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There seems to be a constant in all of these “towering piles of shite” articles: they’re all talking about frontend development. My own experience concurs. I

There seems to be a constant in all of these “towering piles of shite” articles: they’re all talking about frontend development. My own experience concurs. I wonder why that is.

m4r35n357 6y ago
It is the cost of making computers "user friendly" and providing a positive "user experience". Can't be done without layers of crap, it's a law of physics. The alternative is to deal with computers how they naturally "want" to be talked to. Then life is simple, you just need _engineers_ to write the software, and to _train_ people to use it.
- omginternets 6y ago
  I don't know if I buy this. I don't see why it's inherently impossible to create a computer product that is both well-engineered _and_ easy to use.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
ComputerGuru 6y ago
It seems unfair to group desktop apps, web sites/apps, and mobile apps under one category of “frontend development.” A good (read: native) and well-architectured desktop app probably has more in common with backend development, UI design aside!
- omginternets 6y ago
  Sure, that’s fair. I misspoke. I mean that it always seems to relate to things with graphical interfaces. To be clear, I don't doubt it's possible to create well-architected things with GUIs.
- hombre_fatal 6y ago
  Well, it's all client dev. And client dev is hard and fundamentally distant from server application dev because your client applications run on N machines of M different configurations and are user facing instead of just running on one server being machine facing. It's not unfair to group client dev together. Client dev is always hard. People on HN who only have touched JS dev tend to think that JS clients are uniquely hard and, presumably, that clients are a cakewalk to build on other platforms/sdks. Never was true. Just look at the Android dev comments ITT. It's all hard and complex.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    I’ve been doing Native desktop software (distinct from web, embedded, backend, etc) since the early 2000s, so I’m not unaware of the complexities ;)

There seems to be a constant in all of these “towering piles of shite” articles: they’re all talking about frontend development. My own experience concurs. I wonder why that is.

m4r35n357 6y ago

It is the cost of making computers "user friendly" and providing a positive "user experience". Can't be done without layers of crap, it's a law of physics. The alternative is to deal with computers how they naturally "want" to be talked to. Then life is simple, you just need _engineers_ to write the software, and to _train_ people to use it.

omginternets 6y ago
I don't know if I buy this. I don't see why it's inherently impossible to create a computer product that is both well-engineered _and_ easy to use.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

ComputerGuru 6y ago

It seems unfair to group desktop apps, web sites/apps, and mobile apps under one category of “frontend development.” A good (read: native) and well-architectured desktop app probably has more in common with backend development, UI design aside!

omginternets 6y ago
Sure, that’s fair. I misspoke. I mean that it always seems to relate to things with graphical interfaces. To be clear, I don't doubt it's possible to create well-architected things with GUIs.
hombre_fatal 6y ago
Well, it's all client dev. And client dev is hard and fundamentally distant from server application dev because your client applications run on N machines of M different configurations and are user facing instead of just running on one server being machine facing. It's not unfair to group client dev together. Client dev is always hard. People on HN who only have touched JS dev tend to think that JS clients are uniquely hard and, presumably, that clients are a cakewalk to build on other platforms/sdks. Never was true. Just look at the Android dev comments ITT. It's all hard and complex.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  I’ve been doing Native desktop software (distinct from web, embedded, backend, etc) since the early 2000s, so I’m not unaware of the complexities ;)