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I appreciate your position, I really do. It's not like I am clear-cut on this myself, even if my frustration makes it sounds like I am. I appreciate that the la
by janfoeh 10y ago
I appreciate your position, I really do. It's not like I am clear-cut on this myself, even if my frustration makes it sounds like I am. I appreciate that the language, the platform and the web itself needs to evolve.
But I object to the argument that people can just continue to do their thing, because people in that position are overwhelmingly dependent on the ecosystem. Guidance, libraries, tools. And that ecosystem has left them behind, or is at least very far along that road.
Of course reasonable people might disagree, but to me, that people might write unoptimized (or just plain horrible) code is a very, very small price to pay for the empowerment the web delivers to them. And as to "insecure" - Jane and Joe want to show a slideshow of their hand-baked Macarons, not write banking auth systems. If they manage to open up a security risk, the attack surface is usually rather small, and the fault lies with the platform.
No, I stand by this: Javascript was our generations Hypercard, on steroids, and we've almost completely squandered its potential.
- rsyntax 10y agojQuery still exists. IMO, the ecosystem has just moved towards rich-client front end applications. There was no good tool/framework for that and people started fulfilling that need. Of course you could write like you said "unoptimized (or just plain horrible) code" which in an actual application is huge price to pay. I think it all boils down to being able to use the right tool for the job. I wouldn't advise using React or Angular to show static content e.g an splash page.
- Andrex 10y agoIt's certainly an interesting conundrum, and I agree that eventually without ecosystem support Alice and Bob might find things a little tough. However, it's important to realize that the way the web is moving is to not only benefit the working professionals being paid to write it, but also the consumers who experience it. Why do we have minifiers and transpilers and modules and font icons? Why do we aim for one script tag instead of 50? Because for a consumer, the web sucked (and still sucks to an extent, but less so with AMP and offline APIs.) For "prosumers" like Alice and Bob, it was a buffet, but for people browing their web pages it sucked. It was slow and unresponsive and that's even before the rise of the mobile web. And whether the ecosystem leaves them behind or not, Alice and Bob can always create a new slideshow.js file on any given platform they want. The web is moving towards being better for professionals and consumers, and I agree that those in the middle might lose out a little, but they are very small peanuts. I'd rather optimize for the next billion users in Africa, India and beyond, most of whom are on sub-2G speeds, than for the script kiddies making an easy living pilfering jQuery widgets without learning the platform.
- douche 10y agoI miss the days of the plain-old html web. It might have been ugly, and there might have been marquees and blink tags, and under construction signs, and webrings and webmasters, but it loaded over my 56k modem, nobody was screwing with my back button, or messing up scrolling, or popping modals in my face, or pestering me with anti-anti-anti-ad-blocking nag modals and interstitials.
- barryhoodlum 10y agoI was just reading a blog post where a guy had written about Steve Reich and Brian Eno's experiments and his attempts at replicating them. It was posted on HN a few days ago: http://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music.html http://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music.... There are embedded YouTube videos, MP3s, and code samples to illustrate what he's writing about. He's implemented their ideas using the Web Audio API and you can run the code from within the page and listen to the music being generated in real-time. It's a real testament to how great the web can be. I think being able to do things like that is worth all the annoying parts of the modern web, in the end. For the developer and the end user. I wouldn't want to go back to the old way. I think it's easy to focus on the annoying parts and take the good parts for granted.
- flukus 10y ago> It's a real testament to how great the web can be Doing something in a browser that we could do 30 years ago on a desktop isn't that great a testament.
- barryhoodlum 10y agoBut you're clicking on a link, not downloading and installing an application.
- flukus 10y agoYou are downloading an application, arguably installing one temporarily too. Is this that much more efficient than "apt-get install foo"?