5 ms·

I have known this for many years but found it difficult to explain to others. Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and

by mojuba 5y ago

I have known this for many years but found it difficult to explain to others. Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. Though scalable backends are increasingly getting their own layers of complexity these days, but still, on the backend you will never deal with frameworks with millions of entry points. If you don't believe me, UIKit alone exposes I think about half a million public symbols. Nevertheless, I chose the path of the frontend (specifically mobile) because it fascinates me when a lot of people see on their screens something that you have built. A lot more than building a system that only the internal frontend devs are going to appreciate (or not).

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago
Something I've noticed is that when you're building a backend, your program only ever interfaces with other programs. You can establish a reasonably predictable protocol. But when you build a front-end, you're interfacing with the human brain and all the messiness that that entails. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do well.
- mojuba 5y ago
  This is exactly why frontends are orders of magnitudes more difficult to build if equal quality standards are applied to both back and front ends. A front end is a state machine that relies on a bunch of enormous framework layers. Give me an app, mobile or web, and I'll find a glitch or two in the first few minutes of using it. Backends on the other hand, like you said, only ever talk to other programs. And that means building a 100% correct and bug free backend system is not such a fantastical goal.
  - Banana699 5y ago
    >Give me an app, mobile or web, and I'll find a glitch or two in the first few minutes of using it I find that a very strong claim, is it rhetorical or meant literally? If the latter, what can you find in (say) whatsapp* ? (*: aside from messages delaying or appearing out-of-write-order, which are probably backend bugs inevitably arising from its distributed nature)
    - mojuba 5y ago
      I deleted WhatsApp a while ago so can't say right now. It is a pretty mature app that hasn't added big features in years I think, so I wouldn't expect a lot of bugs in it, but take a look at their version history on App Store, there are plenty of purely bug fix releases only this year.
- legulere 5y ago
  I think the biggest difficulty in front ends is that they are statefull. Backends are usually stateless and pass through data from a data store or a cache.
  - valenterry 5y ago
    It's the opposite. Frontends are statefull (backends are often also), but frontends don't deal with long living data. Everytime the app/site is reloaded/restarted, it starts with a fresh state. Backend however often has accumulated a lot of data tech debt over the time.
jensensbutton 5y ago
> Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. Evidence would suggest otherwise. I can build a decent and reliable frontend with a no code solution. That's not to say frontend is "easy", just that trying to say which is harder is ridiculous. They're different. I personally don't like working on frontends because it feels like getting on a hamster wheel that spins faster than in any other domain. ymmv though.
- woah 5y ago
  Seems like you don't know much about building frontends.
  - jensensbutton 5y ago
    Sounds like you don't know much about building backends.
- mojuba 5y ago
  > I can build a decent and reliable frontend with a no code solution Things that can be built that way are not interesting. Of course you can just assemble online stores without writing a single line of code, but that's not exactly programming. We are talking about frontends that have some sort of novelty or at least non-standard flows in them.
  - jensensbutton 5y ago
    The parent made no such distinction. And your comment applies to just as much to backends as frontends. If a backend is "easy" to make reliable then it's probably not very interesting.
- thrashh 5y ago
  A backend can just say ‘no’ if it gets a number in a format it doesn’t like. If a user enters a number incorrectly on a frontend, a frontend can’t just say no. It might have to try its best to parse the number, or if it can’t, the error has to be presented in a user friendly way. A frontend can’t just throw an exception and say Bad Request.
tux3 5y ago
>If you don't believe me, UIKit alone exposes I think about half a million public symbols. That's interesting, do you have a source for this? For reference the Qt5 framework only has about 25k publicly documented functions and the shared libs expose ~100k symbols.
- blacktriangle 5y ago
  I think that passes the smell test. They're at the same order of magnitude and UIKit includes a ton of optional functionality that is situationally used where Qt would likely pull in a 3rd party lib.
- mojuba 5y ago
  Honestly I don't remember but someone counted all the public symbols which included constants too.
valenterry 5y ago
> Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. That's actually true. What makes backends harder (or rather slower?) to build though is the longlivety of the data involved. Backends that don't deal with data are indeed simpler than frontends in my experience. > The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people That has nothing to do with the complexity. It comes from the fact that frontend is more approachable and also more hip. It attracts more "amateurs" or people who don't know what they are doing, for one reason or another. The result is that technology on the backend-side is more advanced and mature than on the frontend side - though that might be a bit subjective and not apply to specific areas. You actually give your own example: "frameworks with millions of entry points" and a dozen new ones every year. :) However, I think frontend is in the progress of catching up - e.g. Javascript is currently replaced with Typescript, which is not being looked down upon by backend people, at least not as much.
- vagrantJin 5y ago
  > Javascript is currently replaced with Typescript, which is not being looked down upon by backend people, at least not as much. For some reason - unbeknownst to God and his prophets, very smart, intelligent folk want to use a BMX as farming tool to plough and till the soil. Now we aren't going to ask silly questions like - why use a bmx when you have a whole barn full of tractors. No. We are going to ask how to get maximum output from the pedal mechanism. How to replace the human with a robot so we plough faster and how best to install solar panels for day time power source as well as highly specialized lithium ion cells made specifically for this purpose, so we can cover more ground. A farmer, who has been farming for his whole life, really belived the tractors with billions of man hours in commercial farms, trusty, easy to fix and operate with a plethora of mechanics to fix and improve them. But that just gives the farmer a vague existential crisis, what really gets him in the dumps is how they get the the goods to and from the farm. See he has big lumbering trailers and a few modernis rigs. Hes been using them forever, they are insured and also have possibly the highest reliability of transport. The new farmers merely smirk at the diesel autos. They have sonething better, smaller, faster and many of it. Quadbikes hooked to trailers. Hundreds and thousands of them. Apparently a central computer, bless it, controls and orchestrates the many quad bikes. The old farmer feels lost and helpless everytime he goes out to harvest. His trusty harvester looks impossibly old and slow, steady as she goes. No matter that she can haul a few hundred tons a week, it is nowhere new sophistacted than the automated quadbikes - zipping in and out with their 80kg loads at break neck speed. It's like watching a symphony. He wonders what they actually grow there. Seeing such advanced alien technology ,to him at least, these new farmers must be planting something more delicate than rice, yield higher than wheat, and sturdier than simple corn. Surely, he reasons, his life is all but over. But is it? The FOMO chronicles, Afseyuk, 2020
majormajor 5y ago
The difficulties of backends usually come from one of these areas that I don't think you're giving proper credit: - scale - a frontend shows one user's view at once, a backend may need to be updating state for millions of users without slowing anyone's experience down. But these sorts of things are somewhat different than just "backend code", it's often closely tied to infra and data designs, which doesn't necessarily look like "backend coding" but is critical to make the rest work. - business logic complexity - often the backend teams are tasked with working with frontend to figure out a simple, user-friendly API surface for the app and also to figure out how to make that work with the various not-written-down, not-even-fully-enumerated business logic permutations and backend-data permutations that could be going on. If they do their job right, the frontend can show different screens with values from the API ready to plug in for a particular scenario without having to worry about the combinatorial rules behind the scenes that led us to want to show the user THIS screen instead of any other one. The difficulty there isn't a mathematical or "hard" one, it's that the product team probably has no idea just how gnarly the set of business rules they sketched out actually gets. A backend has to support everything the frontend client can do today, but often ALSO support a bunch of things the public frontend apps don't yet do (whether this is for admin tasks, or for future readiness, or what). I'm not sure I see the significance of the number of symbols in UIKit - you usually don't need all of them, I assume, and I know that there are some common patterns that get re-used a lot. Is it so different from in backend when there are dozens of databases you could choose, and a bunch of frameworks for each of a bunch of different languages you could choose, but for most problems it's not going to make a huge difference? One thing that often hides the difficulty on backend is that the frontend team might be interacting with just one or two backend teams that then interact with a different set of teams behind them, etc. But the true "backend vs frontend" question has to include ALL of those teams, even the ones you don't directly interact with, since they're all in the critical path. "Hard frontend problems are harder than easy backend problems" - ok, sure. But that's not a very interesting comparison.
- mojuba 5y ago
  Someone else has already mentioned in this thread that backends only ever interact with other programs, not humans. This fact alone makes it easier to design, implement and scale. And like I said elsewhere it is in fact so much easier that a backend can be built to be 100% correct and bug free, while for any more or less interesting and useful frontend it is practically impossible to achieve.
gedy 5y ago
> The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. Agreed, personally when I've heard this, it's frequently due to the "backend" devs really struggling with the complexity of user interface needs, especially UI state. This is the root of a lot the "JavaScript is such a trainwreck" type comments too.
jayd16 5y ago
>The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. I think the high horse is because frontend dev is hard. The backend has more methodical tooling. Javascript is not considered a clean language even if it has improved. It would be nice if you could use clean modern tools but the web is forced to support legacy browsers so it is what it is. I personally like the full stack and don't look down in either direction, but I understand the sentiment.
- spdionis 5y ago
  I don't think backend people deny frontend is hard. The problem is frontend is hard for all the boring reasons.
dahfizz 5y ago
A backend dev may argue that the frontend is complicated _unnecessarily_. You don't need your bloated, complicated frameworks. In most cases, website would be better for the end user if you stopped trying to over-design the frontend. Frontend is hard so we use lots of frameworks which makes frontend hard so we use some more frameworks.....
api 5y ago
The most annoying thing about frontend is the shifting sands. Not only is it complex but APIs, browsers / windowing systems, OSes, and UI/UX fads are constantly shifting. You often have to rewrite the damn thing every few years or it looks "old," and when people see apps that look "old" they assume they're not maintained or are of low quality.
closeparen 5y ago
One problem may be that building specific units of product functionality is considered junior-level work. Doing so quickly and with high quality can get you a nice $20,000 bonus, but not the $200,000 RSU bump associated with promotion to the next level. A higher level engineer is meant to "scale her impact" by owning the architecture, the platform, the playground in which other engineers live. In backend world there are opportunities to do this in nearly any business domain or sufficiently complex problem. But a company only needs so many UI frameworks. As such we see very good, long tenured mobile and frontend engineers simply cranking out feature after feature. There's no career progression that way.
sdevonoes 5y ago
> Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. Backend: - running a migration on a table of 100 million rows... in MySQL 5.6. Well, things can get complicated. - building the infrastructure and monitoring of a k8s cluster - debugging concurrency bugs I think these topics are not really easier than their frontend counterparts. I do believe some aspects of frontend development are harder than some of backend development (and the other way around). I do not think, in general, that "backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends" though.

by mojuba 5y ago

tenaciousDaniel 5y ago

Something I've noticed is that when you're building a backend, your program only ever interfaces with other programs. You can establish a reasonably predictable protocol. But when you build a front-end, you're interfacing with the human brain and all the messiness that that entails. It's an incredibly difficult thing to do well.

mojuba 5y ago
This is exactly why frontends are orders of magnitudes more difficult to build if equal quality standards are applied to both back and front ends. A front end is a state machine that relies on a bunch of enormous framework layers. Give me an app, mobile or web, and I'll find a glitch or two in the first few minutes of using it. Backends on the other hand, like you said, only ever talk to other programs. And that means building a 100% correct and bug free backend system is not such a fantastical goal.
- Banana699 5y ago
  >Give me an app, mobile or web, and I'll find a glitch or two in the first few minutes of using it I find that a very strong claim, is it rhetorical or meant literally? If the latter, what can you find in (say) whatsapp* ? (*: aside from messages delaying or appearing out-of-write-order, which are probably backend bugs inevitably arising from its distributed nature)
  - mojuba 5y ago
    I deleted WhatsApp a while ago so can't say right now. It is a pretty mature app that hasn't added big features in years I think, so I wouldn't expect a lot of bugs in it, but take a look at their version history on App Store, there are plenty of purely bug fix releases only this year.
legulere 5y ago
I think the biggest difficulty in front ends is that they are statefull. Backends are usually stateless and pass through data from a data store or a cache.
- valenterry 5y ago
  It's the opposite. Frontends are statefull (backends are often also), but frontends don't deal with long living data. Everytime the app/site is reloaded/restarted, it starts with a fresh state. Backend however often has accumulated a lot of data tech debt over the time.

jensensbutton 5y ago

> Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. Evidence would suggest otherwise. I can build a decent and reliable frontend with a no code solution. That's not to say frontend is "easy", just that trying to say which is harder is ridiculous. They're different. I personally don't like working on frontends because it feels like getting on a hamster wheel that spins faster than in any other domain. ymmv though.

woah 5y ago
Seems like you don't know much about building frontends.
- jensensbutton 5y ago
  Sounds like you don't know much about building backends.
mojuba 5y ago
> I can build a decent and reliable frontend with a no code solution Things that can be built that way are not interesting. Of course you can just assemble online stores without writing a single line of code, but that's not exactly programming. We are talking about frontends that have some sort of novelty or at least non-standard flows in them.
- jensensbutton 5y ago
  The parent made no such distinction. And your comment applies to just as much to backends as frontends. If a backend is "easy" to make reliable then it's probably not very interesting.
thrashh 5y ago
A backend can just say ‘no’ if it gets a number in a format it doesn’t like. If a user enters a number incorrectly on a frontend, a frontend can’t just say no. It might have to try its best to parse the number, or if it can’t, the error has to be presented in a user friendly way. A frontend can’t just throw an exception and say Bad Request.

tux3 5y ago

>If you don't believe me, UIKit alone exposes I think about half a million public symbols. That's interesting, do you have a source for this? For reference the Qt5 framework only has about 25k publicly documented functions and the shared libs expose ~100k symbols.

blacktriangle 5y ago
I think that passes the smell test. They're at the same order of magnitude and UIKit includes a ton of optional functionality that is situationally used where Qt would likely pull in a 3rd party lib.
mojuba 5y ago
Honestly I don't remember but someone counted all the public symbols which included constants too.

valenterry 5y ago

> Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. That's actually true. What makes backends harder (or rather slower?) to build though is the longlivety of the data involved. Backends that don't deal with data are indeed simpler than frontends in my experience. > The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people That has nothing to do with the complexity. It comes from the fact that frontend is more approachable and also more hip. It attracts more "amateurs" or people who don't know what they are doing, for one reason or another. The result is that technology on the backend-side is more advanced and mature than on the frontend side - though that might be a bit subjective and not apply to specific areas. You actually give your own example: "frameworks with millions of entry points" and a dozen new ones every year. :) However, I think frontend is in the progress of catching up - e.g. Javascript is currently replaced with Typescript, which is not being looked down upon by backend people, at least not as much.

vagrantJin 5y ago
> Javascript is currently replaced with Typescript, which is not being looked down upon by backend people, at least not as much. For some reason - unbeknownst to God and his prophets, very smart, intelligent folk want to use a BMX as farming tool to plough and till the soil. Now we aren't going to ask silly questions like - why use a bmx when you have a whole barn full of tractors. No. We are going to ask how to get maximum output from the pedal mechanism. How to replace the human with a robot so we plough faster and how best to install solar panels for day time power source as well as highly specialized lithium ion cells made specifically for this purpose, so we can cover more ground. A farmer, who has been farming for his whole life, really belived the tractors with billions of man hours in commercial farms, trusty, easy to fix and operate with a plethora of mechanics to fix and improve them. But that just gives the farmer a vague existential crisis, what really gets him in the dumps is how they get the the goods to and from the farm. See he has big lumbering trailers and a few modernis rigs. Hes been using them forever, they are insured and also have possibly the highest reliability of transport. The new farmers merely smirk at the diesel autos. They have sonething better, smaller, faster and many of it. Quadbikes hooked to trailers. Hundreds and thousands of them. Apparently a central computer, bless it, controls and orchestrates the many quad bikes. The old farmer feels lost and helpless everytime he goes out to harvest. His trusty harvester looks impossibly old and slow, steady as she goes. No matter that she can haul a few hundred tons a week, it is nowhere new sophistacted than the automated quadbikes - zipping in and out with their 80kg loads at break neck speed. It's like watching a symphony. He wonders what they actually grow there. Seeing such advanced alien technology ,to him at least, these new farmers must be planting something more delicate than rice, yield higher than wheat, and sturdier than simple corn. Surely, he reasons, his life is all but over. But is it? The FOMO chronicles, Afseyuk, 2020

majormajor 5y ago

The difficulties of backends usually come from one of these areas that I don't think you're giving proper credit: - scale - a frontend shows one user's view at once, a backend may need to be updating state for millions of users without slowing anyone's experience down. But these sorts of things are somewhat different than just "backend code", it's often closely tied to infra and data designs, which doesn't necessarily look like "backend coding" but is critical to make the rest work. - business logic complexity - often the backend teams are tasked with working with frontend to figure out a simple, user-friendly API surface for the app and also to figure out how to make that work with the various not-written-down, not-even-fully-enumerated business logic permutations and backend-data permutations that could be going on. If they do their job right, the frontend can show different screens with values from the API ready to plug in for a particular scenario without having to worry about the combinatorial rules behind the scenes that led us to want to show the user THIS screen instead of any other one. The difficulty there isn't a mathematical or "hard" one, it's that the product team probably has no idea just how gnarly the set of business rules they sketched out actually gets. A backend has to support everything the frontend client can do today, but often ALSO support a bunch of things the public frontend apps don't yet do (whether this is for admin tasks, or for future readiness, or what). I'm not sure I see the significance of the number of symbols in UIKit - you usually don't need all of them, I assume, and I know that there are some common patterns that get re-used a lot. Is it so different from in backend when there are dozens of databases you could choose, and a bunch of frameworks for each of a bunch of different languages you could choose, but for most problems it's not going to make a huge difference? One thing that often hides the difficulty on backend is that the frontend team might be interacting with just one or two backend teams that then interact with a different set of teams behind them, etc. But the true "backend vs frontend" question has to include ALL of those teams, even the ones you don't directly interact with, since they're all in the critical path. "Hard frontend problems are harder than easy backend problems" - ok, sure. But that's not a very interesting comparison.

mojuba 5y ago
Someone else has already mentioned in this thread that backends only ever interact with other programs, not humans. This fact alone makes it easier to design, implement and scale. And like I said elsewhere it is in fact so much easier that a backend can be built to be 100% correct and bug free, while for any more or less interesting and useful frontend it is practically impossible to achieve.

gedy 5y ago

> The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. Agreed, personally when I've heard this, it's frequently due to the "backend" devs really struggling with the complexity of user interface needs, especially UI state. This is the root of a lot the "JavaScript is such a trainwreck" type comments too.

jayd16 5y ago

>The attitude of the backend people of looking down upon frontend people is really stupid and unsubstantiated. I think the high horse is because frontend dev is hard. The backend has more methodical tooling. Javascript is not considered a clean language even if it has improved. It would be nice if you could use clean modern tools but the web is forced to support legacy browsers so it is what it is. I personally like the full stack and don't look down in either direction, but I understand the sentiment.

spdionis 5y ago
I don't think backend people deny frontend is hard. The problem is frontend is hard for all the boring reasons.

dahfizz 5y ago

A backend dev may argue that the frontend is complicated _unnecessarily_. You don't need your bloated, complicated frameworks. In most cases, website would be better for the end user if you stopped trying to over-design the frontend. Frontend is hard so we use lots of frameworks which makes frontend hard so we use some more frameworks.....

api 5y ago

The most annoying thing about frontend is the shifting sands. Not only is it complex but APIs, browsers / windowing systems, OSes, and UI/UX fads are constantly shifting. You often have to rewrite the damn thing every few years or it looks "old," and when people see apps that look "old" they assume they're not maintained or are of low quality.

closeparen 5y ago

One problem may be that building specific units of product functionality is considered junior-level work. Doing so quickly and with high quality can get you a nice $20,000 bonus, but not the $200,000 RSU bump associated with promotion to the next level. A higher level engineer is meant to "scale her impact" by owning the architecture, the platform, the playground in which other engineers live. In backend world there are opportunities to do this in nearly any business domain or sufficiently complex problem. But a company only needs so many UI frameworks. As such we see very good, long tenured mobile and frontend engineers simply cranking out feature after feature. There's no career progression that way.

sdevonoes 5y ago

> Backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends, and I mean decent and reliable ones. Backend: - running a migration on a table of 100 million rows... in MySQL 5.6. Well, things can get complicated. - building the infrastructure and monitoring of a k8s cluster - debugging concurrency bugs I think these topics are not really easier than their frontend counterparts. I do believe some aspects of frontend development are harder than some of backend development (and the other way around). I do not think, in general, that "backends are so much easier to build compared to frontends" though.