4 ms·

Here’s what I think. A lot of really smart people ended up in web development and now they have no outlet for their intelligence or creativity so they just keep

Here’s what I think. A lot of really smart people ended up in web development and now they have no outlet for their intelligence or creativity so they just keep changing the tools around.

deltaonefour 4y ago
I think the opposite. The tools keep changing because they think they have a solution to a problem and they end up creating something that's relatively ineffective. If you been in other areas of software engineering like embedded development, OS development, language development, database development, game development.... then you will see that Web development is the easiest and most accessible. The filter for intelligence in web dev is much less stringent and thus the people in web development tend to reflect that. Not trying to offend anyone. I've been a web developer most of my career and I switched to embedded development and I have to say, web dev is definitely really easy.
- woojoo666 4y ago
  It's in fact one of web devs strengths. Web dev cares about UX, so they design it to be accessible. A lot of these libraries and frameworks are about making complex patterns (like lazy loading) easy to do. The hard parts of web dev are still hard (optimizations, caching, architecture, etc), but the entry level is low and there is an abundance of great resources and tooling to help you as you ramp up in complexity.
  - deltaonefour 4y ago
    >(optimizations, caching, architecture, etc) These things are trivial compared to what other fields of software engineering have to deal with (and other fields have to deal with all this stuff too along with extra harder stuff as well) At the most advanced levels of pure web dev it is still FAR easier then other fields of programming. It only gets a bit harder at massive massive scale, which 99% of developers are shielded from through frameworks or the fact that the company itself doesn't deal with that level of scale.
    - Dracophoenix 4y ago
      > At the most advanced levels of pure web dev And what's that level exactly? Creating one's own markup language or browser engine from scratch?
      - deltaonefour 4y ago
        Nah. That's crossing over to not being a web dev anymore if you're writing a browser engine in C++ and the renderer is in vulkan or opengl. If someones writing a rendering engine in javascript and html. Well, that person is basically what I'm talking about in my initial post; a person who thinks he's solving some problem but not. It's blurry in this area. It's hard to fully define and arguing about the borders of this field is sort of pointless. Take the definition to be fuzzy but to be referring to the Majority of Web Developers in general, and advanced web developers to be people that are harder to define.
        Dracophoenix 4y ago
        It doesn't take a complicated renderer to make a usable browser. The very first web dev built his own browser in a few megabytes of C and created his own markup language (based on SGML). Everything we use today is based on that work. So I think it's a relevant marker for when the line between advanced web development and "regular" coding gets blurry. >It's hard to fully define and arguing about the borders of this field is sort of pointless. I don't think it's pointless at all. If advanced pure web dev is relatively less complicated ,even at the highest levels, then it's important to define where the line ends and begins. I might not have the answer, but I think it's an interesting question worth asking instead of leaving such definitions up to a God of the Gaps-like argument.
        deltaonefour 4y ago
        >It doesn't take a complicated renderer to make a usable browser. 99.9% of front end web developers and back-end as well won't even know how to begin to do this in C or C++. Nowadays to even build a trivial renderer in C or C++ using vulkan is not something someone can pull up a tutorial for and learn. Not like React or Vue or even some backend framework. >I don't think it's pointless at all. If advanced pure web dev is relatively less complicated ,even at the highest levels, then it's important to define where the line ends and begins You accomplish nothing with this other then to put one set of developers in a stupid bucket and another set in a smart bucket. These buckets are real but specifying and talking about the bucket only pisses people off. Additionally the line is very complicated and has several dimensions and in many areas the line is not a line, but a gradient. You'd only be aware of of this dichotomy if you worked outside of web development (and not in datascience).
irrational 4y ago
This is exactly what I think happened. They came from environments were things were much more complicated and pushed that complexity onto web development.
- idlehand 4y ago
  Unfortunately that sentiment is just backend developer elitism. The DOM, frontend state, backend state, and networking end up creating considerable complexity once you start creating more dynamic web applications.
  - eurasiantiger 4y ago
    The frontend is essentially a black box for most developers, even most frontend developers. No wonder it’s hated.
  - irrational 4y ago
    I’m not a backend developer. I’ve been working on the front end since 1996.
mythrwy 4y ago
It could be that. Here's my conspiracy theory: It's a jobs program.

Here’s what I think. A lot of really smart people ended up in web development and now they have no outlet for their intelligence or creativity so they just keep changing the tools around.

deltaonefour 4y ago

I think the opposite. The tools keep changing because they think they have a solution to a problem and they end up creating something that's relatively ineffective. If you been in other areas of software engineering like embedded development, OS development, language development, database development, game development.... then you will see that Web development is the easiest and most accessible. The filter for intelligence in web dev is much less stringent and thus the people in web development tend to reflect that. Not trying to offend anyone. I've been a web developer most of my career and I switched to embedded development and I have to say, web dev is definitely really easy.

woojoo666 4y ago
It's in fact one of web devs strengths. Web dev cares about UX, so they design it to be accessible. A lot of these libraries and frameworks are about making complex patterns (like lazy loading) easy to do. The hard parts of web dev are still hard (optimizations, caching, architecture, etc), but the entry level is low and there is an abundance of great resources and tooling to help you as you ramp up in complexity.
- deltaonefour 4y ago
  >(optimizations, caching, architecture, etc) These things are trivial compared to what other fields of software engineering have to deal with (and other fields have to deal with all this stuff too along with extra harder stuff as well) At the most advanced levels of pure web dev it is still FAR easier then other fields of programming. It only gets a bit harder at massive massive scale, which 99% of developers are shielded from through frameworks or the fact that the company itself doesn't deal with that level of scale.
  - Dracophoenix 4y ago
    > At the most advanced levels of pure web dev And what's that level exactly? Creating one's own markup language or browser engine from scratch?
    - deltaonefour 4y ago
      Nah. That's crossing over to not being a web dev anymore if you're writing a browser engine in C++ and the renderer is in vulkan or opengl. If someones writing a rendering engine in javascript and html. Well, that person is basically what I'm talking about in my initial post; a person who thinks he's solving some problem but not. It's blurry in this area. It's hard to fully define and arguing about the borders of this field is sort of pointless. Take the definition to be fuzzy but to be referring to the Majority of Web Developers in general, and advanced web developers to be people that are harder to define.
      - Dracophoenix 4y ago
        It doesn't take a complicated renderer to make a usable browser. The very first web dev built his own browser in a few megabytes of C and created his own markup language (based on SGML). Everything we use today is based on that work. So I think it's a relevant marker for when the line between advanced web development and "regular" coding gets blurry. >It's hard to fully define and arguing about the borders of this field is sort of pointless. I don't think it's pointless at all. If advanced pure web dev is relatively less complicated ,even at the highest levels, then it's important to define where the line ends and begins. I might not have the answer, but I think it's an interesting question worth asking instead of leaving such definitions up to a God of the Gaps-like argument.
        deltaonefour 4y ago
        >It doesn't take a complicated renderer to make a usable browser. 99.9% of front end web developers and back-end as well won't even know how to begin to do this in C or C++. Nowadays to even build a trivial renderer in C or C++ using vulkan is not something someone can pull up a tutorial for and learn. Not like React or Vue or even some backend framework. >I don't think it's pointless at all. If advanced pure web dev is relatively less complicated ,even at the highest levels, then it's important to define where the line ends and begins You accomplish nothing with this other then to put one set of developers in a stupid bucket and another set in a smart bucket. These buckets are real but specifying and talking about the bucket only pisses people off. Additionally the line is very complicated and has several dimensions and in many areas the line is not a line, but a gradient. You'd only be aware of of this dichotomy if you worked outside of web development (and not in datascience).

irrational 4y ago

This is exactly what I think happened. They came from environments were things were much more complicated and pushed that complexity onto web development.

idlehand 4y ago
Unfortunately that sentiment is just backend developer elitism. The DOM, frontend state, backend state, and networking end up creating considerable complexity once you start creating more dynamic web applications.
- eurasiantiger 4y ago
  The frontend is essentially a black box for most developers, even most frontend developers. No wonder it’s hated.
- irrational 4y ago
  I’m not a backend developer. I’ve been working on the front end since 1996.

mythrwy 4y ago

It could be that. Here's my conspiracy theory: It's a jobs program.