal response is incredulity at the absolute horrorshow that's arisen. To me it's a complete towering, teetering mess of differing approaches, needlessly heavyweight frameworks, terrible decisions, and inefficiency. This is probably the ultimate cliched comment but I honestly cannot understand how any self-respecting developer can work w…

I know it sounds unbelievable, but plenty of web developers ignore that whole show. It just doesn't seem the "upgrade" is worth it until something better comes along.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#638

Post by FussyZeus »

Roboprog wrote: post #513
FussyZeus wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if all you're doing is showing and hiding a mobile menu, you can do that in a really expanded form in like 5 lines of vanilla JS, and not have your user download 90 KB* of crap. *And you BETTER be using the minified version for production.

90 KB is probably bad for a marketing page, but it’s nothing for a B2B or internal use app, particularly when the second use is just the “you already have it” HTTP header response. Good or bad depending on context.

I don't disagree, but when so many public websites are unloading megabytes of Javascript for simple tasks, it feels like that attitude is the core problem. I'm not opposed to using frameworks when they're needed, I just have a problem with people using them to shorten up already short and very easy code because they can't be bothered to Google for a few minutes.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#639

Post by mmczaplinski »

buboard wrote: post #630
noneckbeard wrote: post #624

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems demonstrably untrue. Basic html development is vastly cheaper than “modern JavaScript” which would give any company w an HTML-only strategy a huge advantage. Why aren’t HTML-only companies dominating in every market?

You mean like amazon or ebay or paypal or yahoo? Or like how facebook was so html that they wrote their own php interpreter?

you mean the same facebook which created react.js? If you think any of those companies is not betting heavily on JS, you're out of touch :)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#640

Post by BlueTemplar »

mort96 wrote: post #44
tschellenbach wrote: post #10

It's complicated because the bar in terms of user experience went up (or so they say) and now everyone wants a SPA. Because of this you now have a generation of devs that only knows how to build SPA. I'm actually thinking to move some stuff from Django to Gatsby/React setup just because everyone knows React, and a lot of our new devs don't know Django/Python.

"Everyone wants a SPA" is such bullshit. GitHub used to just load for a hundred milliseconds and then show me everything I needed; now it loads for a hundred milliseconds and shows me a spinner while it does another roundtrip for some javascript, then parses and executes that giant truckload of code, then does _another_ roundtrip to get the JSON or whatever describing the data I actually want to see, then executes it…

Have you considered just stop using these shitty "websites" ?
Post reply on HN