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I've been in the industry since the days of VB6 (which I loved). I've never been more productive than I was with VB6 and WinForms. That said, UI has always been

I've been in the industry since the days of VB6 (which I loved). I've never been more productive than I was with VB6 and WinForms. That said, UI has always been a mess, even then. The more feature-rich you want your UI, the gnarlier and messier it gets. Everyone always likes to blame the front-end engineers for being slovenly, but my experience is that; UI is just messy. It's just hard to program cleanly. Not to mention, modern UIs are generally more complex than the old VB days (at least, my programs are): they have to adjust to various screen sizes. They are almost always client/server apps and need to account for more failure modes. They are built on top of a mess of a document layer that was never intended to be an application layer. This last point is the reason the front-end space has so much churn. It's still an unsolved problem, and may never be well-solved, but I'm glad folks are trying to solve it. React was a step-change for me in terms of building better UIs. I'm looking forward to the next step-change. Lastly, before someone makes the argument: no; we aren't going to stop building applications on top of the DOM + CSS. Not until someone comes up with an alternative that gives us the same ease of distribution and broad base adoption. Edit: I should note, I'm a full-stack dev, and have been more back-end than front-end for most of the early part of my career. The backend is always easier for me at least, but I don't think it's because front-end devs are hipsters.

bradly 5y ago
VB6 was great. I also really enjoyed RealBasic for desktop apps on the Mac. It just worked. Network programming with sockets was so simple. Now I open XCode and am completely overwhelmed.
marcellus23 5y ago
> UI is just messy. It's just hard to program cleanly. I'm an almost entirely frontend dev (iOS + macOS now, web development in the past) and this is what I've come to believe. It's easy to program UI cleanly if it's extremely basic or not very usable — but the second you want an animated transition between states, or to remember what the user checked on the last page so that you can keep it checked on this page, or any number of other things that you need to do if you actually want people to _enjoy using your software_, it gets much harder. My take is it's because building UI is building software for humans, and humans often want behavior that doesn't allow for clean abstraction. Backend dev is more about building for other software -- not that it's easier, just a different set of problems.
- thr0wawayf00 5y ago
  > My take is it's because building UI is building software for humans, and humans often want behavior that doesn't allow for clean abstraction. Backend dev is more about building for other software -- not that it's easier, just a different set of problems. Never really thought about it this way but I completely agree
deleted 5y ago
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frolicker 5y ago
I have been in the industry since punch cards were a thing and servers took up multiple rooms. I've never been more productive. UI has gotten a lot better since those days and I have migrated my efforts to use frameworks such as Vue.js which is sofar the most elegant and modern approach for doing UI work. Creating a desktop app is very easy with electron js although beit a bit heavy and not the most effecient in terms of memory, cpu cycles, etc but it's easier than punch card days I used to enjoy.
- muttantt 5y ago
  Hard to beat Vue, especially when combined with Quasar Framework. The absolute simplest way to deliver SaaS and enterprise apps.
_fat_santa 5y ago
Back when I studying CS and as Junior, I would laugh at memes about "Frontend vs Backend" where they described the Frontend as this pretty pasture and the Backend as this god forsaken place of spaghetti code. In a way I find this meme even funnier now because of how backwards it is. Often times it's the backend that's really clean and organized and the frontend is a hot mess.
- shynrou 5y ago
  I have worked in both kinds of projects. Those where the backend was the mess and those where the frontend was it. Good devs, who take care and are given the time to do it right, can create both in clean manner. I think usually the problem why frontend tends to get messy: There is usually a lot more pressure, unclear goals and instructions involved. And of cause a foundational technology that is already incredibly messy especially if you have a wide browser support goal.
svachalek 5y ago
I've also been doing both sides since the 90s and it's funny how people speak of "just" frontend coding. It has lots of async/parallel issues with messy constraints, and it's the dumping ground for dirty data and error handling issues. It's often done poorly, but doing it right is a very complex problem.

bradly 5y ago

VB6 was great. I also really enjoyed RealBasic for desktop apps on the Mac. It just worked. Network programming with sockets was so simple. Now I open XCode and am completely overwhelmed.

marcellus23 5y ago

> UI is just messy. It's just hard to program cleanly. I'm an almost entirely frontend dev (iOS + macOS now, web development in the past) and this is what I've come to believe. It's easy to program UI cleanly if it's extremely basic or not very usable — but the second you want an animated transition between states, or to remember what the user checked on the last page so that you can keep it checked on this page, or any number of other things that you need to do if you actually want people to _enjoy using your software_, it gets much harder. My take is it's because building UI is building software for humans, and humans often want behavior that doesn't allow for clean abstraction. Backend dev is more about building for other software -- not that it's easier, just a different set of problems.

thr0wawayf00 5y ago
> My take is it's because building UI is building software for humans, and humans often want behavior that doesn't allow for clean abstraction. Backend dev is more about building for other software -- not that it's easier, just a different set of problems. Never really thought about it this way but I completely agree

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

frolicker 5y ago

I have been in the industry since punch cards were a thing and servers took up multiple rooms. I've never been more productive. UI has gotten a lot better since those days and I have migrated my efforts to use frameworks such as Vue.js which is sofar the most elegant and modern approach for doing UI work. Creating a desktop app is very easy with electron js although beit a bit heavy and not the most effecient in terms of memory, cpu cycles, etc but it's easier than punch card days I used to enjoy.

muttantt 5y ago
Hard to beat Vue, especially when combined with Quasar Framework. The absolute simplest way to deliver SaaS and enterprise apps.

_fat_santa 5y ago

Back when I studying CS and as Junior, I would laugh at memes about "Frontend vs Backend" where they described the Frontend as this pretty pasture and the Backend as this god forsaken place of spaghetti code. In a way I find this meme even funnier now because of how backwards it is. Often times it's the backend that's really clean and organized and the frontend is a hot mess.

shynrou 5y ago
I have worked in both kinds of projects. Those where the backend was the mess and those where the frontend was it. Good devs, who take care and are given the time to do it right, can create both in clean manner. I think usually the problem why frontend tends to get messy: There is usually a lot more pressure, unclear goals and instructions involved. And of cause a foundational technology that is already incredibly messy especially if you have a wide browser support goal.

svachalek 5y ago

I've also been doing both sides since the 90s and it's funny how people speak of "just" frontend coding. It has lots of async/parallel issues with messy constraints, and it's the dumping ground for dirty data and error handling issues. It's often done poorly, but doing it right is a very complex problem.