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Seriously, I have been writing code for almost 30 years now. I pick up new languages and packages and love hacking on new things still. Modern front end develop

Seriously, I have been writing code for almost 30 years now. I pick up new languages and packages and love hacking on new things still. Modern front end developmemt feels so bad in some areas. I spent full /days/ trying to tame webpack and friends and just gave up. "Modern" web front end developer is a weird and annoying place. I would rather battle pthreads and kernel bugs with gdb than try to figure out web front end. There are some bright spots. Vue is nice enough. Bootstrap has always made sense. jQuery is easy enough. But man, I remember IE4 vs NS navigator compatibility being more pleasant to manage in some ways to learning some of these JS frameworks. And I am not just expressing a grumpy get off my lawn sentiment. This stuff is legitimately obtuse. But in a strange way compared to say systems programming. Systems program is deep and sort of orderly. Modern JS is broad, chaotic, frustrating.

WD-42 8y ago
I think what's started to happen is there is an entire generation of new coders that grew up on Javascript and the web and so all of this just seems totally normal. I look at some of this static site and server side rendered Javascript stuff and wonder if the people developing them have ever used flask, or Sinatra. I mean hell these frameworks make RoR look lean and simple.
- fvdessen 8y ago
  Yes we have, and while the various new JS frameworks may be a bit more complicated they are also vastly more productive environments. For example webpack's development server let you develop your app with real time updates with hot reload. The productivity benefits from just that are worth more than a few days of setting up webpack. And that's just one thing webpack provides
  - yoavm 8y ago
    How is the productivity benefits from not having to press F5 after I'm updating the code is worth a few days of setting up Webpack? If I sum the time it took me to refresh pages since I started using the internet it doesn't get to a few days.
    - boubiyeah 8y ago
      Plus, it uses a lot of CPU/battery everytime you save in your IDE whether you're going to actually check the result or not.
      - greenhatman 8y ago
        If either of those are actually problems for you then your dev environment leaves a lot to be desired. You can't be wasting cognitive load on that.
    - JasonSage 8y ago
      This actually sounds hyperbolic to me. Are you sure that's the case?
      - yoavm 8y ago
        I'm not sure. But since the average time for a webpage to load is about 3 seconds[0], I would need to press F5 17,280 times to be refreshing for a whole day. I don't think I have, and even I did, quite a few of these had nothing to do with me developing anything, so hot-reload wouldn't help here. [0] https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-fast-is-fast-enough-page-load-time-and-your-bottom-line/ https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-fast-is-fast-enough-page-lo...
      - Can_Not 8y ago
        It's probably completely hyperbolic. No way it should take days unless you're trying to retrofit a legacy project and learn it at the same time.
    - jwdunne 8y ago
      You're not counting the fact that a refresh may require developers to get back to the app state right before refresh.
      - yoavm 8y ago
        Yeah, maybe. But I'm also not counting the times I worked on a hot reload enabled project and I wasn't sure if it actually reloaded or maybe there was an error somewhere that made the whole thing stop working, and so I just manually refreshed. It's just not that amazing, and it certainly not worth a few days of setting up. Would someone really start a project from scratch and then spend days on getting hot reload to work? I'd never want to hire that person honestly, nor to develop in such a fragile platform. Hot reload is nice, but there's nothing revolutionary about it that justifies more than an hour of getting things to work.
  - Confusion 8y ago
    Real time updates and hot reload are almost completely independent of js and webpack. E.g. Middleman has that via the ‘livereload’ feature.
  - interfixus 8y ago
    Eh ... right this moment, I'm watching Firefox auto-reload the stuff I'm working on, by the sheer magic of me saving files in my editor. This is pug, scss, assorted js, svg, you name it. Am I missing out on man-years of productivity for never really having taken to the brontosaurus model?
    - bitexploder 8y ago
      Nah, I think the trend of the commentary was just that the tooling is hard to learn how to set up. I think it is probably worth setting up and learning the tooling if frontend work is a non trivial part of your life. But as someone who just wants to put a toe in and feel productive it can be rough to find easy to use front end frameworks.
    - pixelbash 8y ago
      Haven't we had auto reload since long before webpack? Or am I missing something.
  - 0x0 8y ago
    I dislike hot reload for a few reasons. One, it makes it difficult to keep two tabs open to compare the "before" and "after" of a change, because both tabs reload the "after" instantly. Two, you can get into an "impossible" state where you've navigated into a section of the site and get to see an "after" state that turns out to be unreachable because the change affected earlier navigation. Three, it is often unclear if everything reloaded properly during a hot reload, especially if you have also fiddled around with stylesheets etc in the chrome developer console. To each his own, though! :)
  - WD-42 8y ago
    Hot Reload is not unique to webpack. Hugo for example, provides hot reload. At the same time it's an insanely fast static site generator, which you install by simply downloading a binary. No tools, no dependencies, no hundreds of thousands of node modules.
  - andrei_says_ 8y ago
    Hot reload is not unique to webpack. The multi-day setup or the multi-day attempts to set it up followed by giving up, are. I very much would like to use a simple, sturdy, predictable environment and trying to work with webpack has brought me only frustration. Things that should get chained together and just work, don’t. To fix them I needed to understand obscure bugs in infinite npm dependencies. I’m not that good at JavaScript and honestly don’t want to be. I would gladly pay $50-100 per set up if this service existed.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

WD-42 8y ago

I think what's started to happen is there is an entire generation of new coders that grew up on Javascript and the web and so all of this just seems totally normal. I look at some of this static site and server side rendered Javascript stuff and wonder if the people developing them have ever used flask, or Sinatra. I mean hell these frameworks make RoR look lean and simple.

fvdessen 8y ago
Yes we have, and while the various new JS frameworks may be a bit more complicated they are also vastly more productive environments. For example webpack's development server let you develop your app with real time updates with hot reload. The productivity benefits from just that are worth more than a few days of setting up webpack. And that's just one thing webpack provides
- yoavm 8y ago
  How is the productivity benefits from not having to press F5 after I'm updating the code is worth a few days of setting up Webpack? If I sum the time it took me to refresh pages since I started using the internet it doesn't get to a few days.
  - boubiyeah 8y ago
    Plus, it uses a lot of CPU/battery everytime you save in your IDE whether you're going to actually check the result or not.
    - greenhatman 8y ago
      If either of those are actually problems for you then your dev environment leaves a lot to be desired. You can't be wasting cognitive load on that.
  - JasonSage 8y ago
    This actually sounds hyperbolic to me. Are you sure that's the case?
    - yoavm 8y ago
      I'm not sure. But since the average time for a webpage to load is about 3 seconds[0], I would need to press F5 17,280 times to be refreshing for a whole day. I don't think I have, and even I did, quite a few of these had nothing to do with me developing anything, so hot-reload wouldn't help here. [0] https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-fast-is-fast-enough-page-load-time-and-your-bottom-line/ https://www.semrush.com/blog/how-fast-is-fast-enough-page-lo...
    - Can_Not 8y ago
      It's probably completely hyperbolic. No way it should take days unless you're trying to retrofit a legacy project and learn it at the same time.
  - jwdunne 8y ago
    You're not counting the fact that a refresh may require developers to get back to the app state right before refresh.
    - yoavm 8y ago
      Yeah, maybe. But I'm also not counting the times I worked on a hot reload enabled project and I wasn't sure if it actually reloaded or maybe there was an error somewhere that made the whole thing stop working, and so I just manually refreshed. It's just not that amazing, and it certainly not worth a few days of setting up. Would someone really start a project from scratch and then spend days on getting hot reload to work? I'd never want to hire that person honestly, nor to develop in such a fragile platform. Hot reload is nice, but there's nothing revolutionary about it that justifies more than an hour of getting things to work.
- Confusion 8y ago
  Real time updates and hot reload are almost completely independent of js and webpack. E.g. Middleman has that via the ‘livereload’ feature.
- interfixus 8y ago
  Eh ... right this moment, I'm watching Firefox auto-reload the stuff I'm working on, by the sheer magic of me saving files in my editor. This is pug, scss, assorted js, svg, you name it. Am I missing out on man-years of productivity for never really having taken to the brontosaurus model?
  - bitexploder 8y ago
    Nah, I think the trend of the commentary was just that the tooling is hard to learn how to set up. I think it is probably worth setting up and learning the tooling if frontend work is a non trivial part of your life. But as someone who just wants to put a toe in and feel productive it can be rough to find easy to use front end frameworks.
  - pixelbash 8y ago
    Haven't we had auto reload since long before webpack? Or am I missing something.
- 0x0 8y ago
  I dislike hot reload for a few reasons. One, it makes it difficult to keep two tabs open to compare the "before" and "after" of a change, because both tabs reload the "after" instantly. Two, you can get into an "impossible" state where you've navigated into a section of the site and get to see an "after" state that turns out to be unreachable because the change affected earlier navigation. Three, it is often unclear if everything reloaded properly during a hot reload, especially if you have also fiddled around with stylesheets etc in the chrome developer console. To each his own, though! :)
- WD-42 8y ago
  Hot Reload is not unique to webpack. Hugo for example, provides hot reload. At the same time it's an insanely fast static site generator, which you install by simply downloading a binary. No tools, no dependencies, no hundreds of thousands of node modules.
- andrei_says_ 8y ago
  Hot reload is not unique to webpack. The multi-day setup or the multi-day attempts to set it up followed by giving up, are. I very much would like to use a simple, sturdy, predictable environment and trying to work with webpack has brought me only frustration. Things that should get chained together and just work, don’t. To fix them I needed to understand obscure bugs in infinite npm dependencies. I’m not that good at JavaScript and honestly don’t want to be. I would gladly pay $50-100 per set up if this service existed.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]