To Wash It All Away (2014) [pdf]

(2014)

Added. Thanks!

SIDE NOTE: curious -- it says 4 comments but I only see one at time of me writing this. Thanks.

Yeah I've heard the IKEA complaint in a number of places, but I always found the instructions very good. And I don't consider myself handy at all.

Then again I just tested my blog and it has no errors in the console in Chrome or Firefox (except for missing favicon which is not really an error):

https://www.oilshell.org/blog/

There is still a small, useful subset of the web that is very functional. And I've even grown to like CSS after writing 100 lines of it by hand. If you have 1000+ lines of CSS then you stop understanding it, and apparently the browser stops understanding it too.

Occasionally my wife likes to hear me explain my work, beyond just the outcome that I'm trying to accomplish. Whenever this has involved web UI work, the conversation has broken down into her lecturing me not to be so negative. This is not because I'm feeling any negative emotion at the time, but because virtually nothing in the modern web stack can be described in terms of a positive intention coming to fruition. Every time she asks "why?" the reason is some historical mistake, some failure that can never be undone. Even when it's an aspect of web technology I personally enjoy and admire, I can't explain why it exists without telling a horror story. I manage to frame other areas of computing, when I want to, as a story of progress, a heroic sequence of invention and improvement (with some mistakes and backtracking) leading to a better and better future. Web programming always comes off as a descent into hell. And it's a malevolent God's hell, where every mistake anyone has ever ever made, every injury anyone has ever done to another person, is revisited on you and everyone else every day for eternity.

I forget this, because I take all the history for granted and am excited and grateful that I can use create-react-app to summon a vast technological apparatus to mostly paper over the damage for a putatively-full-stack-but-really-back-end weeny like me. But when I have to explain it to somebody, yeesh. It's like explaining the Vietnam War (or, at this point, the war in Afghanistan) to a younger relative. You forget how awful it was until you have to put it into words, and then you feel depressed the rest of the day thinking about it and realizing that everything we could learn from it to prevent it happening again is something we already knew before we did it.