8 ms·

Regardless of my tweet, that is a personal opinion based on my feelings, background and experiences, the discussions in the replies are interesting from the POV

• notjustanymike 6y ago
  I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Just like music, there was a LOT of trash web development back in the day as well. Sites built with tables in dreamweaver best viewed on netscape navigator at 800x600 with animated gifs bogging the download speed existed long ago. What we have today are the same problems with a new wrapper, created by a not dissimilar group of people from the past.
  • barrkel 6y ago
    We had functional applications for forms and the like, in the 90s, running on machines with 8MB or 16MB of memory. They weren't as pretty, but they had simple development paradigms, VB and Delphi, easy to get started. HTML has been the wrong place to make creating UIs (as opposed to marked up text) for such a long time. Things are getting better from multiple angles, but it's still very uneven.
    • notjustanymike 6y ago
      It's always easy to solve a problem by taking away a number of it's requirements. VB was good at forms but visually unacceptable for branding. It was difficult and unsafe to deliver over the internet. And again, there were a LOT of really bad VB applications that hurt usability and performance. If all you're doing is building forms for an application then it's acceptable, but that's an easy problem solved with elegant solutions today as well. HTML can immediately deliver the styled application without installation to every device regardless of OS. It can propagate changes without reinstallation. It is accessible for every kind of user. And it does this while looking miles better than any VB application.
      • anthk 6y ago
        >And it does this while looking miles better than any VB application. Far less usable too. > It was difficult and unsafe to deliver over the internet No one cared, we had physical media. > And again, there were a LOT of really bad VB applications that hurt usability and performance. Most of them were fast enough.
  • tshaddox 6y ago
    I definitely agree with the music survivor bias thing. This is also very noticeable in the “computer generated imagery in movies looks artificial” meme: you just didn’t notice all the extremely effective and convincing CGI. But I’m curious, what are the examples of great websites “back in the day” that have stood the test of time and would be considered good web development today?
    • bombcar 6y ago
      Wikipedia and Zombo.com haven’t changed much.
    • notjustanymike 6y ago
      You're on one right now. Although it'd benefit from some mobile compatibility...
    • derwiki 6y ago
      Craigslist
  • throwawayfire 6y ago
    > Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Not "just" survival bias. I think it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. As the genre has matured, popular/commercially successful music has depended more and more on fewer and fewer producers. Indeed, there are fewer commercially successful artists: the US Billboard Hot 100 Top 20 this week contains 3 tracks by Justin Bieber, 2 by the Weeknd, and 2 by Drake. That would have been unheard of.
    • toyg 6y ago
      > it's quite reasonable to take a position that there was more innovation and creativity in pop music in 1950-2000. A lot of people said the same in 1990, except their cutoff was 1980. All that synth is just rubbish, man, what about Led Zeppelin, that was new! Except they were just raiding blues and laying some electric guitar on top, of course, so really the cutoff is 1960; but to be honest them bluesmen were just recording stuff that had been sung in the cotton fields forever, so really the cutoff is the beginning of the slave trade; but really those melodies were just brought all the way from Africa, so really... etc etc etc
      • throwawayfire 6y ago
        I think this essentially agrees with my point (that there was more creativity in the broad space of 'pop music' when pop music was a newer phenomenon). I appreciate the reminder that a lot of pop music has a longer history as it developed from Black music styles. Thanks.
    • bryanlarsen 6y ago
      I think you've got that completely backwards. 2000 is about the time that the "long tail" exploded, where Youtube and Spotify made non-top 40 music a lot easier to find. In consequence there is a lot more really good music available today than there was pre-internet and it's a lot easier to find. It's not on the radio, but that's always been the case.
      • 6y ago
  • coldtea 6y ago
    >I read it and feel it's the same as how we perceive modern music. Everyone says music "used to be better" but that's just survival bias. Well, if the top 100 tracks from, say, 1961 to 2021 progressively get less musically diverse, with simpler chords, less harmonies, less timbral variety, lesser melodies, more repeatition, less dynamics, less genre variety, more infantile lyrics (something that has been studied and measured several time, e.g: ), etc, then it's not some "survival bias". https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346997561_Why_are_song_lyrics_becoming_simpler_A_time_series_analysis_of_lyrical_complexity_in_six_decades_of_American_popular_music https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346997561_Why_are_s... https://newatlas.com/pop-music-trends/23535/ https://newatlas.com/pop-music-trends/23535/ https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00521 https://www.nature.com/articles/srep00521 https://www.res.org.uk/resources-page/economics-of-music-chart-toppers--growing-concentration-and-less-variety-of-songs.html https://www.res.org.uk/resources-page/economics-of-music-cha... https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/ https://pudding.cool/2018/05/similarity/
    • bryanlarsen 6y ago
      To be fair, you have to adjust for the relevance of top 100. In the past the top 100 was the only thing most people were exposed to because that's all the radio played. Today Spotify and Youtube and their recommendation algorithms make the top 100 almost completely irrelevant.
      • radicalbyte 6y ago
        The size too: there are far more songs released now than in the 1960s. So it makes sense that the "creme" on the top is more homogenised.
        • zepto 6y ago
          Why does that make sense? More available music should imply a more varied range of good music to rise to the top.
          • 6y ago
  • antirez 6y ago
    I have a different opinion. When we moved from the old way to semantical HTML5 generated still server side but which the layout was defined by the finally mature CSS, with the dynamic parts handed by JavaScript and RPCs, everybody agreed it was better. Such web was faster, more compatible, simpler to parse, and so forth. I think that, if in the 20 years that followed, frontend development would progress in the same direction of improvements, everybody would agree again now. And indeed everybody agrees that JavaScript itself is now better as it is the modern web APIs. If the rest is so controversial there must be a reason.
    • arcturus17 6y ago
      I’ve heard and read stories from seasoned engineers, here on HN and elsewhere, that say that FE dev was as prone to tire fires back then as it is now, so I don’t think that point is as incontrovertible as you claim it to be. Some of those seasoned old-school engineers have, believe it or not, embraced modern FE frameworks and architectures and wouldn’t go back to the old thing if you paid them to do so. I’ve seen testimonials here on HN and surely it must be a factor in the world moving in this direction - it was not the juniors who made these decisions after all.
      • antirez 6y ago
        My point is different: I said that true evolution from tables to create the layout, continuos refreshes of the page to update the state, to a better development environment was universally recognized. And if it was again a case of good design, everybody would see it. If many voices are talking about over engineering now I bet there is a reason.
  • krrishd 6y ago
    OTOH, i think you can actually measure the quality and accessibility of tooling based on how abundant the long tail of mediocrity/low-quality output there is. in music’s case, one of the replies to this comment describes decline in musical complexity/sophistication, which i’d personally attribute to democratization of the tools (which are also much more powerful, allowing kids w computers to do what took whole teams and studios full of equipment before). so i think only seeing high quality UIs in the wild is more of a mixed bag than is intuitive to us — a world absent of shitty soundcloud rap is a world with worse music tooling.
• Waterluvian 6y ago
  I think this is more about the limitations of our perceptions given we live such short focused lives.
• criddell 6y ago
  If ECMAScript, HTML, and the DOM didn't exist and you were asked to create a specification for applications where the client UI is remote, possibly very resource constrained with a connection to the back end that may be slow and only mostly reliable, what would you invent? Is there a better model already out there that isn't used because Javascript + HTML has sucked all of the oxygen out of the room?
  • Const-me 6y ago
    Depends on use case, but for general purpose apps MS XAML platforms are IMO better. They were designed for rich GUI from the start and it shows. The main downside, they only work on Windows, MS once had Silverlight for Mac but it wasn't particularly good.
  • pjmlp 6y ago
    X Windows was an option back in the 90's, and with frameworks like Motif++ it was kind of ok.
    • criddell 6y ago
      Does X scale? Can you have thousands or even millions of simultaneous clients hitting a server?
      • toast0 6y ago
        So, X flips the nouns, and the server is the part where the user sits, and the client is the part where the data processing happens. It used to be possible (and done) to have a thin client X server that would have the whole desktop running elsewhere. You could run a computer lab with a bunch of thin clients and a handful of desktop servers for lack of a better word. That was probably hundreds, maybe thousands. Since then, though, X moved a lot more work from the Xserver to the clients; text is almost exclusively rendered on the client and passed as an image to the server to display. If you did a classical experience, it might work ok to millions, but the user experience would have to be pretty meager. There's also the issue that there's not really a good way to sandbox different X clients; so nobody in their right mind would let a random internet server connect to their Xserver. Connectivity issues abound as well.
• Drew_ 6y ago
  > Others say that the web is slow because of ADs This is pretty much objective truth in my mind. I might agree with people who hate the web if I always had to browse with ads enabled.
  • arcturus17 6y ago
    My worst experiences in the web come from mobile media (news) sites where I can’t block ads. They are absolute dumpster fires. Everything else, including the aforementioned sites when ads are blocked, is pretty decent in my experience.