5 ms·

I ended up on a frontend project recently and I am doing my best to get out of it. Its a nightmare. Imagine a scripting language that you have to compile into

by papaf 9y ago

I ended up on a frontend project recently and I am doing my best to get out of it. Its a nightmare. Imagine a scripting language that you have to compile into another scripting language. Lessons from decades of shared experience completely ignored, terrible IDE support, framework descriptions that are more snakeoil than technical documentation, the worst dependency hell there is with minor updates breaking APIs, and an unhealthy worship of Google and Facebook. No offence intended to Javascript programmers -- I just don't like frontend development.

woah 9y ago
That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. Have you tried writing, say, iOS interface code? It's a bloated monstrosity, although autocomplete is a tiny bit better. There's a reason that so many companies ship electron and react native based apps, even though they have worse performance. It sounds like you've gotten into a field that you always held a misplaced disdain for, you've discovered that it was harder than you thought, and now you are blaming your tools.
- EpicEng 9y ago
  "Hard" or just frustrating? I have found the latter to be true. You're not solving difficult technical problems; you're fighting your tools and figuring out the quirks of the hundreds of abstractions and third party libraries you rely upon to make widgets do their thing.
  - milesvp 9y ago
    Hard isn't the right word. Unnecessarily complex is more accurate. What I've seen in js mirrors a lot of what I saw in php 10 years ago. JS is now the easy language to get into, and so it has the most inexperienced devs with the least access to greybeards to at least show them what to avoid. The result is people who don't quite realize how insane the whole toolchain is. I've got a setup at work that makes make seem like a friendly dev requirement.
- im_down_w_otp 9y ago
  The reason is that they can hire from a massive pool of developers and target Mac, Windows, and Linux all with a single application and UX. I always found writing Cocoa-based code to be surprisingly elegant. The only thing that ever felt weird was having to switch back and forth between Project Builder and Interface Builder. In any case, there are a lot of things that are hard to build and also have great, coherent sets of tools to build them. Erlang comes to mind.
- papaf 9y ago
  I've written frontend apps in C++ with Qt. Please don't take my hate of frontend Javascript personally -- I really do hate it though. It sounds like that you have not much experience outside of Javascript and somehow think that what I see as a massive mess is somehow acceptable in 2017. It really isn't.
- ionised 9y ago
  > That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. I've written interfaces in Java, C# and Python applications and they were not at all difficult. The hardest part is the business logic behind the GUI, not the GUI itself.
merb 9y ago
I just looked into Angular4. the command (ng new new-app, yes it has its own cli). creates a tree with the following: 3098 directories, 21504 files everything it does is printing "app works!" well to be fair to angular4, the problem here is the cargo cult of js/ts and to get a full experience they just pack everything (which you might need) together.
swah 9y ago
After completing a tiny project in VueJS+Bulma where I was not 100% happy with what I'm delivering, I was playing with Google Cloud Platform "console", and oh boy, do they get their interactions right. Every little component to do a new configuration is compact, clear, cute, and intuitive. They seem to think about minimizing mouse movement all the time. I feel like starting my project from zero and copying a dozen solutions from Google. (But they would be painful to replicate, so no..)

by papaf 9y ago

woah 9y ago

That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. Have you tried writing, say, iOS interface code? It's a bloated monstrosity, although autocomplete is a tiny bit better. There's a reason that so many companies ship electron and react native based apps, even though they have worse performance. It sounds like you've gotten into a field that you always held a misplaced disdain for, you've discovered that it was harder than you thought, and now you are blaming your tools.

EpicEng 9y ago
"Hard" or just frustrating? I have found the latter to be true. You're not solving difficult technical problems; you're fighting your tools and figuring out the quirks of the hundreds of abstractions and third party libraries you rely upon to make widgets do their thing.
- milesvp 9y ago
  Hard isn't the right word. Unnecessarily complex is more accurate. What I've seen in js mirrors a lot of what I saw in php 10 years ago. JS is now the easy language to get into, and so it has the most inexperienced devs with the least access to greybeards to at least show them what to avoid. The result is people who don't quite realize how insane the whole toolchain is. I've got a setup at work that makes make seem like a friendly dev requirement.
im_down_w_otp 9y ago
The reason is that they can hire from a massive pool of developers and target Mac, Windows, and Linux all with a single application and UX. I always found writing Cocoa-based code to be surprisingly elegant. The only thing that ever felt weird was having to switch back and forth between Project Builder and Interface Builder. In any case, there are a lot of things that are hard to build and also have great, coherent sets of tools to build them. Erlang comes to mind.
papaf 9y ago
I've written frontend apps in C++ with Qt. Please don't take my hate of frontend Javascript personally -- I really do hate it though. It sounds like that you have not much experience outside of Javascript and somehow think that what I see as a massive mess is somehow acceptable in 2017. It really isn't.
ionised 9y ago
> That's a pretty silly opinion. The fact is that writing interface code is actually hard, and it tends to have many moving parts that are hard to fit into any abstraction. I've written interfaces in Java, C# and Python applications and they were not at all difficult. The hardest part is the business logic behind the GUI, not the GUI itself.

merb 9y ago

I just looked into Angular4. the command (ng new new-app, yes it has its own cli). creates a tree with the following: 3098 directories, 21504 files everything it does is printing "app works!" well to be fair to angular4, the problem here is the cargo cult of js/ts and to get a full experience they just pack everything (which you might need) together.

swah 9y ago

After completing a tiny project in VueJS+Bulma where I was not 100% happy with what I'm delivering, I was playing with Google Cloud Platform "console", and oh boy, do they get their interactions right. Every little component to do a new configuration is compact, clear, cute, and intuitive. They seem to think about minimizing mouse movement all the time. I feel like starting my project from zero and copying a dozen solutions from Google. (But they would be painful to replicate, so no..)