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You Don't Need
- failrate 10y agoI have enjoyed spending hours removing libraries full of bootstrap and angular and replacing them with a simple CSS page and a JavaScript one-liner in my current work project.
- sotojuan 10y agoI wonder what the % of people in HN would be unemployed if more businesses relied on small, static or server rendered web apps instead of huge SPAs.
- rads 10y agoThat's a false dichotomy. Business apps become huge codebases due to lack of engineering discipline and cutting corners to make deadlines. It happens regardless of whether the code is written for the browser or the server because there is no environment that will substitute for the skill that is necessary to control complexity in businesses which are inherently unpredictable.
- sanderjd 10y agoI strongly believe that the big line of business app I worked on for a number of years would have employed fewer people if we had designed it as an SPA backed by APIs instead of a traditional Rails app. Path dependency is real, and by the time we realized that people wanted a lot more web application behavior than we originally thought, it was time consuming to make it happen. To be sure, lots of projects have the opposite problem, but SPAs aren't some make-work conspiracy, they have real use.
- zapt02 10y agoIsn't increased complexity as codebase grows a basic rule of all computer programs? And don't say microservices are exempt - you'll have the same complexity on the tooling side.
- sanderjd 10y agoYes, but my conclusion in this case is that the way we started building the application - traditional full-page-load Rails with custom javascript - resulted in more complexity than if we had started with a "single page app" using a framework like Backbone (which, in fairness, was very new at the time). I didn't actually say anything about microservices. I think that may have also been a win, but it is much less clear-cut. Backing the front-end with a single monolithic API server would have been an improvement over the hybrid page generation / API approach we ended up with. These are all just my own personal conclusions, and others who also worked on the project may not agree with me, but I'm just not convinced by the backlash against js-heavy web apps, because I believe I've felt the pain of going the opposite route in the wrong case.
- realityking 10y agoIn my experience the clean separation between UI and backend code that a SPA enforces is an enormous maintainability boost. Add to that, that you then have by necessity an API you can use for other systems to interact with yours (or just to build some quick one off scripts) and the advantages are even clearer.
- eterm 10y agoYou've enjoyed it, but those hours cost your business, and is that really worth it? Some beliefs which are frequently displayed in these parts: > Money on chairs / desks / PCs are no object because developers cost money, not those things > Ship quickly and iterate > Make it, make it work, make it fast > Write code your successor can maintain And then HN goes ahead and upvotes a boast about spending their (expensive) time unpicking libraries from code. The point of "you might not need X" is to encourage package maintainers to keep their sub-package footprint small, not that end-users shouldn't use X. I'm sure you'll be back to suggest that you've delivered "500% speed-up" or some other nonsense metric and I look forward to that. Ultimately, custom business owned code which attempts to deliver the value of angular is just a future maintenance nightmare, and I say that as someone who really doesn't like angular. If you really replaced angular with a "javascript one-liner" I'd like to see that line!
- zzguy 10y agoJust because you can't give a $ amount for the costs saved by reducing complexity, doesn't mean it doesn't have value. Simple is good.
- mixedCase 10y agoI'm going to take a guess and say he won big in maintainability and performance on low-end devices.
- failrate 10y agoIf it will operate with no js at all, then it is also more compatible with some security requirements I have. Don't get me wrong, I've always been a big fan of JavaScript, warts and all. However, in this particular instance, what should have been a simple server rendered login page was written with a full SPA application development mindset.
- failrate 10y agoIf it will operate with no js at all, then it is also more compatible with some security requirements I have. Don't get me wrong, I've always been a big fan of JavaScript, warts and all. However, in this particular instance, what should have been a simple server rendered login page was written with a full SPA application development mindset.
- mdadm 10y agoSome of these things are actually pretty cool IMO, like http://keithclark.co.uk/articles/pure-css-parallax-websites/demo3/ http://keithclark.co.uk/articles/pure-css-parallax-websites/... from https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-Javascript#Parallax https://github.com/you-dont-need/You-Dont-Need-Javascript#Pa...
- moeamaya 10y agoIn theory css parallax is brilliant and should replace all bloated js versions. In practice, it's unusable. We spent 40 hours as two experienced frontend engineers trying to get the example to work on a relatively simple example but it requires such a specific markup that it became too convoluted. Eventually I gave in and looked for a js solution but those were much larger and slower than we wanted. Ultimately, ended up writing a short 100-line open source vanilla js lib, and a bunch of folks seemed to be having our same issues: https://github.com/dixonandmoe/rellax https://github.com/dixonandmoe/rellax. That said I still love to explore the extents of css' capabilities but this is one time where it fell short.
- mladen5 10y agoExact same problem, actually tried making this example mentioned here to work on other browsers besides Chrome and failed to do so. Your rellax library looks really useful i just hope i won't have to build parallax websites anymore.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- yoz-y 10y agoHeh, the "you don't need GUI" one is extremely underwhelming. Anybody who knows what terminal is already knows about all those commands and none of them is easier than a GUI. It could make more impact if it actually explained tasks that are harder to do in GUI than in the command line, such as massive renaming of the files, filtering files depending on content and so on.
- flukus 10y agoOr it could just have a last item of "all of these commands are combinable, scriptable and repeatable".
- notgood 10y agoI have always dream of hybrid software, meaning GUIs which show in real time the CLI equivalent of each one of your actions on the GUI, so later on everything you did in the GUI is combinable/scriptable, etc
- flukus 10y agoDoesn't apple have something like that? Either way, I think log files of actions taken are much more debuggable than watching a computer control the gui.
- iainmerrick 10y agoYes, AppleScript did this way back in the pre-OS X days -- but only if you added Apple Events support to your app, which was extremely fiddly and tedious. Their current tool Automator is supposed to do this, but I don't know how widely it's supported. I suspect just like everything else, it has niche of users who love it and depend on it. It's not something your typical Mac user would think to reach for.
- omribahumi 10y agoIs macro recording (and editing) still a thing? I haven't used MS Office in a while...
- banhfun 10y agoSomeone should create one for jQuery and Bootstrap
- unforswearing 10y agohttps://github.com/oneuijs/You-Dont-Need-jQuery https://github.com/oneuijs/You-Dont-Need-jQuery
- mixedCase 10y agoThere's this: http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/ http://youmightnotneedjquery.com/
- dmd 10y agoOr, say, for us 95% of programmers who never use javascript at all, or program for the web for that matter.
- thegreatpeter 10y agoThis is great but as the author points out - outside of primitives you might as well use lodash. Also, compatibility for these noon lodash methods are chrome and Firefox.
- emilong 10y ago_.get() is the killer feature of lodash.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- voltagex_ 10y agoCan we have "You Don't Need Electron" too?
- flukus 10y agoCan we expand that to node and the entire ecosystem?
- xkcd-sucks 10y agoElectron.js: Run Electron apps in any browser. ~~No external dependencies~~ Builds a statically linked Chrome, so just `npm install` and you're good to go
- voltagex_ 10y agoThere's a lesson there - making software easier to build and install goes a long way. Go has that advantage too.
- PudgePacket 10y agoeye twitch
- joshmanders 10y agoHow about "You Don't Need To Be An Elitist Prick"
- flukus 10y agoIf nodes taught me anything it's that we need more elitism. Letting front end coders build stuff in the only language they know has proven to be a terrible idea.
- joshmanders 10y agoMmhmmm, whatever makes you feel better at the end of the day.
- partycoder 10y agoIn the case of lodash, those functions exist mostly to interoperate with other lodash functions, like chain.
- gog 10y agoIt would be nice if the examples would have a browser compatibility table. Without it is is just a waste of time. The first one I tried (CSS only accordion) takes you to a site where the author himself says that this is an experiment and was not meant for use in production (no IE support).
- pksadiq 10y agoI feel a strong need for You-Dont-Need-Windows
- lqdc13 10y agoTry verifying authenticode signatures in exes correctly without Windows.
- pksadiq 10y ago> Try verifying authenticode signatures in exes correctly without Windows. When You-Dont-Need-Windows, You don't need this either. Do you?
- tf2manu994 10y agoIf you want to compile to windows, you absolutely do.
- saghm 10y agoI think the argument/joke he's trying to make is that he'd be happier without anyone using Windows (which would conveniently solve the problem of having to compile to Windows)
- lqdc13 10y agoI get the joke and I've been aggressively trying to avoid it. But you can't, unless you only deal with phones or server backend. Coming from a Linux user, for most people, Windows is the only usable non-Apple-hardware OS, unfortunately.
- pksadiq 10y agoI was able to convince several people to move from windows to GNU/Linux. In some cases, it didn't took more than 2 minutes! Case 1: Religious/moral people: If you are using unauthorized (pirated?) copies of windows, isn't it like stealing? Think of the amount you are stealing just by installing M$-something, Adobe something, etc. How can you wish that your money/wealth shouldn't be stealed when you steals somebody else's money? Case 2: Business people: Have you ever contacted M$ for support? Then why would you pay them, just for something that runs viruses smoothly, and occasionally having blue screen of death? Case 3: Personal: I came to know that I was like a frog in a well when I was introduced to GNU/Linux. Thanks to Microsoft for wasting my 10 years of time. Now I know about windows, may be more than some windows admin would do, just because I don't use windows anymore! Serious GNU/Linux users may not have a solution known for an immediate problem. But they know how to find a solution or where to look for it.
- Snow_44 10y agoYou don't need javascript is really cool~
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- lacampbell 10y agoI am looking forward to "you don't need Git" :D
- flowless 10y agoYou don't need web apps would be nice as well :)
- Somasis 10y agoSome of these CSS ones have to be a joke. Using CSS based font creation? Seriously?