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Why is modern web development so complicated?

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Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#651

Post by BlueTemplar »

vcanales wrote: post #82

These "i hate debugging wandering pixels" and "i don't want to figure out why my css doesn't work" opinions sounds like they come from people who aren't really front end developers; like they come from the kind of dev who would sit and complain about the frontend devs on their company, thinking that they're a lower class of people. I've been working on the server- and client-side of the web for about 10 years now, an…

The right tool for the job... and a web browser is NOT the right tool to build applications, especially heavy ones. (I suspect it's mostly about a power move from Google to wrestle the control over general computing from Microsoft...)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#652

Post by reroute1 »

buboard wrote: post #642
mmczaplinski wrote: post #639

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ;)

maybe, but it's impossible without it

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#653

Post by Raphmedia »

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…

It seems to me that you are describing click-bait blogs and the work of junior trend-driven developers. I have worked with plenty of clients who actually needed SPAs. Custom CRMs and ERPs, etc.

The quality front-end developers are not the ones who make small blogs or small corner store websites. It's agency developers working on huge projects. Those projects have big budgets on optimisation and page speed.

Switch your gmail account to Basic HTML (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049) and see how the SPA version isn't any slower but in fact much more pleasant to use.

"The web" isn't an entity. It is a network of websites and applications. Some of them are slow and over-engineered and others are bloated excuses to display adverts. I can assure you that every single front-end developer I have worked with understood those issues and pushed for the right technologies.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#655

Post by Izkata »

pixelbash wrote: post #609
The_rationalist wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is far from obvious and is almost never convincingly exemplified.

Try two way binding on nested form elements with jQuery.

My philosophy in those days was that the DOM is the data store, with accessors that are only used during queries. Done this way, I'd never experienced the headaches people complain about.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#657

Post by dreamcompiler »

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…

In the early 2000s I worked for a company whose IT infrastructure was primarily Microsoft based. Maybe about 10% of the company had Macs, and we typically had to fight to get them. The Windows boxes required a huge amount of IT support per capita, while the Macs pretty much just worked and the Mac users didn't need much help. Not to mention that the Windows boxes were notoriously malware-prone and needed constant patches and the Macs didn't. I wondered for a long time why the company didn't just switch entirely to Macs. After all, most of the corporate apps were web-based and they worked fine on either platform. It took me a while to figure out exactly what you wrote above: The CIO didn't want a small, lean organization. He wanted a huge organization with a huge budget, because that's what looks good to C-level executives. Hence, Windows was the officially-sanctioned desktop solution.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#658

Post by kd0amg »

james-mcelwain wrote: post #461
thaumaturgy wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I’d argue that the multiplicity of different programming languages and programming language paradigms suggests there likely isn't a teleological trajectory towards some single standard for programming. Part of this is because many systems are evolving, because business needs have human inputs and are not always "logical." At the edges where this human interaction happens, we expand the domain of programming to that o…

I’d argue that the multiplicity of different programming languages and programming language paradigms suggests there likely isn't a teleological trajectory towards some single standard for programming.

We also have a multiplicity of building materials, tools, fabrication processes, etc. What's the standard way to make a steel object? Do you cast, forge, stamp, mill, sinter, roll, weld? I would expect engineering as a discipline to have more solid arguments for choosing which (combination) of those processes to use for a particular task than what is typically thrown around in discussions about choosing a programming language or paradigm.

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#659

Post by Izkata »

mort96 wrote: post #150
onion2k wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub works without JS just fine. Switch it off. In fact, I'm pretty sure Github is rendered server side for the first load. You shouldn't be seeing any spinners. I'd check if I wasn't on my phone.

Nope, the content is loaded dynamically from their API after the rest of the page has loaded: https://i.imgur.com/Kxs9l7j.mp4 Sure, the list of my repositories is server rendered, but I already know my list of repositories. The thing I'm waiting for 99% of the time when loading github.com is to see if there's any new activity. Sorry about the graphical glitches, blame nvidia or xorg or gnome or something.

Like 5-10 years ago, writing.com updated their content from loading static pages to be more dynamic.

What they actually did was continue loading the content statically, then hide it behind a 1 or 2 second loading spinner that wasn't actually loading anything.

Seems like users have just come to expect spinners...

(I don't know how the site currently works, haven't been there in a long time)

Re: Why is modern web development so complicated?

#660

Post by onorton »

tim333 wrote: post #641
Jach wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Keep in mind that those samples are tiny and C++ devs probably skew to more senior roles based on the age of the language alone.
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