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Are you really saying that the internet and web applications (and all their various components) are artificially complex? Or is it just whatever reification of

by jmagoon 11y ago

Are you really saying that the internet and web applications (and all their various components) are artificially complex? Or is it just whatever reification of "web dev" that you have in mind?

sklogic 11y ago
Yes, I'm really saying that a majority of this web crap is artificially overcomplicated for no reason at all, and it is mostly a product of stupidity rather than any sane design. And stupidity got this funny property - it attracts even more stupidity, they stick together, they grow like a snowball, consuming everything around. Ill designed web standards, exceptionally, incomprehensibly shitty language (javascript) - of course it should have created tiers upon tiers of ill designed frameworks, ladders of leaky abstractions and a broken culture of tolerance towards all this shit. The only sane way to deal with this kind of crap is to shield from it entirely, introduce a simple and clean design which should interact with a broken system, without allowing any of the underlying abstractions to leak to your level. It always works, with all kinds of broken APIs, and I cannot see why web should be any different. Btw., it's amusing that web devs got so offended by quite an obvious fact that their work is nowhere near in complexity with the hardcore realtime stuff.
- jmagoon 11y ago
  It's hard to argue your "fact", especially against such an insufferable amount of smugness and causal reductionism. I find it not amusing that people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial. It's the same type of intellectual closemindedness that leads to major problems in human existence. It's a mindset that deliberately ignores complexity in order to justify preexisting belief and prop up belief as truth while protecting the ego. Personally, I enjoy working on hardware and working on distrubted systems. I also like building things that look beautiful. But to each their own, I guess.
  - olalonde 11y ago
    There was an article on HN recently which I believe applies equally well to technical stacks: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-failing-the-stack-fallacy/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-fail...
    - jmagoon 11y ago
      Which sources nobel laureate Philip Anderson in the paper "More Is Different": "The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe...The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles." https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Different_Phil_Anderson.pdf https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Diff...
      - sklogic 11y ago
        Kolmogorov and Chaitin got a different view on this matter. This is actually what science is all about - finding an information in data, or, in other words, measuring the complexity. If you can reduce a complex set of data to a simple algorithm, then this algorithm is all the knowledge that is there, and the rest is just a noise. By definition. What Phil Anderson is talking about is a different kind of complexity, which is sort of irrelevant in this context. Yes, knowing the fundamental laws won't help you to explain, say, a protein folding, not without hundreds of years of a CPU time. But it does not matter. It does not make this science more "complex".
  - sklogic 11y ago
    > people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial I do not "assume" that web technologies are stupid. I know they're stupid and I can prove they're stupid. Where shall I start? Javascript? All of the W3C issued mess? All the damage left from the browser wars? This guy said it all much better than I can: http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tcltk-vs-web-we-should-abandon-web.html http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tcltk-vs... When you have something to compare with, something as simple and beautiful as Tk, all the complexity of the modern web looks like a steaming pile of stupidity.

by jmagoon 11y ago

Are you really saying that the internet and web applications (and all their various components) are artificially complex? Or is it just whatever reification of "web dev" that you have in mind?

sklogic 11y ago

Yes, I'm really saying that a majority of this web crap is artificially overcomplicated for no reason at all, and it is mostly a product of stupidity rather than any sane design. And stupidity got this funny property - it attracts even more stupidity, they stick together, they grow like a snowball, consuming everything around. Ill designed web standards, exceptionally, incomprehensibly shitty language (javascript) - of course it should have created tiers upon tiers of ill designed frameworks, ladders of leaky abstractions and a broken culture of tolerance towards all this shit. The only sane way to deal with this kind of crap is to shield from it entirely, introduce a simple and clean design which should interact with a broken system, without allowing any of the underlying abstractions to leak to your level. It always works, with all kinds of broken APIs, and I cannot see why web should be any different. Btw., it's amusing that web devs got so offended by quite an obvious fact that their work is nowhere near in complexity with the hardcore realtime stuff.

jmagoon 11y ago
It's hard to argue your "fact", especially against such an insufferable amount of smugness and causal reductionism. I find it not amusing that people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial. It's the same type of intellectual closemindedness that leads to major problems in human existence. It's a mindset that deliberately ignores complexity in order to justify preexisting belief and prop up belief as truth while protecting the ego. Personally, I enjoy working on hardware and working on distrubted systems. I also like building things that look beautiful. But to each their own, I guess.
- olalonde 11y ago
  There was an article on HN recently which I believe applies equally well to technical stacks: http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-failing-the-stack-fallacy/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/18/why-big-companies-keep-fail...
  - jmagoon 11y ago
    Which sources nobel laureate Philip Anderson in the paper "More Is Different": "The ability to reduce everything to simple fundamental laws does not imply the ability to start from those laws and reconstruct the universe...The behavior of large and complex aggregates of elementary particles, it turns out, is not to be understood in terms of a simple extrapolation of the properties of a few particles." https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Different_Phil_Anderson.pdf https://web2.ph.utexas.edu/~wktse/Welcome_files/More_Is_Diff...
    - sklogic 11y ago
      Kolmogorov and Chaitin got a different view on this matter. This is actually what science is all about - finding an information in data, or, in other words, measuring the complexity. If you can reduce a complex set of data to a simple algorithm, then this algorithm is all the knowledge that is there, and the rest is just a noise. By definition. What Phil Anderson is talking about is a different kind of complexity, which is sort of irrelevant in this context. Yes, knowing the fundamental laws won't help you to explain, say, a protein folding, not without hundreds of years of a CPU time. But it does not matter. It does not make this science more "complex".
- sklogic 11y ago
  > people can assume things they don't participate in are simple, stupid, and trivial I do not "assume" that web technologies are stupid. I know they're stupid and I can prove they're stupid. Where shall I start? Javascript? All of the W3C issued mess? All the damage left from the browser wars? This guy said it all much better than I can: http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tcltk-vs-web-we-should-abandon-web.html http://beauty-of-imagination.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/tcltk-vs... When you have something to compare with, something as simple and beautiful as Tk, all the complexity of the modern web looks like a steaming pile of stupidity.