33 ms·

Web development is running into the wrong direction

21 points by greatgib 5y ago

haxiomic 5y ago
Couldn’t agree more: the attitude I’ve developed as I’ve progressed through seeing many web and native projects from conception to completion is that adding a new tool or dependency is not as cheap as it first seems - each new tool compounds complexity, makes it harder for others to contribute and is a source of future fragility to the project I suspect the web’s low barrier to entry (which is a wonderful thing) means a large proportion of developers are relatively junior and the prevailing voices encouraging these development patterns reflect this The browser stack is incredible and you can make great things and have a wonderful experience building them but I would avoid listening to popular takes on how to do it - you’ll have a better time working from first principles and just using what makes sense to you given your experience I’m curious to hear other options on this but over time when reviewing a library or tool I’ve come to learn different signals: a library or tool with a website with serious design effort put into it has become to me a signal to be seriously sceptical of value - doubly so if it features the phrase “blazing fast”. And a tool presented with html 1.0 almost zero CSS, Fabrice Bellard-style [0], that’s the good stuff worth paying attention to [0] https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/
moasda 5y ago
Frontend development has had great momentum in recent years. Due to improved JavaScript execution speed a lot of business logic was implemented on frontend side. This lead to a lot of powerful JavaScript frameworks like vue.js, Angular, and React. But maintenance is still a big pain as the web browsers are your "operating systems" and they are quite heterogeneous and they have changed very fast in the last years.
maxharris 5y ago
I started writing native apps in Swift a year ago and have not looked back. The Native APIs are far superior to web APIs if your goal is to deliver the best app to the end user. The biggest downsides are Apple's poor documentation and lack of open alternatives to its own App Store. So, I'd like to see open, non-web alternatives to Apple's walled garden that offer the same technology and similar APIs. I'd be overjoyed to see something competitive with the latest mini-LED iPad Pro, running Haiku... The browser is great for documents and nothing more. The best way to save the web is to stop visiting websites that require JavaScript.
andrewmcwatters 5y ago
I know this will sound like a Luddite's opinion, but as soon as you need npm for your project, because of a technical decision one has made, you've introduced difficult to remove complexity. This is unfortunately at odds with what any reasonable software manager can tolerate, because developers on a team will introduce regressions, so you need to be able to test changes. I don't think web development has in any meaningful way progressed past manually choosing dependencies per-page with CDN'ized resources. When one chooses to rely on a package manager, you've separated yourself one significant degree from understanding exactly what is loaded on a page, which by necessity requires additional tooling to combat resource consumption growth. Any experienced software developer knows from having studied highly performant, widely used software that the fastest software is the software that does nothing. As haxiomic mentioned, if a library tells you its "blazing fast" you're being peddled to.

21 points by greatgib 5y ago

Couldn’t agree more: the attitude I’ve developed as I’ve progressed through seeing many web and native projects from conception to completion is that adding a new tool or dependency is not as cheap as it first seems - each new tool compounds complexity, makes it harder for others to contribute and is a source of future fragility to the project I suspect the web’s low barrier to entry (which is a wonderful thing) means a large proportion of developers are relatively junior and the prevailing voices encouraging these development patterns reflect this The browser stack is incredible and you can make great things and have a wonderful experience building them but I would avoid listening to popular takes on how to do it - you’ll have a better time working from first principles and just using what makes sense to you given your experience I’m curious to hear other options on this but over time when reviewing a library or tool I’ve come to learn different signals: a library or tool with a website with serious design effort put into it has become to me a signal to be seriously sceptical of value - doubly so if it features the phrase “blazing fast”. And a tool presented with html 1.0 almost zero CSS, Fabrice Bellard-style [0], that’s the good stuff worth paying attention to [0] https://bellard.org/ https://bellard.org/

moasda 5y ago

Frontend development has had great momentum in recent years. Due to improved JavaScript execution speed a lot of business logic was implemented on frontend side. This lead to a lot of powerful JavaScript frameworks like vue.js, Angular, and React. But maintenance is still a big pain as the web browsers are your "operating systems" and they are quite heterogeneous and they have changed very fast in the last years.

maxharris 5y ago

I started writing native apps in Swift a year ago and have not looked back. The Native APIs are far superior to web APIs if your goal is to deliver the best app to the end user. The biggest downsides are Apple's poor documentation and lack of open alternatives to its own App Store. So, I'd like to see open, non-web alternatives to Apple's walled garden that offer the same technology and similar APIs. I'd be overjoyed to see something competitive with the latest mini-LED iPad Pro, running Haiku... The browser is great for documents and nothing more. The best way to save the web is to stop visiting websites that require JavaScript.

andrewmcwatters 5y ago

I know this will sound like a Luddite's opinion, but as soon as you need npm for your project, because of a technical decision one has made, you've introduced difficult to remove complexity. This is unfortunately at odds with what any reasonable software manager can tolerate, because developers on a team will introduce regressions, so you need to be able to test changes. I don't think web development has in any meaningful way progressed past manually choosing dependencies per-page with CDN'ized resources. When one chooses to rely on a package manager, you've separated yourself one significant degree from understanding exactly what is loaded on a page, which by necessity requires additional tooling to combat resource consumption growth. Any experienced software developer knows from having studied highly performant, widely used software that the fastest software is the software that does nothing. As haxiomic mentioned, if a library tells you its "blazing fast" you're being peddled to.