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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

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.

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.