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> Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex Well, that sure is an arrogant way to present stereotypes as fact. At first, I read this as satire. You c

> Webdevs tend to suffer from an inferiority complex Well, that sure is an arrogant way to present stereotypes as fact. At first, I read this as satire. You can follow the history of web development and see exactly why the current stack is as it is. It's people building solutions to problems. For example, nobody thought "I should create a front-end build process to impress my peers!". What happened instead is that repetitive tasks were programmed out of existence. The web industry is young, you can trace every single steps of it without much research. To claim something as ridiculous as "responded by making the simple things they do monstrously complicated to try to prove something to the C++ guys" is silly at best. Sure, this may be accurate for some of the junior devs. you worked with in your career. However, this is not representative of the industry as a whole.

buboard 7y ago
> It's people building solutions to problems. It most definitely doesn't seem so. People build multiple solutions to nonexistent problems, or problems that are only relevant to google (which classifies them as nonexistent problems for everyone else). Then they push those solutions where they don't fit (e.g. SPAs for blogs)
goatinaboat 7y ago
You can follow the history of web development and see exactly why the current stack is as it is I have lived this history of web development. I remember when CGI was new and exciting. Now I see modern sites using literally thousands of times the memory and CPU to struggle to do things that were trivial even back in the 90s on a 486 with 8Mb RAM. A typical document, say a news story might be 2kb-5kb in size. Why does the page need 5Mb of JS to deliver and display it? So I am 100% confident in my assertion that the web as it is today is massively and needlessly over complicated.
- Santosh83 7y ago
  You're right about the document sizes exploding but I think the real reason is the suits swooped down when they found that mere hyperlinked documents could actually be monetized into profitability. The rest is history. 4.4Mb for those 5Mb per news article is javascript that exists for ads and tracking, which in turn exist for monetizing.
- Raphmedia 7y ago
  It seems to me that you are describing click-bait blogs and the work of junior trend-driven developers. I have worked with plenty of clients who actually needed SPAs. Custom CRMs and ERPs, etc. The quality front-end developers are not the ones who make small blogs or small corner store websites. It's agency developers working on huge projects. Those projects have big budgets on optimisation and page speed. Switch your gmail account to Basic HTML (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049) and see how the SPA version isn't any slower but in fact much more pleasant to use. "The web" isn't an entity. It is a network of websites and applications. Some of them are slow and over-engineered and others are bloated excuses to display adverts. I can assure you that every single front-end developer I have worked with understood those issues and pushed for the right technologies.

buboard 7y ago

> It's people building solutions to problems. It most definitely doesn't seem so. People build multiple solutions to nonexistent problems, or problems that are only relevant to google (which classifies them as nonexistent problems for everyone else). Then they push those solutions where they don't fit (e.g. SPAs for blogs)

goatinaboat 7y ago

You can follow the history of web development and see exactly why the current stack is as it is I have lived this history of web development. I remember when CGI was new and exciting. Now I see modern sites using literally thousands of times the memory and CPU to struggle to do things that were trivial even back in the 90s on a 486 with 8Mb RAM. A typical document, say a news story might be 2kb-5kb in size. Why does the page need 5Mb of JS to deliver and display it? So I am 100% confident in my assertion that the web as it is today is massively and needlessly over complicated.

Santosh83 7y ago
You're right about the document sizes exploding but I think the real reason is the suits swooped down when they found that mere hyperlinked documents could actually be monetized into profitability. The rest is history. 4.4Mb for those 5Mb per news article is javascript that exists for ads and tracking, which in turn exist for monetizing.
Raphmedia 7y ago
It seems to me that you are describing click-bait blogs and the work of junior trend-driven developers. I have worked with plenty of clients who actually needed SPAs. Custom CRMs and ERPs, etc. The quality front-end developers are not the ones who make small blogs or small corner store websites. It's agency developers working on huge projects. Those projects have big budgets on optimisation and page speed. Switch your gmail account to Basic HTML (https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049 https://support.google.com/mail/answer/15049) and see how the SPA version isn't any slower but in fact much more pleasant to use. "The web" isn't an entity. It is a network of websites and applications. Some of them are slow and over-engineered and others are bloated excuses to display adverts. I can assure you that every single front-end developer I have worked with understood those issues and pushed for the right technologies.