10 ms·

This post makes me sad. Javascript, CSS and HTML can all be used powerfully, performantly and in a managed way where anyone can come on board and contribute. Fa

This post makes me sad. Javascript, CSS and HTML can all be used powerfully, performantly and in a managed way where anyone can come on board and contribute. Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. To broadly paint this web stack that so many people poured countless hours into making, as 'impossible' to use is doing it a great disservice. But hey man, that's just like your opinion.

martin_drapeau 10y ago
I agree with you here. The front-end (JS, CSS, HTML) are there to stay and can be organized into clean and maintainable modules. Its not technically difficult but it is humanly hard: you need to put in place best practices, peer training and have lots of discipline. Lots of people are turning to React - probably because it gives you structure. Often a developer is thrown into a stack that was built crooked and gets discouraged. Instead, its your job to get in there and clean it up. It may take months but you'll you yourself and your team a big service!
pdonis 10y ago
> Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. And they throw huge amounts of resources at the web stack to do it. It might work for them, but I'm not sure that makes it powerful, performant, and manageable for those of us who aren't huge companies.
- wcarss 10y ago
  And even their code is still often bloated, maddening hacks on hacks.
- gbog 10y ago
  You probably do not have the complexity level of these companies either. To me js and css are kind of manageable, a bit the same way as python: use strongly enforced linters forbidding anything ambiguous, do not jump every other day in a new sexy bandwagon, and do not let one line of code commited in without an automated test running it on a ci machine. What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the github repos holding these tools are 3 months old.
  - sotojuan 10y ago
    Your last paragraph describes my experience with web development exactly. Ironically I'm 22, but I've worked with people or talked to people online who want to use the "latest and greatest" for what could've been a simple CRUD app.
  - tempodox 10y ago
    > You probably do not have the complexity level of these companies either. Have you looked at the microservices craze lately? You need a new one of these each time you scratch your head.
  - JDiculous 10y ago
    > What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the github repos holding these tools are 3 months old. This is because employers are demanding that candidates know the latest and greatest technologies (eg. looking for 5 years of experience in 1 year old technology). I'm an FE dev, and during my last round of interviewing 3-4 months ago I was asked about my thoughts on Redux, CSS Modules, Radium, Docker, GraphQL/Relay, ClojureScript/Om, etc. If I need to be experienced with this stuff to stay employable because just doing my job isn't enough, then I'm going to learn it.
    - douche 10y ago
      Or move to the back-end, where things move at a more survivable pace. Here's the dirty secret, too: for the most part, the work you do there is actually easier than front-end work, since you have better tooling and frameworks that don't shift under you like quicksand. And building a CRUD backend to a REST API might be a tad tedious, but it's a whole lot less fiddly than mucking about with CSS and trying to make web UIs pixel perfect in every mongrel browser under the sun.
      - 10y ago
pixie_ 10y ago
What's sad is the zillions of hours wasted by engineers on an inherently flawed stack. What's sad is how ridiculously complicated it is to create and manage relatively simple UIs. What's sad is an entire generations of programmers growing up and thinking this is normal. Programming is supposed to be about creating platforms for each other so we can continue solving higher (and higher) level problems. This web crap has us stuck fighting in the mud going nowhere.
- SZJX 10y ago
  What's the alternative? The division of platforms is a fact and how can you deal with it by only programming native apps? This is the best solution people have come up with. You talk as if it's all a hugr waste of time. I don't think so.
- TheMagicHorsey 10y ago
  Yes. Exactly what you said. It bothers me when people think solving broken Javascript problems is a valuable way to spend our civilizations scarce skilled manpower.
  - astrodust 10y ago
    Angry Birds and Candy Crush are clearly superior uses of time.
    - TeMPOraL 10y ago
      Well, they at least provide value to people without too much externalities which makes them much better than both fighting in the mud and all the adtech work that drives this mess.
- idlewords 10y ago
  The web lets you reach a large audience in a way nothing else can. You have to get over yourself about the tools not being elegant, and make sure the thing you're using the flawed tools for is worth the aggravation.
tikhonj 10y ago
People used COBOL to run large companies too. (Hell, they still do.) Doesn't mean it was particularly good for any definition of good. Even the big companies can't do pretty basic things on the web, like justify text beautifully. It's not hard to imagine another world with much better typography on the internet. Ditto for better languages and a better layout system. Most importantly, just because something has broad support and took a lot of effort does not put it beyond sharp criticism. That's no way to make progress and a perfect way to make entrenched worse-is-better technologies that managed to get popular even more entrenched.
fsloth 10y ago
anyone can come on board and contribute. The corollary to that is that the system uses components that target the lowest common denominator. I'm not sure "anyone can contribute" is a good foundation for any complex technical endeavour - if we are speaking specifically of implementation.
- vonmoltke 10y ago
  That is not a corollary. While I disagree with the person you are quoting as far as web frameworks are concerned, this is about organization and documentation, not "components that target the lowest common denominator".
Silhouette 10y ago
Javascript, CSS and HTML can all be used powerfully, performantly and in a managed way where anyone can come on board and contribute. I disagree. Compared with other languages and technologies used for similar purposes, none of JS, CSS or HTML is particularly powerful or efficient, nor do any of them provide particularly good tools for helping new developers get up to speed or co-ordinating large teams working on the same project. I initially wrote a huge set of specific examples to support these claims, but on reflection I'm not sure criticising JS/CSS/HTML in excruciating detail would really advance the discussion here. Suffice it to say that best-in-class programming languages, document preparation software like TeX or high-end DTP applications, and representations like PostScript and PDF, have all been doing everything JS/CSS/HTML can do and much more for a long time. Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. That's not the whole story, though, is it? For example, both Facebook and Google became successful primarily for the hard problems they've solved on the back end, particularly in terms of scalability. Facebook's main web site is nothing special in general UI terms, and their web-based tools for advertisers are awful. The search engine that took Google into the big leagues was famously extremely simple on the front-end, and while today they also have applications like Google Mail and Docs/Apps/whatever it is called this week in their portfolio, again the front-ends for those are still relatively simple in general UI terms and would probably be unremarkable in any other context. To broadly paint this web stack that so many people poured countless hours into making, as 'impossible' to use is doing it a great disservice. I don't see anyone saying it's impossible to use. However, it's probably fair to say that the state of the art in front-end web development is between one and two decades behind the general programming community, and that many relatively inexperienced people working in the web field are slowly but surely learning the same lessons (and repeating the same mistakes, and repeating them again) as the rest of the programming world did before. One of the biggest problems, IMHO, is that quite a few of those people now work for influential businesses like Google and Facebook, which means quite a few even less experienced developers assume they know what they're doing. And that's how you get framework fatigue, left-pad, "living standards", sites and apps written more than a year or two ago no longer working in modern browsers, and other such madness.
- vram22 10y ago
  Great summary of many valid issues.
prohor 10y ago
The first two paint points are perfectly solved by GWT[1]. But for some reason it isn't picked up by web community, even though you can still make really cool web apps with it. 1. http://www.gwtproject.org/ http://www.gwtproject.org/
- lazyjones 10y ago
  > But for some reason it isn't picked up by web community It's Java. Last time I checked, still a painfully verbose language and build environment, with the wizardry of JVM tuning on top. Perhaps, some day, this will turn into something more pleasant: https://sites.google.com/site/gowebuitoolkit/ https://sites.google.com/site/gowebuitoolkit/
- LoneWolf 10y ago
  Having used it for one or two projects I can say it solves some problems, but creates others, when trying to do more complex stuff it can be a pain (can't remember any specifics it was a few years ago).
- GlennS 10y ago
  If GWT doesn't count as hacks built upon hacks, then I don't know what does...
- diyfund 10y ago
  GWT has been continually approved upon. Compilation is super fast now, and developing is a breeze with super dev mode. You can even debug your Java (precompiled) code within chrome. as a GWT user, I don't have to worry about all those things that trouble Javascript developers. Refactoring is easy as it is just Java.
lazyjones 10y ago
> Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. It does require huge companies like these to work with the web stack painlessly and they're behind initiatives to make it even more cumbersome. You could say that they have an incentive to hamper competition by screwing up the web and they're doing it well.

martin_drapeau 10y ago

I agree with you here. The front-end (JS, CSS, HTML) are there to stay and can be organized into clean and maintainable modules. Its not technically difficult but it is humanly hard: you need to put in place best practices, peer training and have lots of discipline. Lots of people are turning to React - probably because it gives you structure. Often a developer is thrown into a stack that was built crooked and gets discouraged. Instead, its your job to get in there and clean it up. It may take months but you'll you yourself and your team a big service!

pdonis 10y ago

> Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. And they throw huge amounts of resources at the web stack to do it. It might work for them, but I'm not sure that makes it powerful, performant, and manageable for those of us who aren't huge companies.

wcarss 10y ago
And even their code is still often bloated, maddening hacks on hacks.
gbog 10y ago
You probably do not have the complexity level of these companies either. To me js and css are kind of manageable, a bit the same way as python: use strongly enforced linters forbidding anything ambiguous, do not jump every other day in a new sexy bandwagon, and do not let one line of code commited in without an automated test running it on a ci machine. What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the github repos holding these tools are 3 months old.
- sotojuan 10y ago
  Your last paragraph describes my experience with web development exactly. Ironically I'm 22, but I've worked with people or talked to people online who want to use the "latest and greatest" for what could've been a simple CRUD app.
- tempodox 10y ago
  > You probably do not have the complexity level of these companies either. Have you looked at the microservices craze lately? You need a new one of these each time you scratch your head.
- JDiculous 10y ago
  > What I found harder to manage is the young FE devs themselves: for them it seems every new project, or every new view in the same project, is the opportunity to use a completely different, new toolset. Oh, and some new syntaxic sugar candies supposed to "save" a couple of keystrokes (which is the worst reason you can find to use a new syntax requiring its own tools). I find this very dangerous, especially when the github repos holding these tools are 3 months old. This is because employers are demanding that candidates know the latest and greatest technologies (eg. looking for 5 years of experience in 1 year old technology). I'm an FE dev, and during my last round of interviewing 3-4 months ago I was asked about my thoughts on Redux, CSS Modules, Radium, Docker, GraphQL/Relay, ClojureScript/Om, etc. If I need to be experienced with this stuff to stay employable because just doing my job isn't enough, then I'm going to learn it.
  - douche 10y ago
    Or move to the back-end, where things move at a more survivable pace. Here's the dirty secret, too: for the most part, the work you do there is actually easier than front-end work, since you have better tooling and frameworks that don't shift under you like quicksand. And building a CRUD backend to a REST API might be a tad tedious, but it's a whole lot less fiddly than mucking about with CSS and trying to make web UIs pixel perfect in every mongrel browser under the sun.
    - 10y ago

pixie_ 10y ago

What's sad is the zillions of hours wasted by engineers on an inherently flawed stack. What's sad is how ridiculously complicated it is to create and manage relatively simple UIs. What's sad is an entire generations of programmers growing up and thinking this is normal. Programming is supposed to be about creating platforms for each other so we can continue solving higher (and higher) level problems. This web crap has us stuck fighting in the mud going nowhere.

SZJX 10y ago
What's the alternative? The division of platforms is a fact and how can you deal with it by only programming native apps? This is the best solution people have come up with. You talk as if it's all a hugr waste of time. I don't think so.
TheMagicHorsey 10y ago
Yes. Exactly what you said. It bothers me when people think solving broken Javascript problems is a valuable way to spend our civilizations scarce skilled manpower.
- astrodust 10y ago
  Angry Birds and Candy Crush are clearly superior uses of time.
  - TeMPOraL 10y ago
    Well, they at least provide value to people without too much externalities which makes them much better than both fighting in the mud and all the adtech work that drives this mess.
idlewords 10y ago
The web lets you reach a large audience in a way nothing else can. You have to get over yourself about the tools not being elegant, and make sure the thing you're using the flawed tools for is worth the aggravation.

tikhonj 10y ago

People used COBOL to run large companies too. (Hell, they still do.) Doesn't mean it was particularly good for any definition of good. Even the big companies can't do pretty basic things on the web, like justify text beautifully. It's not hard to imagine another world with much better typography on the internet. Ditto for better languages and a better layout system. Most importantly, just because something has broad support and took a lot of effort does not put it beyond sharp criticism. That's no way to make progress and a perfect way to make entrenched worse-is-better technologies that managed to get popular even more entrenched.

fsloth 10y ago

anyone can come on board and contribute. The corollary to that is that the system uses components that target the lowest common denominator. I'm not sure "anyone can contribute" is a good foundation for any complex technical endeavour - if we are speaking specifically of implementation.

vonmoltke 10y ago
That is not a corollary. While I disagree with the person you are quoting as far as web frameworks are concerned, this is about organization and documentation, not "components that target the lowest common denominator".

Silhouette 10y ago

Javascript, CSS and HTML can all be used powerfully, performantly and in a managed way where anyone can come on board and contribute. I disagree. Compared with other languages and technologies used for similar purposes, none of JS, CSS or HTML is particularly powerful or efficient, nor do any of them provide particularly good tools for helping new developers get up to speed or co-ordinating large teams working on the same project. I initially wrote a huge set of specific examples to support these claims, but on reflection I'm not sure criticising JS/CSS/HTML in excruciating detail would really advance the discussion here. Suffice it to say that best-in-class programming languages, document preparation software like TeX or high-end DTP applications, and representations like PostScript and PDF, have all been doing everything JS/CSS/HTML can do and much more for a long time. Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. That's not the whole story, though, is it? For example, both Facebook and Google became successful primarily for the hard problems they've solved on the back end, particularly in terms of scalability. Facebook's main web site is nothing special in general UI terms, and their web-based tools for advertisers are awful. The search engine that took Google into the big leagues was famously extremely simple on the front-end, and while today they also have applications like Google Mail and Docs/Apps/whatever it is called this week in their portfolio, again the front-ends for those are still relatively simple in general UI terms and would probably be unremarkable in any other context. To broadly paint this web stack that so many people poured countless hours into making, as 'impossible' to use is doing it a great disservice. I don't see anyone saying it's impossible to use. However, it's probably fair to say that the state of the art in front-end web development is between one and two decades behind the general programming community, and that many relatively inexperienced people working in the web field are slowly but surely learning the same lessons (and repeating the same mistakes, and repeating them again) as the rest of the programming world did before. One of the biggest problems, IMHO, is that quite a few of those people now work for influential businesses like Google and Facebook, which means quite a few even less experienced developers assume they know what they're doing. And that's how you get framework fatigue, left-pad, "living standards", sites and apps written more than a year or two ago no longer working in modern browsers, and other such madness.

vram22 10y ago
Great summary of many valid issues.

prohor 10y ago

The first two paint points are perfectly solved by GWT[1]. But for some reason it isn't picked up by web community, even though you can still make really cool web apps with it. 1. http://www.gwtproject.org/ http://www.gwtproject.org/

lazyjones 10y ago
> But for some reason it isn't picked up by web community It's Java. Last time I checked, still a painfully verbose language and build environment, with the wizardry of JVM tuning on top. Perhaps, some day, this will turn into something more pleasant: https://sites.google.com/site/gowebuitoolkit/ https://sites.google.com/site/gowebuitoolkit/
LoneWolf 10y ago
Having used it for one or two projects I can say it solves some problems, but creates others, when trying to do more complex stuff it can be a pain (can't remember any specifics it was a few years ago).
GlennS 10y ago
If GWT doesn't count as hacks built upon hacks, then I don't know what does...
diyfund 10y ago
GWT has been continually approved upon. Compilation is super fast now, and developing is a breeze with super dev mode. You can even debug your Java (precompiled) code within chrome. as a GWT user, I don't have to worry about all those things that trouble Javascript developers. Refactoring is easy as it is just Java.

lazyjones 10y ago

> Facebook, Google and Microsoft all use the web stack to run huge companies. It does require huge companies like these to work with the web stack painlessly and they're behind initiatives to make it even more cumbersome. You could say that they have an incentive to hamper competition by screwing up the web and they're doing it well.