Why is modern web development so complicated? • Hacker News Board

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#641

Post by tim333 » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:36 PM UTC

Jach wrote: post #259

goatinaboat wrote: post #63

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

I might have agreed the inferiority complex existed in the early 2000s, but I don't see it anymore. Rather I think the negative thoughts go the other way, maybe not inferiority from non-webdevs, but jealousy. You can find n00bs who graduated a coding bootcamp and are now making a significantly larger amount of money doing webdev stuff than a bunch of middle aged guys working on legacy native applications who studied…

I think C++ guys make more on average. eg https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/salary-checker/average-front-end-we... vs https://www.cwjobs.co.uk/salary-checker/average-c++-develope... (UK data, 37k vs 57k but I think it's similar elsewhere)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#642

Post by buboard » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:46 PM UTC

mmczaplinski wrote: post #639

buboard wrote: post #630

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

maybe, but i dont think they grew because of JS. they grew despite it maybe ;)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#643

Post by icxa » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 1:52 PM UTC

sgift wrote: post #536

icxa wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a more eloquent way is to say fundamentally creating long lasting software structures is more of an art rather than a science, and you can't just tell someone "go practice these 5 things and you'll be the next Picasso" you just have to do it a lot of times, over and over, learning from your mistakes. There are no shortcuts. You have to build a ton of software, and make a lot of mistakes, and most importantly,…

The important thing is: Picasso knew what to study. Over time art had established a canon of things which helped people to get better at classical arts. Only after he studied that canon in depth and for a long time he could then break into new territories and start breaking rules intentionally to develop his own style/school. Our craft is very bad at providing such a canon. It is even anti-intellectual in parts ("wha…

We absolutely have a canon. You show me someone who has studied Dikjstra, Turing, Hoare, who has taken the time to pour over the Art of Computer Programming and Structures and Interpretations of Computer Programs, and poured over Ivan Sutherland, is familiar with the early days of IBM, Fairchild, Xerox PARC, and hundreds of other classics we consider to be "canon" that I am surely missing (just shooting from the hip here), and you'' be showing me, more likely than not, a damn good programmer. We have a canon, we just don't have the same studios, detail-oriented attention spans we once had, and the technology we have built is partly to blame.

Maybe related, you were once considered an ignorant brut in this country and others if you haven't read a library of literary classics, now we have kids growing up who barely know Shakespeare, or the rich body of the writing of the abolitionists or slave narratives (how many people you think in this country that even know 1/100th of what Henry Louis Gates Jr knows?) Do you think W.E.B Du Bois and Booker T Washington are common names anymore? I remember when everyone had the preamble of the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address burned into their minds, now we can't be expected to remember questions for a simple AWS Certification Exam, it's pathetic.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#644

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:03 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #265

The answer to "why is ___ so ___?", is very nearly always best when phrased as the question, "what was supposed to stop __ from __?" The answer is nearly always...nothing. There was nothing, technologically or organizationally, preventing web development from becoming so complicated, such that websites whose desired functionality would be satisfied by static html are now several meg of thousands of lines of javascrip…

[deleted]

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#645

Post by tcgv » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:08 PM UTC

silexia wrote: post #365

rossdavidh wrote: post #265

The answer to "why is ___ so ___?", is very nearly always best when phrased as the question, "what was supposed to stop __ from __?" The answer is nearly always...nothing. There was nothing, technologically or organizationally, preventing web development from becoming so complicated, such that websites whose desired functionality would be satisfied by static html are now several meg of thousands of lines of javascrip…

I love your comment, but I think it does miss out on some important concepts. I used to think when I first started my company that I could just do every part of it far better than anyone else. I would push on my employees pretty hard and often denigrate their efforts. As the company is continued to grow, I now have 180 full-time employees. The reason I have all these people is that they can do enormously more work th…

> view ourselves in the best possible light, and to view other people as not as good

Remembered me of this cognitive bias: "Overestimating Our Own Importance" [1]

[1] "Psychology of Intelligence Analysis", Chapter 11. Available at:

- https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#646

Post by Stoids » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:11 PM UTC

buboard wrote: post #629

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #544

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think SPAss are much like special effects in movies: You only notice them when you bad. I build SPAs as part of my job. Good SPAs do not break the back button. Insisting they do is silly.

Can i middle-click open in new tab in your app?

Yes, almost any routing library will expose a Link component wrapper that properly sets those attributes.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#647

Post by Stoids » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:13 PM UTC

renke1 wrote: post #100

goatinaboat wrote: post #63

Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex, that they are not considered “real” developers by the rest of the community. So they have responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys, who simply don’t care, until they try to use the dumpster fire that is any modern website, that is. Then it has the opposite of the intended effect! Someone else men…

Who is considered a "real" developer these days?

Jonathan Blow and no one else clearly.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#648

Post by buboard » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:14 PM UTC

majewsky wrote: post #373

rossdavidh wrote: post #265

The answer to "why is ___ so ___?", is very nearly always best when phrased as the question, "what was supposed to stop __ from __?" The answer is nearly always...nothing. There was nothing, technologically or organizationally, preventing web development from becoming so complicated, such that websites whose desired functionality would be satisfied by static html are now several meg of thousands of lines of javascrip…

I would add one word to this: > There was nothing anymore preventing web development from becoming so complicated The early web was much simpler because of the resource constraints of the 90s and early 2000s. Pages only started serving 10 MB of JS when browsers got to the point where they could chew through 10 MB of JS at a barely acceptable pace. Also: > Managers don't really feel like pointing out "the project I'm…

So , is it a result of the VC funded bubble? If that's the case it will not outlast the next bubble burst maybe.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#649

Post by tikiman163 » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:17 PM UTC

rossdavidh wrote: post #265

The answer to "why is ___ so ___?", is very nearly always best when phrased as the question, "what was supposed to stop __ from __?" The answer is nearly always...nothing. There was nothing, technologically or organizationally, preventing web development from becoming so complicated, such that websites whose desired functionality would be satisfied by static html are now several meg of thousands of lines of javascrip…

I'm not sure if I fully agree with your point about developers or managers not wanting to suggest they aren't needed. You're argument relies on the idea that most business needs could be sufficiently met by static html doesn't really fit how businesses works. If a business in an industry has additional functionality on their page that gives them an edge beyond just text on a page, then it is needed. Additionally, when extra functionality is needed the whole industry is going to compete on that. Most businesses don't have enough extra funds to support unnecessary or non-competitive functionality development, so while there might be something better they could be doing with their money, it's almost never the case that what's being developed is so over complicated or over architected that it would be a better financial move to build a static page or site than what they're doing because losing that competitive edge often results in the company, division or product line failing to get enough sales to continue.

You do make something of a good point about nothing preventing web development becoming over complicated, except you seem to have forgotten how much that costs. Unless there is a perceived marketable difference, people will rarely push for it to be developed at all, and given the size of the average development team's backlog that pressure to develop also has to outweigh everything in the backlog as well.

The honest truth is that web development has become so complicated because that's the equilibrium point of the supply of labor to the demand for advanced features. Developing the same features from scratch using static web development methods takes exponentially longer as a function of feature complexity, and the ability to use frameworks and other more complicated tools reduces that down to being merely linear.

Web development isn't complicated because nothing is stopping it from being complicated, it's complicated because consumers want features that they assume should be simple, but are in fact very complicated.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#650

Post by pingyong » Thu, Aug 08, 2019, 2:21 PM UTC

thaumaturgy wrote: post #429

nostrademons wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "sure, that material might not be the most durable on the market, but unobtainium would have added $35 million to the project cost and ongoing maintenance costs would have gone up by another $5 million / year." > That right there is a comparison that developers can never, ever offer anyone that's writing the checks for a project. Sure they can. At Google there was an internal cheat sheet of "numbers every engineer…

It's awesome that Google did that. This is the first I've heard of it. But: > The thing is that the overhead for this process really only makes sense at Google scale. The software industry is far larger than Google. If we want to claim that software is a discipline of engineering, we all need to have access to that kind of reference data, rather than trying to feel our way around in the dark in comment threads about…

>The fetishization of developer time is one of the problems slowing the maturation of our industry. It ignores end-user time, it ignores management time; it often focuses solely on the initial development time of a project and ignores entirely the ongoing maintenance time for a project.

The problem is that in many projects, especially small web-dev or simple automation projects, you simply don't know if they're going to be profitable. The margins are huge, since the upfront development cost is almost constant, you might lose $50,000, or you might make $500,000, or anything in-between, but you just don't really know beforehand. So obviously in this situation you want to become at least somewhat profitable as fast as possible, and then think about "doing things right" later. Is this horrible practice? Sure. But it's also the most logical thing to do here, because "doing things right" at the start is simply a huge risk that only pays off if you're successful anyway. And people would rather minimize losses than maximize gains.

On the other hand more traditional engineering tasks tend to require big up-front investments anyway, and "failing is not an option". I mean it really kind of isn't, if you need more money and/or more time you'll get that much more often here because the initial investment was so big already. So doing things right from the start makes complete sense.