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I Don't Like Magic

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Re: I Don't Like Magic

#81

Post by antonvs »

pessimizer wrote: post #10
noelwelsh wrote: post #7

If you have this attitude I hope you write everything in assembly. Except assembly is compiled into micro-ops, so hopefully you avoid that by using an 8080 (according to a quick search, the last Intel CPU to not have micro-ops.) In other words, why is one particular abstraction (e.g. Javscript, or the web browser) ok, but another abstraction (e.g. React) not? This attitude doesn't make sense to me.

Are you seriously saying that you can't understand the concept of different abstractions having different levels of usefulness? That's the law of averages taken to cosmic proportions. If this is true, why have more than one abstraction?

Are you seriously saying you can’t understand the parallel being drawn here?

If you “don’t like magic”, you can’t use a compiler.

Re: I Don't Like Magic

#82

Post by vladms »

jv22222 wrote: post #72
vladms wrote: post #11

The advantage of frameworks is to have a "common language" to achieve some goals together with a team. A good framework hides some of the stupid mistakes you would do when you would try to develop that "language" from scratch. When you do a project from scratch, if you work enough on it, you end up wishing you would have started differently and you refactor pieces of it. While using a framework I sometimes have momen…

I used Claude to document, in great detail, a 500k-line codebase in about an hour of well-directed prompts. Just fully explained it, how it all worked, how to get started working on it locally, the nuance of the old code, pathways, deployments using salt-stack to AWS, etc. I don't think the moat of "future developers won't understand the codebase" exists anymore. This works well for devs who write their codebase usin…

To make a parallel to actual human language: you can understand well a foreign language and not be able to speak it at the same level.

I found myself in that situation with both foreign languages and with programming languages / frameworks - understanding is much easier than creating something good. You can of course revert to a poorer vocabulary / simpler constructions (in both cases), but an "expert" speaker/writer will get a better result. For many cases the delta can be ignored, for some cases it matters.

Re: I Don't Like Magic

#83

Post by antonvs »

lo_zamoyski wrote: post #69

This reads like a transcript of a therapy session. He never gives any real reasons. It's mostly a collection of assertions. This guy must never have worked on anything substantial. He also must underestimate the difficulty of writing software as well as his reliance on the work of others. > I don’t like using code that I haven’t written and understood myself. Why stop with code? Why not refine beach sand to grow your…

It all essentially amounts to saying, “I don’t have the personality to competently use technology.”

Re: I Don't Like Magic

#84

Post by dang »

kosmotaur wrote: post #76

> I get that. But I still draw a line. When it comes to front-end development, that line is for me to stay as close as I can to raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. After all, that’s what users are going to get in their browsers. No it’s not. They will get shown a collection of pixels, a bunch of which will occupy coordinates (in terms of an abstraction that holds the following promise) such that if the mouse cursor (which…

Please make your substantive points without calling names, shallow dismissals, or swipes.

This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

Re: I Don't Like Magic

#85

Post by [deleted] »

kosmotaur wrote: post #76

> I get that. But I still draw a line. When it comes to front-end development, that line is for me to stay as close as I can to raw HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. After all, that’s what users are going to get in their browsers. No it’s not. They will get shown a collection of pixels, a bunch of which will occupy coordinates (in terms of an abstraction that holds the following promise) such that if the mouse cursor (which…

[deleted]

Re: I Don't Like Magic

#87

Post by goatlover »

vladms wrote: post #11

The advantage of frameworks is to have a "common language" to achieve some goals together with a team. A good framework hides some of the stupid mistakes you would do when you would try to develop that "language" from scratch. When you do a project from scratch, if you work enough on it, you end up wishing you would have started differently and you refactor pieces of it. While using a framework I sometimes have momen…

It's funny how Lisp has been criticized for its ability to create a lot of macros and DSLs, then Java & JavaScript came along and there was an explosion of frameworks and transpiled languages in JVM, Node or the Browser.

Re: I Don't Like Magic

#88

Post by blturner »

cbeach wrote: post #35

> I’ve always avoided client-side React because of its direct harm to end users (over-engineered bloated sites that take way longer to load than they need to). A couple of megabytes of JavaScript is not the "big bloated" application in 2026 that is was in 1990. Most of us have phones in our pockets capable of 500Mbps. The payload of an single page app is trivial compared to the bandwidth available to our devices. I'd…

Sure, amongst the wealthy. Suggest reading Alex Russell on this topic: https://infrequently.org/series/performance-inequality/

Re: I Don't Like Magic

#89

Post by skydhash »

antonvs wrote: post #81
pessimizer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously saying that you can't understand the concept of different abstractions having different levels of usefulness? That's the law of averages taken to cosmic proportions. If this is true, why have more than one abstraction?

Are you seriously saying you can’t understand the parallel being drawn here? If you “don’t like magic”, you can’t use a compiler.

Is a compiler magic? Did they came from an electronic heaven? There are plenty of books, papers, courses,... that explains how compiler works. When people are talking about "magic", it usually means choosing a complex solution over a simple one, but with an abstraction that is ill-fitted. Then they use words like user-friendly, easy to install with curl|bash, etc to lure us into using it.

Re: I Don't Like Magic

#90

Post by dnautics »

the advantage of frameworks is that there are about 20-ish security/critical usage considerations, of which you will remember about 5. if you don't use a framework, you are so much more likelihood of getting screwed. you should use a framework when theres just shit you dont think of that could bite you in the ass[0]. for everything else, use libraries.

[0] this includes for example int main(), which is a hook for a framework. c does a bunch of stuff in __start (e.g. in linux, i don't know what the entrypoint is in other languages) that you honestly don't want to do every. single. time./ for every single OS

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