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There are a variety of clips of Jonathan blows twitch stream where he talks about web development. He feels that it has gotten so inefficient and complicated th

There are a variety of clips of Jonathan blows twitch stream where he talks about web development. He feels that it has gotten so inefficient and complicated that it now takes 20x as long to create something as it needs to. He suggested that it would be faster for most teams to create their tech stacks utterly from scratch. He further argued that once this efficiency problem gets figured out, most web jobs will disappear. This is coming from a guy who is creating his own programming language for his next game though, and who makes his own game engines Eg, here’s one example clip: https://youtu.be/yodWEPgn8NA https://youtu.be/yodWEPgn8NA

dntrkv 6y ago
He sounds like someone that hasn't done any web dev at large scale. 90% of the web devs at my place of work just fulfill business needs day in and day out. Around 10% actually spend any time messing with the tooling. Sure, when you don't know what you're doing and you're working on a smaller project, you can get bogged down with the tooling aspect. But in every job I've worked with a healthy engineering culture, the tooling side of web dev is invisible to most of the devs to the point where they wouldn't know how to make a config change if they wanted. They just build shit.
stupidcar 6y ago
I watched it. It was dumb. A textbook example of some major fallacies: The first is mistaking your level of desire for something to happen with the actual probability of it happening. It's clear he doesn't just think web programming is going to collapse, he wants it to happen. And it's distorted his estimation of its likelihood. I'm sure in 2030 he'll be making videos confidently predicting the collapse of web programming by 2040. The second is where an expert in one domain considers its complexity to be inherent and unavoidable, while assuming other domains, of which they are ignorant, are inherently simple. Then when they try to engage with those domains, they run into significant complexity and experience the uncomfortable and unfamiliar sensation of being an amateur again. Since the unfamiliar domain is, by their estimation, simple, they conclude that the complexity they've encountered is unnecessary — a result of people working in that domain being too stupid or inventing busywork. The third is the mistaken belief that our means will improve, but that our desires will remain the same. So, right now we have certain requirements, and in order to meet them requires us to do a lot of complicated, cutting edge stuff. But soon all that complexity will get figured out, the cowpaths will get paved etc., and we'll happily just pushing a single button to do everything we need. The reality is, of course, that our requirements will just get more complicated as well. Human civilisation has been on this treadmill since time immemorial.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  > an expert in one domain considers its complexity to be inherent and unavoidable, while assuming other domains, of which they are ignorant, are inherently simple Like the data science guy I worked with who complained we were making authentication and access control complicated.
- hertzrat 6y ago
  While I like your argument about requirements getting more complex in the future, if we are speaking of fallacies, the much of what you said is an ad hominem and mind reading. The argument basically comes down to whether web development is or isn’t slower than it should be, and whether it will become dramatically faster to do in the future
throwanem 6y ago
Not to be overly dismissive, but I'm not all that worried about the opinions of a guy who works in a totally different branch of the discipline and also releases one product per decade.
commandlinefan 6y ago
> it would be faster for most teams to create their tech stacks utterly from scratch I actually agree, but maybe not for the same reasons he gives. The problem with modern tech stacks is that, yes, they're insanely complex, and each of the dozen or so individual components has dozens if not hundreds of its own hidden expectations about what should be where and what it should look like. As long as you meet all of those expectations, everything works magically like it should, but as soon as you miss one, you'll be lucky if you even get an error message that you can google the solution for. There are two efficient ways to solve this: 1) no dependencies, build everything from first principles that you already understand. Then, although there will be plenty of assumptions baked into the code, you'll know what they are and how to deal with them because you put them there. 2) take advantage of pre-built solutions, but actually read and understand the docs before you rely on them. The second solution depends on two rarely present preconditions: one, the docs actually exist. Two, management understands that it takes more than twenty minutes to realistically absorb 500 pages of dense technical documentation. What we end up doing as a workaround is using the off-the-shelf stuff without really understanding what it's doing (or are you telling me that you understand the 9000 files that are installed by NPM? I'm not exaggerating, BTW, go take a peek). We cross our fingers and hope that we got all the assumptions right, cut-and-paste solutions from stackoverflow, and let the horrifically inefficient solution take the place of actual engineering because the "timelines are aggressive".
djcollier 6y ago
The web is just a way of delivering software to users. I think the person speaking in the video is worrying way too much about putting developers into boxes. At the end of the day, there are many problems in the world that can be solved with software. > What most web developers spend their time doing is useless busy work that is not actually objectively necessary in order to create the functionality. It's just dealing with a bunch of weird conventions by some other software that they are trying to use that are there because some other other weird conventions by some other software that they are trying to use. If you just strip all that crap out, you can be tremendously more efficient. Not only is this a very arrogant sentiment, but his reduction of all web development down to manipulating "weird conventions" doesn't fit with my experience. I don't sit around all day messing around with Webpack configurations or leaning new frameworks. I deliver software that addresses business needs, that happens to be accessed via a web browser. He also says that jobs with the title "frontend", "backend" and "fullstack" for the web are not safe jobs. Many game developers, operating system designers, and large desktop applications will also have "frontend" and "backend" separations of responsibility as well, because they often involve different skill sets or knowledge.
syndacks 6y ago
The guy's clearly a genius but he's also an asshole. Bigger projects across multiple disciplines require collaboration and communication, which inherently add complexity and cost. We're not all savants building indie games, so we use other people's work in things called libraries and dependencies.
varispeed 6y ago
Things got more complex because the problems got more complex. Creating a stack from scratch is something that a contractor would suggest to a company, so then they will have full bookings for fixing those. I was at couple of companies who were React/Angular/.NET shy and their CTO wanted to show off building ultimate framework that will make company millions. Every developer had to spend weeks figuring out how to use it and then they always f up something. One gone bankrupt another is rebuilding everything with React...

dntrkv 6y ago

He sounds like someone that hasn't done any web dev at large scale. 90% of the web devs at my place of work just fulfill business needs day in and day out. Around 10% actually spend any time messing with the tooling. Sure, when you don't know what you're doing and you're working on a smaller project, you can get bogged down with the tooling aspect. But in every job I've worked with a healthy engineering culture, the tooling side of web dev is invisible to most of the devs to the point where they wouldn't know how to make a config change if they wanted. They just build shit.

stupidcar 6y ago

I watched it. It was dumb. A textbook example of some major fallacies: The first is mistaking your level of desire for something to happen with the actual probability of it happening. It's clear he doesn't just think web programming is going to collapse, he wants it to happen. And it's distorted his estimation of its likelihood. I'm sure in 2030 he'll be making videos confidently predicting the collapse of web programming by 2040. The second is where an expert in one domain considers its complexity to be inherent and unavoidable, while assuming other domains, of which they are ignorant, are inherently simple. Then when they try to engage with those domains, they run into significant complexity and experience the uncomfortable and unfamiliar sensation of being an amateur again. Since the unfamiliar domain is, by their estimation, simple, they conclude that the complexity they've encountered is unnecessary — a result of people working in that domain being too stupid or inventing busywork. The third is the mistaken belief that our means will improve, but that our desires will remain the same. So, right now we have certain requirements, and in order to meet them requires us to do a lot of complicated, cutting edge stuff. But soon all that complexity will get figured out, the cowpaths will get paved etc., and we'll happily just pushing a single button to do everything we need. The reality is, of course, that our requirements will just get more complicated as well. Human civilisation has been on this treadmill since time immemorial.

cratermoon 6y ago
> an expert in one domain considers its complexity to be inherent and unavoidable, while assuming other domains, of which they are ignorant, are inherently simple Like the data science guy I worked with who complained we were making authentication and access control complicated.
hertzrat 6y ago
While I like your argument about requirements getting more complex in the future, if we are speaking of fallacies, the much of what you said is an ad hominem and mind reading. The argument basically comes down to whether web development is or isn’t slower than it should be, and whether it will become dramatically faster to do in the future

throwanem 6y ago

Not to be overly dismissive, but I'm not all that worried about the opinions of a guy who works in a totally different branch of the discipline and also releases one product per decade.

commandlinefan 6y ago

> it would be faster for most teams to create their tech stacks utterly from scratch I actually agree, but maybe not for the same reasons he gives. The problem with modern tech stacks is that, yes, they're insanely complex, and each of the dozen or so individual components has dozens if not hundreds of its own hidden expectations about what should be where and what it should look like. As long as you meet all of those expectations, everything works magically like it should, but as soon as you miss one, you'll be lucky if you even get an error message that you can google the solution for. There are two efficient ways to solve this: 1) no dependencies, build everything from first principles that you already understand. Then, although there will be plenty of assumptions baked into the code, you'll know what they are and how to deal with them because you put them there. 2) take advantage of pre-built solutions, but actually read and understand the docs before you rely on them. The second solution depends on two rarely present preconditions: one, the docs actually exist. Two, management understands that it takes more than twenty minutes to realistically absorb 500 pages of dense technical documentation. What we end up doing as a workaround is using the off-the-shelf stuff without really understanding what it's doing (or are you telling me that you understand the 9000 files that are installed by NPM? I'm not exaggerating, BTW, go take a peek). We cross our fingers and hope that we got all the assumptions right, cut-and-paste solutions from stackoverflow, and let the horrifically inefficient solution take the place of actual engineering because the "timelines are aggressive".

djcollier 6y ago

The web is just a way of delivering software to users. I think the person speaking in the video is worrying way too much about putting developers into boxes. At the end of the day, there are many problems in the world that can be solved with software. > What most web developers spend their time doing is useless busy work that is not actually objectively necessary in order to create the functionality. It's just dealing with a bunch of weird conventions by some other software that they are trying to use that are there because some other other weird conventions by some other software that they are trying to use. If you just strip all that crap out, you can be tremendously more efficient. Not only is this a very arrogant sentiment, but his reduction of all web development down to manipulating "weird conventions" doesn't fit with my experience. I don't sit around all day messing around with Webpack configurations or leaning new frameworks. I deliver software that addresses business needs, that happens to be accessed via a web browser. He also says that jobs with the title "frontend", "backend" and "fullstack" for the web are not safe jobs. Many game developers, operating system designers, and large desktop applications will also have "frontend" and "backend" separations of responsibility as well, because they often involve different skill sets or knowledge.

syndacks 6y ago

The guy's clearly a genius but he's also an asshole. Bigger projects across multiple disciplines require collaboration and communication, which inherently add complexity and cost. We're not all savants building indie games, so we use other people's work in things called libraries and dependencies.

varispeed 6y ago

Things got more complex because the problems got more complex. Creating a stack from scratch is something that a contractor would suggest to a company, so then they will have full bookings for fixing those. I was at couple of companies who were React/Angular/.NET shy and their CTO wanted to show off building ultimate framework that will make company millions. Every developer had to spend weeks figuring out how to use it and then they always f up something. One gone bankrupt another is rebuilding everything with React...