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> seems like a design choice intended to infantilize engineers and shelter them from reality. The entire front-end framework landscape is like this. It's all d

by bakugo 4y ago

> seems like a design choice intended to infantilize engineers and shelter them from reality. The entire front-end framework landscape is like this. It's all designed to appeal to the kind of "engineer" that just wants to copy paste code and have it work like magic without ever thinking about what's actually going on.

nailer 4y ago
This is exactly the “just use react” stereotype. Download a random react component from NPM and 90% chance they just added wrapper divs until they could get the CSS to (kind of) work.
andrewmcwatters 4y ago
It's just front-end engineering in general, you don't get this with people who work in other subfields of software engineering. I get it, though. It's OK until you need to learn and grow beyond it, which I think anyone doing this long enough will. It sucks that people learn this the hard way, though, and the only way to grow beyond this for people new to the field is to eventually get burned and learn there are other ways to do all of this. There are whole generations who don't know what session cookies are! And... that's just OK.
- Aeolun 4y ago
  > There are whole generations who don't know what session cookies are! I really enjoy JWTs, but the idea of sending all my user data on every request hadn’t occurred to me, and still feels mildly wasteful.
  - andrewmcwatters 4y ago
    Generally a session cookie requires that you send over a unique ID. That's usually it. If you use JWTs, you're sending over the same amount of data if not more, but now you have to do things yourself instead of just utilizing features browsers natively have. You could utilize a key system to gain the same advantage as not having to use persistence as one gets using JWTs when implementing session cookies, if you wanted, too.
tut-urut-utut 4y ago
What’s wrong with that? Let’s better spend time on important things instead of wasting time trying to make UI behave properly across a plethora of browsers, OSes and platforms.
- azangru 4y ago
  > instead of wasting time trying to make UI behave properly across a plethora of browsers, OSes and platforms Cross-browser compatibility was the problem that jquery was trying to solve back in 2008 or thereabouts. Not a problem that react is trying to solve in 2023.
epolanski 4y ago
And yet the sanest option for this, web components, keeps struggling.
- r3trohack3r 4y ago
  I've been using WebComponents a lot lately. My biggest gripe with them as a technology is that they have no way to associate a `<style>` tag in `<head>` with a ShadowDOM tree (short of cloning and injecting w/ JS). The only way to say "this CSS goes with this <template>" is to nest the `<style>` tag in `<template>` itself or painstakingly expose `part`s on everything you want to style. I'd really like a template selector for CSS where I can say something like `::template(#id) button` to select all buttons inside the `<template id="id">` for whatever ShadowDOM it is mounted to. Without this, I either have to do CSS in JS, CSS in HTML, or I have to use special build magic to take my standard index.css files and inject them into my HTML or JS. All of that is kinda gross.
  - epolanski 4y ago
    That's how it is intended to work to avoid that using two web components on two different websites leads to major inconsistencies because the root shares several classes. If you want to support your case, you either inject css or you design your web components to support css variables which pierce throgh the shadow dom.
strokirk 4y ago
That sounds just like me and my backend coding too! What are you doing to justify being to high and mighty?
robertoandred 4y ago
It’s hilarious how frontend engineering is both for dumbdumb fake engineers while also being too complex for vaunted backend engineers to understand.
- kingboss 4y ago
  No. It's not too complex. It's just boring. And you people keep reinventing the wheel and presenting old concepts as "revolutionary" or "innovative". That is why you get looked down upon.
  - MrOwnPut 4y ago
    Or you don't understand the needs or the technology because of your stubbornness and ignorance. That's why I look down upon engineers with your mindset. I won't generalize all backend engineers as you did to frontend though. I've met many who get it but of course prefer the peacefulness of controlling the execution environment and the limited state of a server. Btw imo backend is boring because the reasons above, frontend has a lot more going on. As a full stack engineer I'd say frontend is much much harder, and that's why you have all the tech trying to make it easier to scale and maintain. That's not to say backend doesn't have it's own difficulties. It all depends what you are making too. A website is easy, a complex app is much more difficult.
    - kingboss 4y ago
      I didn't say I look down upon frontend devs. I said that because of the way frontend seems to be chasing trends a lot of people look down on you. Maybe I should have said "That is why you get looked down upon by a lot of people". Why are you assuming I am a backend dev? In fact why do you even assume I do web dev? You do know that there are many more areas where programming is needed, right?
      - MrOwnPut 4y ago
        Do you have the same judgement you invented or would you like to mind read other's opinions and generalize groups of people some more? How I took that is you just don't want to commit to your own statements, so you speak through these "others"... And backend isn't just web. I was using a catch-all to call out how, misinformed, ignorant, and offensive your statement was.
conradkay 4y ago
Sounds reasonable and like good code and design, perhaps we "engineers" think hard enough already. I just started reading A Philosophy of Software Design and it talks about "deep" modules (they give the example of UNIX's open creat close lseek and read vs java's I/O interfaces).

by bakugo 4y ago

nailer 4y ago

This is exactly the “just use react” stereotype. Download a random react component from NPM and 90% chance they just added wrapper divs until they could get the CSS to (kind of) work.

andrewmcwatters 4y ago

It's just front-end engineering in general, you don't get this with people who work in other subfields of software engineering. I get it, though. It's OK until you need to learn and grow beyond it, which I think anyone doing this long enough will. It sucks that people learn this the hard way, though, and the only way to grow beyond this for people new to the field is to eventually get burned and learn there are other ways to do all of this. There are whole generations who don't know what session cookies are! And... that's just OK.

Aeolun 4y ago
> There are whole generations who don't know what session cookies are! I really enjoy JWTs, but the idea of sending all my user data on every request hadn’t occurred to me, and still feels mildly wasteful.
- andrewmcwatters 4y ago
  Generally a session cookie requires that you send over a unique ID. That's usually it. If you use JWTs, you're sending over the same amount of data if not more, but now you have to do things yourself instead of just utilizing features browsers natively have. You could utilize a key system to gain the same advantage as not having to use persistence as one gets using JWTs when implementing session cookies, if you wanted, too.

tut-urut-utut 4y ago

What’s wrong with that? Let’s better spend time on important things instead of wasting time trying to make UI behave properly across a plethora of browsers, OSes and platforms.

azangru 4y ago
> instead of wasting time trying to make UI behave properly across a plethora of browsers, OSes and platforms Cross-browser compatibility was the problem that jquery was trying to solve back in 2008 or thereabouts. Not a problem that react is trying to solve in 2023.

epolanski 4y ago

And yet the sanest option for this, web components, keeps struggling.

r3trohack3r 4y ago
I've been using WebComponents a lot lately. My biggest gripe with them as a technology is that they have no way to associate a `<style>` tag in `<head>` with a ShadowDOM tree (short of cloning and injecting w/ JS). The only way to say "this CSS goes with this <template>" is to nest the `<style>` tag in `<template>` itself or painstakingly expose `part`s on everything you want to style. I'd really like a template selector for CSS where I can say something like `::template(#id) button` to select all buttons inside the `<template id="id">` for whatever ShadowDOM it is mounted to. Without this, I either have to do CSS in JS, CSS in HTML, or I have to use special build magic to take my standard index.css files and inject them into my HTML or JS. All of that is kinda gross.
- epolanski 4y ago
  That's how it is intended to work to avoid that using two web components on two different websites leads to major inconsistencies because the root shares several classes. If you want to support your case, you either inject css or you design your web components to support css variables which pierce throgh the shadow dom.

strokirk 4y ago

That sounds just like me and my backend coding too! What are you doing to justify being to high and mighty?

robertoandred 4y ago

It’s hilarious how frontend engineering is both for dumbdumb fake engineers while also being too complex for vaunted backend engineers to understand.

kingboss 4y ago
No. It's not too complex. It's just boring. And you people keep reinventing the wheel and presenting old concepts as "revolutionary" or "innovative". That is why you get looked down upon.
- MrOwnPut 4y ago
  Or you don't understand the needs or the technology because of your stubbornness and ignorance. That's why I look down upon engineers with your mindset. I won't generalize all backend engineers as you did to frontend though. I've met many who get it but of course prefer the peacefulness of controlling the execution environment and the limited state of a server. Btw imo backend is boring because the reasons above, frontend has a lot more going on. As a full stack engineer I'd say frontend is much much harder, and that's why you have all the tech trying to make it easier to scale and maintain. That's not to say backend doesn't have it's own difficulties. It all depends what you are making too. A website is easy, a complex app is much more difficult.
  - kingboss 4y ago
    I didn't say I look down upon frontend devs. I said that because of the way frontend seems to be chasing trends a lot of people look down on you. Maybe I should have said "That is why you get looked down upon by a lot of people". Why are you assuming I am a backend dev? In fact why do you even assume I do web dev? You do know that there are many more areas where programming is needed, right?
    - MrOwnPut 4y ago
      Do you have the same judgement you invented or would you like to mind read other's opinions and generalize groups of people some more? How I took that is you just don't want to commit to your own statements, so you speak through these "others"... And backend isn't just web. I was using a catch-all to call out how, misinformed, ignorant, and offensive your statement was.

conradkay 4y ago

Sounds reasonable and like good code and design, perhaps we "engineers" think hard enough already. I just started reading A Philosophy of Software Design and it talks about "deep" modules (they give the example of UNIX's open creat close lseek and read vs java's I/O interfaces).