3 ms·

web tech really is bollocks, isn't it.

kansface 6y ago
I don't understand this sentiment at all... even approximately. I've been doing this for about 15 years now. I started in the days of "This website works best in IE5" (read, only works in ie5). I wrote Macromedia Flash Apps to make animations, because that was the only option. It was awesome! I spent hours or even days making rounded corners via chopping up images and table hacks, because rounded corners seemed really important. Just laying stuff out correctly on the page and stupid browser hacks was most of the job. I personally went from spending probably 60% of my time fixing cross compatibility bugs to spending a few hours a year on it. We went from manual coding for cross browser support, to polyfills, to telling webpack to dynamically include polyfills to target the subset of browsers I care about with 2 lines of configuration. I can now determine the exact tradeoff between file size and audience reach. Yes, that came with some complexity. Yes, that tradeoff is 100% worth it. No, you do not have to use it. This is how I feel about React. I've unintentionally built my own, shitty version of React at least half a dozen times over the last decade. The last time, maybe 4 or 5 years ago now, was an online file system browser which could contain tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of folders/files. The naive implementation wouldn't load. A less naive implementation took a few weeks to implement and seconds to load. The React rewrite took a day or two to write and loaded in milliseconds. It was less code, easier to understand, and a couple of orders of magnitude more performant! Other languages don't have crazy build systems because they don't have to run the same code on multiple platforms made by multiple competing vendors on multiple operating systems for hardware ranging from a M1 to a refrigerator. If that's not you, not a problem, you can just write vanilla JS. If you don't have thousands of objects that you dynamically load that need to be turned into DOM Nodes, don't reach for React... If you just want a library that renders some DOM Nodes, thats fine too, use React and nothing else - you can even write react.createElement by hand and eschew JSX if so desired! I would not choose to go back to the halcyon days of web dev where we didn't have dependencies and dependency management because we couldn't. At this point in my career, changing web tech has lead to a productivity increase of probably 10000%. There are some pain points, but we're working on it! Web tech, fuck yeah!

I don't understand this sentiment at all... even approximately. I've been doing this for about 15 years now. I started in the days of "This website works best in IE5" (read, only works in ie5). I wrote Macromedia Flash Apps to make animations, because that was the only option. It was awesome! I spent hours or even days making rounded corners via chopping up images and table hacks, because rounded corners seemed really important. Just laying stuff out correctly on the page and stupid browser hacks was most of the job. I personally went from spending probably 60% of my time fixing cross compatibility bugs to spending a few hours a year on it. We went from manual coding for cross browser support, to polyfills, to telling webpack to dynamically include polyfills to target the subset of browsers I care about with 2 lines of configuration. I can now determine the exact tradeoff between file size and audience reach. Yes, that came with some complexity. Yes, that tradeoff is 100% worth it. No, you do not have to use it. This is how I feel about React. I've unintentionally built my own, shitty version of React at least half a dozen times over the last decade. The last time, maybe 4 or 5 years ago now, was an online file system browser which could contain tens or possibly hundreds of thousands of folders/files. The naive implementation wouldn't load. A less naive implementation took a few weeks to implement and seconds to load. The React rewrite took a day or two to write and loaded in milliseconds. It was less code, easier to understand, and a couple of orders of magnitude more performant! Other languages don't have crazy build systems because they don't have to run the same code on multiple platforms made by multiple competing vendors on multiple operating systems for hardware ranging from a M1 to a refrigerator. If that's not you, not a problem, you can just write vanilla JS. If you don't have thousands of objects that you dynamically load that need to be turned into DOM Nodes, don't reach for React... If you just want a library that renders some DOM Nodes, thats fine too, use React and nothing else - you can even write react.createElement by hand and eschew JSX if so desired! I would not choose to go back to the halcyon days of web dev where we didn't have dependencies and dependency management because we couldn't. At this point in my career, changing web tech has lead to a productivity increase of probably 10000%. There are some pain points, but we're working on it! Web tech, fuck yeah!