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> UIs are inherently a painful domain No they aren't. Developers think their a painful domain because they are the ones that introduce the complexity in the n

by dham 5y ago

> UIs are inherently a painful domain No they aren't. Developers think their a painful domain because they are the ones that introduce the complexity in the name of the customer who doesn't care, to increase the developers salary in some kind of crazy Ponzi scheme.

steve_adams_86 5y ago
I’ve been working on UIs for 15 years and when I read comments like this I have to wonder if you’ve worked on complex, stateful, feature-rich UIs. The potential for bugs to appear is almost exponential as you add layers, and it isn’t really the fault of the developer so much as the nature of nested behaviours. This is true in any environment, but easier to manage when human beings aren’t the ones executing your code in non-deterministic ways in variable execution settings. The tools we have in the browser are excellent up to a point. I think the challenge comes when you need to create reusable abstractions around them several layers deep. There are tools which help manage these challenges really well, like state charts, but they aren’t perfect and they come with their own challenges. The reality (I think) is that UIs can present quite incredible complexity, and creating tools with approachable APIs to help tame the complexity is a legitimately huge challenge. It could be that I’m a bad software developer (most days I’m pretty sure there’s some truth in that), but I’m passionate and spend a lot of time deep in this space and exploring ways to make it better. It isn’t rocket science, but it isn’t digging holes either. The react team is a bunch of smart people and they’re doing good work on solving a tough challenge. I don’t see a Ponzi scheme at all. Sorry if I’ve missed some sarcasm or something here - feel free to disregard if that’s the case (or if it isn’t, too)
Strom 5y ago
Text alone is already a painful domain [1][2] and text is just a small subset of the full UI domain. -- [1] https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ [2] https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/
sam0x17 4y ago
One thing I've found is that things used to be a lot simpler. We've added tons of complexity in the last 15 years, but the fundamentals of web pages and the UI controls in them largely have stayed the same. We've largely moved backwards. And what's worse, I can't even hire junior devs who know how to do things the old simple way anymore. It's framework or bust now.

by dham 5y ago

steve_adams_86 5y ago

I’ve been working on UIs for 15 years and when I read comments like this I have to wonder if you’ve worked on complex, stateful, feature-rich UIs. The potential for bugs to appear is almost exponential as you add layers, and it isn’t really the fault of the developer so much as the nature of nested behaviours. This is true in any environment, but easier to manage when human beings aren’t the ones executing your code in non-deterministic ways in variable execution settings. The tools we have in the browser are excellent up to a point. I think the challenge comes when you need to create reusable abstractions around them several layers deep. There are tools which help manage these challenges really well, like state charts, but they aren’t perfect and they come with their own challenges. The reality (I think) is that UIs can present quite incredible complexity, and creating tools with approachable APIs to help tame the complexity is a legitimately huge challenge. It could be that I’m a bad software developer (most days I’m pretty sure there’s some truth in that), but I’m passionate and spend a lot of time deep in this space and exploring ways to make it better. It isn’t rocket science, but it isn’t digging holes either. The react team is a bunch of smart people and they’re doing good work on solving a tough challenge. I don’t see a Ponzi scheme at all. Sorry if I’ve missed some sarcasm or something here - feel free to disregard if that’s the case (or if it isn’t, too)

Strom 5y ago

Text alone is already a painful domain [1][2] and text is just a small subset of the full UI domain. -- [1] https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ https://gankra.github.io/blah/text-hates-you/ [2] https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/ https://lord.io/text-editing-hates-you-too/

sam0x17 4y ago

One thing I've found is that things used to be a lot simpler. We've added tons of complexity in the last 15 years, but the fundamentals of web pages and the UI controls in them largely have stayed the same. We've largely moved backwards. And what's worse, I can't even hire junior devs who know how to do things the old simple way anymore. It's framework or bust now.