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How am I not engaging with your point? In response to a comment pointing out how we need to re-think web application development, you said: "The web is the fir

by timr 11y ago

How am I not engaging with your point? In response to a comment pointing out how we need to re-think web application development, you said: "The web is the first truly cross-platform development environment." ...and then talked a bit about how it's open (yeah, ok, sure), and then you said it's not really a good application development environment (obviously). I'm saying, your entire premise is wrong: it isn't an application development environment, any more than a box of legos is a "housing development environment". People have built houses out of legos, but that doesn't make "lego" a building material. It's a big, messy, nasty hack. The fact that it's "open" is a non-sequitur response to "it's the wrong tool for the job", which is what the OP (and I, and elviejo) are arguing. It's also not a legitimate response to argue that any re-thinking of the model has to come from a company, or otherwise not be "open". The reason that web apps happened is because web apps started as a hack. That doesn't mean we can't change the paradigm, but to do that, we have to stop defending the current model. (Realistically, the reason I'm getting downvoted probably has more to do with my willingness to call out React as a pile of garbage than with the substance of the greater argument. C'est la vie...it's actually pretty amusing to watch the comment fluctuate between -3 and +3...)

TeMPOraL 11y ago
I'm in the middle of reading through The Unix-Haters Handbook and I must say that the arguments against web-as-application-platform (and the attempts to defend it) and are eerily similar to what this book reports about arguments against Unix that were circulated in the 80s and early 90s. Sadly, the fact Unix managed to a) win, and b) fuck up the computing world so badly that people don't even realize how much we've lost doesn't make me hopeful about the future of the web. Bad stuff seems to win because it's more evolutionarily adapted than well thought out stuff. This happens to hold for programming languages too.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- Dr_tldr 11y ago
  Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion. The recent cross-communication between JavaScript, Elm, and Clojure has been incredibly fruitful but hasn't been noticed by the bitter die-hards. And really, almost all of it could've happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp community hadn't been dismissive, arrogant douchebags that considered JavaScript a worthless toy language. What's truly sad is that some people would rather be abstractly right while producing nothing of value than work with the dominant paradigm and introduce useful concepts to it.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    > Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion. This did not happen thanks to Unix; if anything, you'd probably have to be grateful to Microsoft and Apple for introducing OSes that were end-user-usable. There's a reason the "year of Linux on Desktop" never happened and is always one year from now. The point of The Unix-Haters Handbook, which also applies very much to modern web is that the so-called "advancement" didn't really bring anything new. It reinvented old things - things we knew how to do right - but in a broken way, full of half-assed hacks that got fossilized because everything else depends on it. > And really, almost all of it could've happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp community hadn't been dismissive, arrogant douchebags that considered JavaScript a worthless toy language. I don't know where you're getting that from, but it's probably a good opportunity to remind you that JavaScript was supposed to be Scheme twice, both time it didn't happen because Netscape wanted a Java-looking solution right fucking now to compete first with Java, and then with Microsoft, and somehow no-one thought to pause for the moment and maybe do it right. (Also don't blame Lisp community for the fact that companies reinvented half of Lisp in XML. Rather ask yourself why most programmers think the history of programming is a linear progression of power from Assembler and C, and why they remain ignorant of anything that happened before ~1985.) JavaScript got a bad rep because a) it was terribly broken (less so now), and b) because of all the stupid stuff people were writing in it those 15 years ago. But the current problems of the Web are not really the fault of JavaScript, but of the community moving forward at the speed of typing, without stopping for a second and thinking if those layers on layers on layers of complexity are actually needed or useful. Simple landing pages are now built on frameworks that are more complex than what we used to call "Enterprise Edition" 10 years ago.
dasil003 11y ago
> That doesn't mean we can't change the paradigm, but to do that, we have to stop defending the current model. Here's the crux of our disagreement. You believe that the web is such a broken application platform that it is possible to convince enough vendors and people to get behind a better solution. However, I (despite your presumptuous implication that I'm a millenial), have been around long enough to know that will never happen. Web standards will continue iterating, and companies will continue building apps on the web, even the most powerful app platforms today such as iOS and Android for all their market power can not stop this force. The reason is because it's a platform that works. The man-millenia behind the web can not be reproduced and focused into a single organized effort. You might as well argue that we replace Linux with Plan 9, it doesn't matter how much passion you have and how sound your technical argument is, Linux, like the web, is entrenched. It's gone beyond the agency of individual humans and organizations to become an emergent effect. That's not to say that the web might not some be supplanted by something better, but it won't come because of angry engineers wringing their hands about how terrible the web is. It will come from something unexpected that solves a different problem, but in a much simpler and more elegant way, and over time it will be the thin edge of the wedge where it evolves and develops into a web killer. Maybe I'm just cynical and lack vision, perhaps you can go start a movement to prove me wrong. I'll happily eat my hat and rejoice at your accomplishments when that time comes.
- timr 11y ago
  "You believe that the web is such a broken application platform that it is possible to convince enough vendors and people to get behind a better solution. However, I...have been around long enough to know that will never happen." "That's not to say that the web might not some be supplanted by something better..." Whomever wrote the first paragraph of your comment should get in touch with the person who wrote the second paragraph. OK, seriously, though, let's summarize: 1) Person says "web development sucks, here's why: $REASONS" 2) You reply: "it's the only truly cross-platform development environment ever" 3) I (and others) reply: "no, it really isn't. it isn't even a development environment, by any reasonable measure." Now you're putting words in my mouth about convincing vendors and starting movements. I'm not trying to start a revolution here, just trying to counter the notion that we can't do any better than the pile of junk we've adopted. You don't have to love your captors! I have no idea if someone will come up with a revolutionary, grand unified solution tomorrow, but I know that this process starts with the acknowledgement that what we have sucks, and that we have lots of examples of better solutions to work from. Hell...just having a well-defined set of 1995-era UI components defined as a standard would be a quantum leap forward in terms of application development.
Dr_tldr 11y ago
If you know C++/Perl/PHP but don't know ES6, websockets, Node, etc, would you not say that your opinion about the web being a bad environment for rich applications might be in some way colored by your personal economic interests? A common defensive mechanism among people with outdated skills is to try to delegitimize new frameworks and technologies in the hopes of convincing the broader community not to use things they don't know. I'm inferring this from your arguments being driven by analogies and insinuations rather than concrete critique. It's not my intention to attack you personally, but an aggressively dismissive attitude towards unfamiliar concepts should be properly contextualized. As for React, isn't it more likely that you don't know React very well, have never looked at its internals, and in general don't feel like you have the time or ability to learn much about modern web development? If you build a few projects with React and still dislike it, good! Your critiques will be a lot more valid and useful at that point, whereas right now...yeah.
- sievebrain 11y ago
  I know C++, used to know Perl, and know JavaScript pretty well. The fact that you actually name WebSockets as a technology sort of sums up the issue we are discussing here. WebSockets is not something that can be compared to C++ or even Node. It's a dumb hack which justifies its existence primarily by allowing web apps to circumvent corporate firewall policies. The web is a joke of an app platform. Those of us who have wider experience of different kinds of programmings see some web devs struggling with this concept and conclude, I think quite reasonably, that the only plausible explanation is lack of experience. This is not due to "outdated skills" - I daresay everyone criticising the web as a platform in this thread has, in fact, written web apps. It's the opposite problem. It's to do with developers who haven't got the experience of older technologies having nothing to compare it too, so "web 2.2" gets compared to compared to "web 2.0" and it looks like progress. And in case you're tempted to dismiss me too, I recently tried to write an app using Polymer. It sucked. The entire experience was godawful from beginning to end. Luckily the app in question didn't have to be a web app, so I started over with a real widget toolkit and got results that were significantly better in half the time.
  - Dr_tldr 11y ago

by timr 11y ago

TeMPOraL 11y ago

I'm in the middle of reading through The Unix-Haters Handbook and I must say that the arguments against web-as-application-platform (and the attempts to defend it) and are eerily similar to what this book reports about arguments against Unix that were circulated in the 80s and early 90s. Sadly, the fact Unix managed to a) win, and b) fuck up the computing world so badly that people don't even realize how much we've lost doesn't make me hopeful about the future of the web. Bad stuff seems to win because it's more evolutionarily adapted than well thought out stuff. This happens to hold for programming languages too.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Dr_tldr 11y ago
Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion. The recent cross-communication between JavaScript, Elm, and Clojure has been incredibly fruitful but hasn't been noticed by the bitter die-hards. And really, almost all of it could've happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp community hadn't been dismissive, arrogant douchebags that considered JavaScript a worthless toy language. What's truly sad is that some people would rather be abstractly right while producing nothing of value than work with the dominant paradigm and introduce useful concepts to it.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Your takeaway of computers going from niche industry to the single largest driver of global economic activity is that the bad stuff won? What an incredibly myopic conclusion. This did not happen thanks to Unix; if anything, you'd probably have to be grateful to Microsoft and Apple for introducing OSes that were end-user-usable. There's a reason the "year of Linux on Desktop" never happened and is always one year from now. The point of The Unix-Haters Handbook, which also applies very much to modern web is that the so-called "advancement" didn't really bring anything new. It reinvented old things - things we knew how to do right - but in a broken way, full of half-assed hacks that got fossilized because everything else depends on it. > And really, almost all of it could've happened literally 15 years ago with Lisp if the Lisp community hadn't been dismissive, arrogant douchebags that considered JavaScript a worthless toy language. I don't know where you're getting that from, but it's probably a good opportunity to remind you that JavaScript was supposed to be Scheme twice, both time it didn't happen because Netscape wanted a Java-looking solution right fucking now to compete first with Java, and then with Microsoft, and somehow no-one thought to pause for the moment and maybe do it right. (Also don't blame Lisp community for the fact that companies reinvented half of Lisp in XML. Rather ask yourself why most programmers think the history of programming is a linear progression of power from Assembler and C, and why they remain ignorant of anything that happened before ~1985.) JavaScript got a bad rep because a) it was terribly broken (less so now), and b) because of all the stupid stuff people were writing in it those 15 years ago. But the current problems of the Web are not really the fault of JavaScript, but of the community moving forward at the speed of typing, without stopping for a second and thinking if those layers on layers on layers of complexity are actually needed or useful. Simple landing pages are now built on frameworks that are more complex than what we used to call "Enterprise Edition" 10 years ago.

dasil003 11y ago

> That doesn't mean we can't change the paradigm, but to do that, we have to stop defending the current model. Here's the crux of our disagreement. You believe that the web is such a broken application platform that it is possible to convince enough vendors and people to get behind a better solution. However, I (despite your presumptuous implication that I'm a millenial), have been around long enough to know that will never happen. Web standards will continue iterating, and companies will continue building apps on the web, even the most powerful app platforms today such as iOS and Android for all their market power can not stop this force. The reason is because it's a platform that works. The man-millenia behind the web can not be reproduced and focused into a single organized effort. You might as well argue that we replace Linux with Plan 9, it doesn't matter how much passion you have and how sound your technical argument is, Linux, like the web, is entrenched. It's gone beyond the agency of individual humans and organizations to become an emergent effect. That's not to say that the web might not some be supplanted by something better, but it won't come because of angry engineers wringing their hands about how terrible the web is. It will come from something unexpected that solves a different problem, but in a much simpler and more elegant way, and over time it will be the thin edge of the wedge where it evolves and develops into a web killer. Maybe I'm just cynical and lack vision, perhaps you can go start a movement to prove me wrong. I'll happily eat my hat and rejoice at your accomplishments when that time comes.

timr 11y ago
"You believe that the web is such a broken application platform that it is possible to convince enough vendors and people to get behind a better solution. However, I...have been around long enough to know that will never happen." "That's not to say that the web might not some be supplanted by something better..." Whomever wrote the first paragraph of your comment should get in touch with the person who wrote the second paragraph. OK, seriously, though, let's summarize: 1) Person says "web development sucks, here's why: $REASONS" 2) You reply: "it's the only truly cross-platform development environment ever" 3) I (and others) reply: "no, it really isn't. it isn't even a development environment, by any reasonable measure." Now you're putting words in my mouth about convincing vendors and starting movements. I'm not trying to start a revolution here, just trying to counter the notion that we can't do any better than the pile of junk we've adopted. You don't have to love your captors! I have no idea if someone will come up with a revolutionary, grand unified solution tomorrow, but I know that this process starts with the acknowledgement that what we have sucks, and that we have lots of examples of better solutions to work from. Hell...just having a well-defined set of 1995-era UI components defined as a standard would be a quantum leap forward in terms of application development.

Dr_tldr 11y ago

If you know C++/Perl/PHP but don't know ES6, websockets, Node, etc, would you not say that your opinion about the web being a bad environment for rich applications might be in some way colored by your personal economic interests? A common defensive mechanism among people with outdated skills is to try to delegitimize new frameworks and technologies in the hopes of convincing the broader community not to use things they don't know. I'm inferring this from your arguments being driven by analogies and insinuations rather than concrete critique. It's not my intention to attack you personally, but an aggressively dismissive attitude towards unfamiliar concepts should be properly contextualized. As for React, isn't it more likely that you don't know React very well, have never looked at its internals, and in general don't feel like you have the time or ability to learn much about modern web development? If you build a few projects with React and still dislike it, good! Your critiques will be a lot more valid and useful at that point, whereas right now...yeah.

sievebrain 11y ago
I know C++, used to know Perl, and know JavaScript pretty well. The fact that you actually name WebSockets as a technology sort of sums up the issue we are discussing here. WebSockets is not something that can be compared to C++ or even Node. It's a dumb hack which justifies its existence primarily by allowing web apps to circumvent corporate firewall policies. The web is a joke of an app platform. Those of us who have wider experience of different kinds of programmings see some web devs struggling with this concept and conclude, I think quite reasonably, that the only plausible explanation is lack of experience. This is not due to "outdated skills" - I daresay everyone criticising the web as a platform in this thread has, in fact, written web apps. It's the opposite problem. It's to do with developers who haven't got the experience of older technologies having nothing to compare it too, so "web 2.2" gets compared to compared to "web 2.0" and it looks like progress. And in case you're tempted to dismiss me too, I recently tried to write an app using Polymer. It sucked. The entire experience was godawful from beginning to end. Luckily the app in question didn't have to be a web app, so I started over with a real widget toolkit and got results that were significantly better in half the time.
- Dr_tldr 11y ago