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You can reduce any field to "it's a just bunch of...": All coding is just a bunch of binary numbers. All chemistry and biology is just a bunch of molecules. All

You can reduce any field to "it's a just bunch of...": All coding is just a bunch of binary numbers. All chemistry and biology is just a bunch of molecules. All construction is just a bunch of concrete, bricks and steel. It's nonsense, and is exactly the kind of naive and insulting statement you talked about. Complexity is emergent. Look below any complex system and you'll find a simpler one, but that doesn't mean the higher-level complexity is unnecessary. All the things you complained about have good reasons to exist, invented by people who actually work as professional web developers and need to solve problems. The real problem is "seasoned programmers" who don't work in web development, but who expect to be able to jump in an master it in a day, based on the fact that they put together a GeoCities homepage twenty years ago, and are enraged and disgusted to find that things aren't so simple anymore. It's absurd. Developers wouldn't expect to be able to jump into kernel development, or database development, and find it to be a breeze.

emsy 6y ago
> Developers wouldn't expect to be able to jump into kernel development, or database development, and find it to be a breeze. Yes, that’s correct. In my experience, in those fields the complexity of the solution scales with the complexity of the problem. However, modern web development usually tries to squash every problem under a huge stack of complex frameworks and libraries. How many “full stack” kernel or database developers are there? Complexity is not always emergent. In the case of web development it’s in large parts self inflicted. My point was that modern web development is more complex than it needs to be and you didn’t rebut it.
rsynnott 6y ago
So, the thing is... I'm not a webdev, though I've done web development in the distant past (early noughties). I'm not a desktop dev, though again done it in the late nineties and early noughties. I messed around with modern desktop/mobile dev recently (specifically Cocoa) and it's basically fine; in many ways simpler and better abstracted than what I was used to (mostly GTK+ and some win32 stuff back in the day). I looked at modern webdev stuff... and I'm sorry, it's insane. Vast increase in complexity for, for most purposes, no real gains. I can't think of anywhere else this is the case. If you want to access an SQL database, that's easier than it used to be, and better abstractions on top are available if you want them. If you want to write a web API, that's easier than it used to be, and again nice abstractions are available. If you want to process tens of terabytes of data, that's so much easier it's not even funny. But if you want to write a webapp... unless you totally ignore the modern stuff it's vastly, vastly more complex than it used to be. I suppose this may be my grumpy old man side coming out, but I really don't find modern single page apps to be a better experience than mid-noughties webapps in the vast majority of cases. They're usually worse; in particular they're usually slower, and mess with UI expectations more. And yet they are _vastly_ more difficult to produce. The whole thing seems like it took a wrong turn somewhere.
- unclebucknasty 6y ago
  This is not talked about enough. We frequently ask whether it's too complex, but that assumes the objective is even sound. Anyone who has done significant work on a full scale SPA using any framework (or no framework) would have to weigh whether it was worth it. And that's on two levels: 1) Was the additional effort and complexity worth it for the perceived improvements in user experience that were sought? And 2) were there actually any such improvements or, even, is the user experience actually worse as a result? Because I have to say that I'm not convinced. There does seem to be a period when AJAX first became a thing wherein the added responsiveness gained from judicious use of dynamic operations with partial page updates improved the experience over full page reloads exclusively. Then, someone said, "hey, if that's cool, then why don't we make the whole thing dynamic, fighting Web semantics (and standard browser behavior like back buttons and history) every step of the way? Not so sure that's a good premise or has led to a good result.
unclebucknasty 6y ago
>The real problem is "seasoned programmers" who don't work in web development Problem is some of those seasoned developers didn't just "put together a GeoCities homepage twenty years ago" (which is itself a weird knock on some devs in the midst of a rant that appears to be knocking people for knocking devs). They worked on "actual" hard stuff that even you might consider hard--let's say kernel or database development or even challenging Web development problems that actually existed prior to the current state of things (audience gasps). So the question is whether there is a mismatch between the objective and the level of difficulty/complexity? Some stuff is just hard by consensus (and the relative number of people who can actually do it). Other stuff is needlessly complex. Another category is both hard and needlessly complex. So, instead of parsing the complaints here into a personal attack on certain developer skillsets, then rebutting with the same, it might be more useful to earnestly consider whether things have been made overly complex and can be improved.

emsy 6y ago

> Developers wouldn't expect to be able to jump into kernel development, or database development, and find it to be a breeze. Yes, that’s correct. In my experience, in those fields the complexity of the solution scales with the complexity of the problem. However, modern web development usually tries to squash every problem under a huge stack of complex frameworks and libraries. How many “full stack” kernel or database developers are there? Complexity is not always emergent. In the case of web development it’s in large parts self inflicted. My point was that modern web development is more complex than it needs to be and you didn’t rebut it.

rsynnott 6y ago

So, the thing is... I'm not a webdev, though I've done web development in the distant past (early noughties). I'm not a desktop dev, though again done it in the late nineties and early noughties. I messed around with modern desktop/mobile dev recently (specifically Cocoa) and it's basically fine; in many ways simpler and better abstracted than what I was used to (mostly GTK+ and some win32 stuff back in the day). I looked at modern webdev stuff... and I'm sorry, it's insane. Vast increase in complexity for, for most purposes, no real gains. I can't think of anywhere else this is the case. If you want to access an SQL database, that's easier than it used to be, and better abstractions on top are available if you want them. If you want to write a web API, that's easier than it used to be, and again nice abstractions are available. If you want to process tens of terabytes of data, that's so much easier it's not even funny. But if you want to write a webapp... unless you totally ignore the modern stuff it's vastly, vastly more complex than it used to be. I suppose this may be my grumpy old man side coming out, but I really don't find modern single page apps to be a better experience than mid-noughties webapps in the vast majority of cases. They're usually worse; in particular they're usually slower, and mess with UI expectations more. And yet they are _vastly_ more difficult to produce. The whole thing seems like it took a wrong turn somewhere.

unclebucknasty 6y ago
This is not talked about enough. We frequently ask whether it's too complex, but that assumes the objective is even sound. Anyone who has done significant work on a full scale SPA using any framework (or no framework) would have to weigh whether it was worth it. And that's on two levels: 1) Was the additional effort and complexity worth it for the perceived improvements in user experience that were sought? And 2) were there actually any such improvements or, even, is the user experience actually worse as a result? Because I have to say that I'm not convinced. There does seem to be a period when AJAX first became a thing wherein the added responsiveness gained from judicious use of dynamic operations with partial page updates improved the experience over full page reloads exclusively. Then, someone said, "hey, if that's cool, then why don't we make the whole thing dynamic, fighting Web semantics (and standard browser behavior like back buttons and history) every step of the way? Not so sure that's a good premise or has led to a good result.

unclebucknasty 6y ago

>The real problem is "seasoned programmers" who don't work in web development Problem is some of those seasoned developers didn't just "put together a GeoCities homepage twenty years ago" (which is itself a weird knock on some devs in the midst of a rant that appears to be knocking people for knocking devs). They worked on "actual" hard stuff that even you might consider hard--let's say kernel or database development or even challenging Web development problems that actually existed prior to the current state of things (audience gasps). So the question is whether there is a mismatch between the objective and the level of difficulty/complexity? Some stuff is just hard by consensus (and the relative number of people who can actually do it). Other stuff is needlessly complex. Another category is both hard and needlessly complex. So, instead of parsing the complaints here into a personal attack on certain developer skillsets, then rebutting with the same, it might be more useful to earnestly consider whether things have been made overly complex and can be improved.