4 ms·

I feel the same fatigue. But on the other hand: looking at the boiler plate to get a web backend running I honestly don't see that much of a difference. Granted

I feel the same fatigue. But on the other hand: looking at the boiler plate to get a web backend running I honestly don't see that much of a difference. Granted my experience is mostly limited to the Java ecosystem (specifically Spring) but just by looking at alternatives like Laravel (PHP) or Elixir (Erlang) or Django (Python) I don't see much difference when it comes to boilerplate. Developers seem to have this romantic notion that everything used to be so simple but it seems like history is just repeating itself. I'm sure programmers of the 70s and 80s said the same about desktop development in the late 90s. That being said: It's baffling to me that browser vendors can't agree on advancing the technology on their own. Why do we have to wait for the ECMA and CSS standard to evolve and instead use shims to get where we clearly want to go?

ethbr0 6y ago
The first sin of computing was platform diversity: the greatest leap forward in computing was platform diversity. Ever since, we've been trying to grapple with that problem and opportunity. If browsers didn't evolve incompatibly during the early days of web scripting, much of this never would have come into being. But then we would have had to wait another couple decades for AJAX, etc. Unfortunately, I do get a sense that the younger generation looks at the polyfill complexity produced by the 90s and assumes that's the baseline by which things should be done. ... and, not to put too fine a point on it (and with deference to all the folks working in front end who know more about computer science than I ever will!), front end web development has a huge amount of developers who lack formal, in depth and breadth computer science education. Those who never learned the past, doomed to repeat it, etc.
Tarariro 6y ago
Unless you were doing things like Corba or DCOM, desktop development in the 90s was a breeze compared to modern development.

ethbr0 6y ago

The first sin of computing was platform diversity: the greatest leap forward in computing was platform diversity. Ever since, we've been trying to grapple with that problem and opportunity. If browsers didn't evolve incompatibly during the early days of web scripting, much of this never would have come into being. But then we would have had to wait another couple decades for AJAX, etc. Unfortunately, I do get a sense that the younger generation looks at the polyfill complexity produced by the 90s and assumes that's the baseline by which things should be done. ... and, not to put too fine a point on it (and with deference to all the folks working in front end who know more about computer science than I ever will!), front end web development has a huge amount of developers who lack formal, in depth and breadth computer science education. Those who never learned the past, doomed to repeat it, etc.

Tarariro 6y ago

Unless you were doing things like Corba or DCOM, desktop development in the 90s was a breeze compared to modern development.