7 ms·

I feel like a lot of HN is stuck in 2010 and dislikes all of this new web tech because they don’t understand it. This comment is a prime example.

megaman22 9y ago
Possibly a lot of HN has been around the block for a couple of decades at this point, and has seen this web dev stuff come full circle several times, and before that, the same ideas in desktop software. Computer science programs really need to introduce something like a "History of Computing Ideas" course as a mandatory element. Maybe we can get away from rehashing the same cycle of trends every five years and move onto some different wheels.
- goatlover 9y ago
  Are they going to also teach that at bootcamps?
- Danihan 9y ago
  I'm still waiting for my web framework in pure ASM idea to manifest.
- OJFord 9y ago
  > Computer science programs really need to introduce something like a "History of Computing Ideas" course as a mandatory element. Isn't that the whole programme? In my final year I had a couple of more advanced courses in which we could just about get our heads around results published by the lecturer four years ago when we started the programme. Everything else is just working up to that, from Boole's ideas; through Turing's and von Neumann's.
  - megaman22 9y ago
    You're looking at this from a more academic perspective than my comment implied. Really, it's the whole clusterf&*^ of software engineering being conflated with computer science, when they are really not the same thing in any way. There is a lot of practical implementation history that people are often woefully ignorant of, and it leads them to tread the same paths over and over and over. - Here are the core GNU command line utilities; make, sed, grep, etc. They are battle-tested, use them, don't rewrite them a dozen times in JavaScript - Here is the progression of version control tools that people have used over time, and some reasons why we've moved on from SourceSafe and rcs to Git. - Here's the history of how people have done databases, flat-file, vs sql vs nosql - etc, etc, etc.
    - OJFord 9y ago
      Ah, I see what you mean. Apologies, I didn't mean to digress from the spirit of your comment, I suppose it just varies with experience: of the things mentioned, including web frameworks, I _did_ hear of the history of how people have done databases, but other than that GNU tools are just things I used to get the work done, and I learned git through open source. (Though I think it would make a great 'stuff you've learned put into practice' talk: diff algorithms, data structures, etc.)
- cookiecaper 9y ago
  Yes, though I think we need to diffuse the sentiment via organic cultural osmosis rather than relying on ivory towers to indoctrinate for us (not effective). Alan Kay frequently laments the direction of the computer industry, calling computing "not-quite-a-field" and "pop culture". From an interview in 2012: Quote: ---- > Kay: [...] [I] happen to believe in history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field. > Binstock [interviewer]: You once referred to computing as pop culture. > Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. [...] The big problem with our culture is that it's being dominated [more by] pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content. I consider jazz to be a developed part of high culture. Anything that's been worked on and developed and you [can] [sic] go to the next couple levels. [...] > [Kay continues]: [P]op culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]. [sic - brackets in original] --- It's a great summary of the programming fads that have come to characterize tech culture and how disappointing it is for anyone who is trying to navigate this field with some intent and presence of mind higher than fitting in with the crowd or cashing in on a perceived gold rush. It's also just a great memorialization of the concept of pop culture in general; pop culture is about a feeling of belonging and community, and engaging positive biological responses associated with social approval and community. It's something that people do to give themselves that rush of praise, and then retroactively try to justify. After a couple of years, no one can understand what anyone was thinking because they were just rationalizing riding the tide. And, IMO, it aptly describes not only the React phenomenon, but also Kubernetes (aka "shared hosting"), Docker (aka "static linking"), etc. Also IMO, big dollar players stoke this negative culture because it's profitable for them. It's not necessarily that these technologies won't leave their mark, it's just that they're not the revelations people pretend they are. Regardless, suspicion is always warranted when people insist that the contemporary is novel, in computing or practically anything else. [0] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit... \ archive: https://archive.fo/DkQOc https://archive.fo/DkQOc
rimliu 9y ago
Or it may well be that this "all new web tech" was created by people who do not understand neither web nor HTML. Sudenly everything needs to be SPA, every site needs to load hundreds KBs of scripts just to "be current". What's the value of being modern if it makes user experience objectively worse? Sure client side render may prevent you from reloading the entire page. And who cares that this rerender actually takes longer than reload? Did I really need to waste 200KB of my mobile data to load scripts all I wanted to see were 5 pages each weigthing 5KB? What did I gain from trading full reload for the a-la-SPA kind of deal?
- scottmf 9y ago
  >Sudenly everything needs to be SPA, every site needs to load hundreds KBs of scripts just to "be current". Not everything has to be an SPA, but React is 30kb gzipped and Preact et al are in the single digits. >What's the value of being modern if it makes user experience objectively worse? The point is they don’t inherently make user experience objectively worse. >Sure client side render may prevent you from reloading the entire page. And who cares that this rerender actually takes longer than reload? This isn’t how it works. Rerenders can be incredibly fast. >Did I really need to waste 200KB of my mobile data to load scripts all I wanted to see were 5 pages each weigthing 5KB? What did I gain from trading full reload for the a-la-SPA kind of deal? What did you lose? You lost nothing because SSR provided the initial page load as quickly as any other HTML. It sounds like you’ve generalized the entirety of modern SPA development from your experience of a few terribly developed sites with poor user experience. You probably only notice the poorly-built SPAs because the UX gets in the way. i.e., confirmation bias.
  - RobertRoberts 9y ago
    >You probably only notice the poorly-built SPAs because the UX gets in the way. i.e., confirmation bias. Maybe you are too young to remember Youtube before it was turned into a webapp. It was _considerably_ faster. Todays version requires all sorts of odd refreshing bits and pieces. The old one just loaded right away and showed the video. If I was paranoid, I'd think that Google did it on purpose to push Youtube Red ads at us.
RobertRoberts 9y ago
I've been doing webdev since 1999. I've seen all manner of stupid hacks, dumb "best practices" that have come and gone, ridiculous frameworks that became _useless_ because browsers just integrated the features. Flash home screens, table layouts, IE only coding up the wazoo. So, when someone says they have a JS framework that replaces the core of the browser's display, the DOM, my response to that is sigh, this again. Shadow DOM is around the corner, what then? The reason this stuff gets popular is not because it's a good idea, it's because big companies have tons of cash and man power and can't wait for browsers to get updated. Well, a lot of us code monkey vets are done chasing "shiny crappolla", and we can wait a bit until the dust settles. How many JS frameworks are there now? I saw all of them come, where is ember, knockout, etc...? Vue just popped up, and I can't even recall the other 5 I tried out at the same time. Which will succeed? When you have to put real money into a project and the framework matters to your clients budget, and your profitability, you can't make a risky bet and expect your client to pay for it later if you are wrong. I am all for the long term now. Show me how a 1 year old framework is a good investment, I am willing to learn something. (keep in mind React is only about 4.5 years old, Angular is only 15 months old (AngularJS is 7 just years old and already being phased out!))
- scottmf 9y ago
  You should learn React and build a simple project with it to understand its real value, which is component-based architecture. React will likely be around longer than/as long as any framework, but whatever replaces it will use a lot of the same concepts.
  - RobertRoberts 9y ago
    How does that help 1000 visitors to a blog read the blog easier? Not every site is an app, and the apps we do build we already have invested in VanillaJS framework. Do you think React will outlast the VanillaJS framework? (http://vanilla-js.com/ http://vanilla-js.com/) (edit: this is partly a joke comment, fyi)
    - scottmf 9y ago
bdcravens 9y ago
Isn't the opposite true? A lot of "younger" developers are stuck disliking anything older than 2010 because it's not "new". Not because it's slower, or creates a bad experience for the customer, but because it's not new. If it's not faster, and doesn't provide a competitive advantage (I'm talking about real competition, not the pseudo-competitive market of "hire all the developers by dangling shiny new tech in front of them"), then what's the point? (There are certainly use cases where new approaches make sense, but that doesn't mean they become the new defaults)
weego 9y ago
I am willing to concede your pedigree as a developer as necessary but I've been writing all manner of languages and environments since 99 and I'm sorry to say there's no revolution here, no battlefield to die on. It's a poor model that has been tried and abandoned any number of times in my career. The ubiquity of platforms that suit these ideas and developers who think Web development began with node and spas isn't confirmation that every idea is the future. Moreover, the notion that because FB or whoever went "hmm nothing solves our domain problem, we have the resources to solve it ourselves" that suddenly they solved every domain problem is equally naive. It's likely that people quoting react stacks are solving issues that never existed for them with libraries they don't need.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  Your comment expresses a really common sentiment, but it also vague and offers no supporting evidence. When was a model like React + Redux (or Elm) used previously, and why did it fail? The combination of factors (browser advances and iteration on existing models) is unlike anything before. This tech stack did not exist in 1999, it did not exist in 2005, and it did not exist in 2012. It is driven by real problems.
  - Silhouette 9y ago
    When was a model like React + Redux (or Elm) used previously, and why did it fail? What do you mean "a model like React + Redux"? Programmers have been separating underlying state, rendering and interactions since at least the earliest days of MVC in the '70s. We've been diffing model states to identify changes to act on for as long as we've had explicit isolated state management, which again is several decades. We've been identifying specific parts of a display to rerender fully because doing the whole thing was too expensive since the earliest graphical video games. We've been using markup languages to describe UI layouts declaratively for a long time too. Adopting similar techniques in browsers was likely as soon as serious front-end coding to build larger client-side web apps became viable, and they have much the same pros and cons now as they did in other UI development before. React and its surrounding ecosystem may have been the first JS libraries to popularise the ideas for a new generation, and IMHO those early versions of React were well done and useful, but let's not pretend the underlying concepts are radical and new in themselves.

megaman22 9y ago

Possibly a lot of HN has been around the block for a couple of decades at this point, and has seen this web dev stuff come full circle several times, and before that, the same ideas in desktop software. Computer science programs really need to introduce something like a "History of Computing Ideas" course as a mandatory element. Maybe we can get away from rehashing the same cycle of trends every five years and move onto some different wheels.

goatlover 9y ago
Are they going to also teach that at bootcamps?
Danihan 9y ago
I'm still waiting for my web framework in pure ASM idea to manifest.
OJFord 9y ago
> Computer science programs really need to introduce something like a "History of Computing Ideas" course as a mandatory element. Isn't that the whole programme? In my final year I had a couple of more advanced courses in which we could just about get our heads around results published by the lecturer four years ago when we started the programme. Everything else is just working up to that, from Boole's ideas; through Turing's and von Neumann's.
- megaman22 9y ago
  You're looking at this from a more academic perspective than my comment implied. Really, it's the whole clusterf&*^ of software engineering being conflated with computer science, when they are really not the same thing in any way. There is a lot of practical implementation history that people are often woefully ignorant of, and it leads them to tread the same paths over and over and over. - Here are the core GNU command line utilities; make, sed, grep, etc. They are battle-tested, use them, don't rewrite them a dozen times in JavaScript - Here is the progression of version control tools that people have used over time, and some reasons why we've moved on from SourceSafe and rcs to Git. - Here's the history of how people have done databases, flat-file, vs sql vs nosql - etc, etc, etc.
  - OJFord 9y ago
    Ah, I see what you mean. Apologies, I didn't mean to digress from the spirit of your comment, I suppose it just varies with experience: of the things mentioned, including web frameworks, I _did_ hear of the history of how people have done databases, but other than that GNU tools are just things I used to get the work done, and I learned git through open source. (Though I think it would make a great 'stuff you've learned put into practice' talk: diff algorithms, data structures, etc.)
cookiecaper 9y ago
Yes, though I think we need to diffuse the sentiment via organic cultural osmosis rather than relying on ivory towers to indoctrinate for us (not effective). Alan Kay frequently laments the direction of the computer industry, calling computing "not-quite-a-field" and "pop culture". From an interview in 2012: Quote: ---- > Kay: [...] [I] happen to believe in history. The lack of interest, the disdain for history is what makes computing not-quite-a-field. > Binstock [interviewer]: You once referred to computing as pop culture. > Kay: It is. Complete pop culture. I'm not against pop culture. Developed music, for instance, needs a pop culture. [...] The big problem with our culture is that it's being dominated [more by] pop-culture content than it is for high-culture content. I consider jazz to be a developed part of high culture. Anything that's been worked on and developed and you [can] [sic] go to the next couple levels. [...] > [Kay continues]: [P]op culture holds a disdain for history. Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]. [sic - brackets in original] --- It's a great summary of the programming fads that have come to characterize tech culture and how disappointing it is for anyone who is trying to navigate this field with some intent and presence of mind higher than fitting in with the crowd or cashing in on a perceived gold rush. It's also just a great memorialization of the concept of pop culture in general; pop culture is about a feeling of belonging and community, and engaging positive biological responses associated with social approval and community. It's something that people do to give themselves that rush of praise, and then retroactively try to justify. After a couple of years, no one can understand what anyone was thinking because they were just rationalizing riding the tide. And, IMO, it aptly describes not only the React phenomenon, but also Kubernetes (aka "shared hosting"), Docker (aka "static linking"), etc. Also IMO, big dollar players stoke this negative culture because it's profitable for them. It's not necessarily that these technologies won't leave their mark, it's just that they're not the revelations people pretend they are. Regardless, suspicion is always warranted when people insist that the contemporary is novel, in computing or practically anything else. [0] http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442 http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-wit... \ archive: https://archive.fo/DkQOc https://archive.fo/DkQOc

rimliu 9y ago

Or it may well be that this "all new web tech" was created by people who do not understand neither web nor HTML. Sudenly everything needs to be SPA, every site needs to load hundreds KBs of scripts just to "be current". What's the value of being modern if it makes user experience objectively worse? Sure client side render may prevent you from reloading the entire page. And who cares that this rerender actually takes longer than reload? Did I really need to waste 200KB of my mobile data to load scripts all I wanted to see were 5 pages each weigthing 5KB? What did I gain from trading full reload for the a-la-SPA kind of deal?

scottmf 9y ago
>Sudenly everything needs to be SPA, every site needs to load hundreds KBs of scripts just to "be current". Not everything has to be an SPA, but React is 30kb gzipped and Preact et al are in the single digits. >What's the value of being modern if it makes user experience objectively worse? The point is they don’t inherently make user experience objectively worse. >Sure client side render may prevent you from reloading the entire page. And who cares that this rerender actually takes longer than reload? This isn’t how it works. Rerenders can be incredibly fast. >Did I really need to waste 200KB of my mobile data to load scripts all I wanted to see were 5 pages each weigthing 5KB? What did I gain from trading full reload for the a-la-SPA kind of deal? What did you lose? You lost nothing because SSR provided the initial page load as quickly as any other HTML. It sounds like you’ve generalized the entirety of modern SPA development from your experience of a few terribly developed sites with poor user experience. You probably only notice the poorly-built SPAs because the UX gets in the way. i.e., confirmation bias.
- RobertRoberts 9y ago
  >You probably only notice the poorly-built SPAs because the UX gets in the way. i.e., confirmation bias. Maybe you are too young to remember Youtube before it was turned into a webapp. It was _considerably_ faster. Todays version requires all sorts of odd refreshing bits and pieces. The old one just loaded right away and showed the video. If I was paranoid, I'd think that Google did it on purpose to push Youtube Red ads at us.

RobertRoberts 9y ago

I've been doing webdev since 1999. I've seen all manner of stupid hacks, dumb "best practices" that have come and gone, ridiculous frameworks that became _useless_ because browsers just integrated the features. Flash home screens, table layouts, IE only coding up the wazoo. So, when someone says they have a JS framework that replaces the core of the browser's display, the DOM, my response to that is sigh, this again. Shadow DOM is around the corner, what then? The reason this stuff gets popular is not because it's a good idea, it's because big companies have tons of cash and man power and can't wait for browsers to get updated. Well, a lot of us code monkey vets are done chasing "shiny crappolla", and we can wait a bit until the dust settles. How many JS frameworks are there now? I saw all of them come, where is ember, knockout, etc...? Vue just popped up, and I can't even recall the other 5 I tried out at the same time. Which will succeed? When you have to put real money into a project and the framework matters to your clients budget, and your profitability, you can't make a risky bet and expect your client to pay for it later if you are wrong. I am all for the long term now. Show me how a 1 year old framework is a good investment, I am willing to learn something. (keep in mind React is only about 4.5 years old, Angular is only 15 months old (AngularJS is 7 just years old and already being phased out!))

scottmf 9y ago
You should learn React and build a simple project with it to understand its real value, which is component-based architecture. React will likely be around longer than/as long as any framework, but whatever replaces it will use a lot of the same concepts.
- RobertRoberts 9y ago
  How does that help 1000 visitors to a blog read the blog easier? Not every site is an app, and the apps we do build we already have invested in VanillaJS framework. Do you think React will outlast the VanillaJS framework? (http://vanilla-js.com/ http://vanilla-js.com/) (edit: this is partly a joke comment, fyi)
  - scottmf 9y ago

bdcravens 9y ago

Isn't the opposite true? A lot of "younger" developers are stuck disliking anything older than 2010 because it's not "new". Not because it's slower, or creates a bad experience for the customer, but because it's not new. If it's not faster, and doesn't provide a competitive advantage (I'm talking about real competition, not the pseudo-competitive market of "hire all the developers by dangling shiny new tech in front of them"), then what's the point? (There are certainly use cases where new approaches make sense, but that doesn't mean they become the new defaults)

weego 9y ago

I am willing to concede your pedigree as a developer as necessary but I've been writing all manner of languages and environments since 99 and I'm sorry to say there's no revolution here, no battlefield to die on. It's a poor model that has been tried and abandoned any number of times in my career. The ubiquity of platforms that suit these ideas and developers who think Web development began with node and spas isn't confirmation that every idea is the future. Moreover, the notion that because FB or whoever went "hmm nothing solves our domain problem, we have the resources to solve it ourselves" that suddenly they solved every domain problem is equally naive. It's likely that people quoting react stacks are solving issues that never existed for them with libraries they don't need.

aaron-lebo 9y ago
Your comment expresses a really common sentiment, but it also vague and offers no supporting evidence. When was a model like React + Redux (or Elm) used previously, and why did it fail? The combination of factors (browser advances and iteration on existing models) is unlike anything before. This tech stack did not exist in 1999, it did not exist in 2005, and it did not exist in 2012. It is driven by real problems.
- Silhouette 9y ago
  When was a model like React + Redux (or Elm) used previously, and why did it fail? What do you mean "a model like React + Redux"? Programmers have been separating underlying state, rendering and interactions since at least the earliest days of MVC in the '70s. We've been diffing model states to identify changes to act on for as long as we've had explicit isolated state management, which again is several decades. We've been identifying specific parts of a display to rerender fully because doing the whole thing was too expensive since the earliest graphical video games. We've been using markup languages to describe UI layouts declaratively for a long time too. Adopting similar techniques in browsers was likely as soon as serious front-end coding to build larger client-side web apps became viable, and they have much the same pros and cons now as they did in other UI development before. React and its surrounding ecosystem may have been the first JS libraries to popularise the ideas for a new generation, and IMHO those early versions of React were well done and useful, but let's not pretend the underlying concepts are radical and new in themselves.