9 ms·

Basic web programming is a dream world for prototyping. You don’t even have a compile step; it’s all WYSIWYG.

globalise83 3y ago
I very often write little scripts that I can just copy and paste into the console in dev tools. Sometimes I even do this in customer demos to show what our product would look like in their web pages. To many people it really seems like magic.
Firmwarrior 3y ago
Wait, you're saying it's possible to write web code without typescript, react, and node?
- hyperhello 3y ago
  Interpreted languages are so improved by lengthy build processes involving compilers, linkers, transpiration, and sixteen different kinds of incompatible package formats, I don’t know why anyone would eschew them.
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    I often wonder if a given manifestation of Poe's Law[0] is intentional. It seems not in this case, but damn if this isn't real. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
  - renlo 3y ago
    "transpiration"; is this the perspiration one gets when trying to use the JavaScript toolchain to transpile code?
- ravenstine 3y ago
  Node? Who uses Node for anything serious in 2023? Real backend coding today is done using Bun. And yeah, you can write something in JavaScript, but it definitely won't scale and will constantly throw errors. Pretty much all serious frontend code today is written in Typescript across the board. /s
- anyfoo 3y ago
  > typescript Well, the problem is rather, that JavaScript is a pretty bad language (nobody claimed otherwise, when it was designed in 10 days), so that using something like TypeScript makes it much better. Unfortunately your browser understands JavaScript, not TypeScript. That's the immense tragedy of web development: It's a giant pile of excrement, because it's built on several things that were never meant to be what they are used for today. It's also why I left a long time ago, and never looked back.
  - twism 3y ago
    curious as to what you left it for that doesnt have this compile step
    - anyfoo 3y ago
      I didn’t leave it because of the compile steps, but because the extra layers, despite all their downsides, were far from able to hide the underlying impedance mismatch. I left over a decade ago and went back to low level kernel programming.
      - noizejoy 3y ago
        It’s good for everyone that different individuals have different likes and resulting priorities. Good that you found the one that makes you happier. And with any luck your preferred niche isn’t too overcrowded, so you don’t suffer from those negative side effects.
        anyfoo 3y ago
        I did not intend to shit on web developers, by the way. It's not their fault, they just have to live with it. I just lament the history that lead to what they ultimately have on their plate. Early "web development" went tremendously wrong, owing partially due to the fact that the "hypertext" markup protocol and markup language were meant to be used in an entirely different way, and partially due to early hacks leading to early results in terms of "web applications". But those hacks came at the cost of making this layer sandwich in any way sane to begin with. In my opinion, everything else since is an attempt to find a way out of that mess. I was there when the web happened, though only watching from the side lines. I also remember that there were more fitting approaches early on, but a lot of them suffered under the Internet's explosive growth: Some of the "sane" stuff at least would have needed concerted efforts for plans that have to be executed over time. But the web was already a thing, and people desperately wanted to do certain things with it. The quick hacks for that were available immediately, and they were cool: "Hah, look what I can do. You can now get a travel itinerary through your city's public transport system from the World Wide Web. Isn't that amazing?" (At the time, it was.) I'm not saying you cannot have joy in web development. As you say, it just wasn't for me. For the reasons above.
WorldMaker 3y ago
Semi-related, I was idly wondering the other day why we don't see more "F12 Zines" like the "BASIC Zines" of the 70s and 80s. You could collect all sorts of neat little bits of JS that run easily in the browser's Dev Tools (F12) and introduce simple programming concepts from whatever browser they already have available on their machine. Dev Tools have gotten to be impressive REPLs with surprisingly deep IDEs. There's probably an interesting "punk" experiment in trying to open that to people of all ages interested in exploring it. Imagine the wonder of introducing the right sorts of curious people to the magical world of "about:blank" and from there hitting F12 to go on a journey of making it not quite so blank anymore.
- zappchance 3y ago
  Not exactly what you're asking for but very similar: Hackits [0][1]. [0] https://blog.haschek.at/2014/why-hackits-are-the-first-thing-i-teach.html https://blog.haschek.at/2014/why-hackits-are-the-first-thing... [1] https://www.0xf.at/ https://www.0xf.at/
  - tangwwwei 3y ago
    thank you for this, i just had alot of fun with 0xf.at !
- progmetaldev 3y ago
  My guess is the lack of income from providing this information from a browser vendor (who are all mostly Chromium based, so there's no reason to offer anything that makes it easier to use their specific browser), and the number of companies that have popped up offering to sell you tutorials on web development. I am in my almost mid-40's, so I got to watch the web grow, and have my skills grow with it. Reading uncompressed source code from libraries like PrototypeJS/Scriptaculous, and early jQuery, along with the custom code per website, definitely made me the developer I am today (in regards to web development, although desktop tools have definitely gotten better, as well).
  - WorldMaker 3y ago

I very often write little scripts that I can just copy and paste into the console in dev tools. Sometimes I even do this in customer demos to show what our product would look like in their web pages. To many people it really seems like magic.

Firmwarrior 3y ago

Wait, you're saying it's possible to write web code without typescript, react, and node?

hyperhello 3y ago
Interpreted languages are so improved by lengthy build processes involving compilers, linkers, transpiration, and sixteen different kinds of incompatible package formats, I don’t know why anyone would eschew them.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  I often wonder if a given manifestation of Poe's Law[0] is intentional. It seems not in this case, but damn if this isn't real. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe's_law
- renlo 3y ago
  "transpiration"; is this the perspiration one gets when trying to use the JavaScript toolchain to transpile code?
ravenstine 3y ago
Node? Who uses Node for anything serious in 2023? Real backend coding today is done using Bun. And yeah, you can write something in JavaScript, but it definitely won't scale and will constantly throw errors. Pretty much all serious frontend code today is written in Typescript across the board. /s
anyfoo 3y ago
> typescript Well, the problem is rather, that JavaScript is a pretty bad language (nobody claimed otherwise, when it was designed in 10 days), so that using something like TypeScript makes it much better. Unfortunately your browser understands JavaScript, not TypeScript. That's the immense tragedy of web development: It's a giant pile of excrement, because it's built on several things that were never meant to be what they are used for today. It's also why I left a long time ago, and never looked back.
- twism 3y ago
  curious as to what you left it for that doesnt have this compile step
  - anyfoo 3y ago
    I didn’t leave it because of the compile steps, but because the extra layers, despite all their downsides, were far from able to hide the underlying impedance mismatch. I left over a decade ago and went back to low level kernel programming.
    - noizejoy 3y ago
      It’s good for everyone that different individuals have different likes and resulting priorities. Good that you found the one that makes you happier. And with any luck your preferred niche isn’t too overcrowded, so you don’t suffer from those negative side effects.
      - anyfoo 3y ago
        I did not intend to shit on web developers, by the way. It's not their fault, they just have to live with it. I just lament the history that lead to what they ultimately have on their plate. Early "web development" went tremendously wrong, owing partially due to the fact that the "hypertext" markup protocol and markup language were meant to be used in an entirely different way, and partially due to early hacks leading to early results in terms of "web applications". But those hacks came at the cost of making this layer sandwich in any way sane to begin with. In my opinion, everything else since is an attempt to find a way out of that mess. I was there when the web happened, though only watching from the side lines. I also remember that there were more fitting approaches early on, but a lot of them suffered under the Internet's explosive growth: Some of the "sane" stuff at least would have needed concerted efforts for plans that have to be executed over time. But the web was already a thing, and people desperately wanted to do certain things with it. The quick hacks for that were available immediately, and they were cool: "Hah, look what I can do. You can now get a travel itinerary through your city's public transport system from the World Wide Web. Isn't that amazing?" (At the time, it was.) I'm not saying you cannot have joy in web development. As you say, it just wasn't for me. For the reasons above.

WorldMaker 3y ago

Semi-related, I was idly wondering the other day why we don't see more "F12 Zines" like the "BASIC Zines" of the 70s and 80s. You could collect all sorts of neat little bits of JS that run easily in the browser's Dev Tools (F12) and introduce simple programming concepts from whatever browser they already have available on their machine. Dev Tools have gotten to be impressive REPLs with surprisingly deep IDEs. There's probably an interesting "punk" experiment in trying to open that to people of all ages interested in exploring it. Imagine the wonder of introducing the right sorts of curious people to the magical world of "about:blank" and from there hitting F12 to go on a journey of making it not quite so blank anymore.

zappchance 3y ago
Not exactly what you're asking for but very similar: Hackits [0][1]. [0] https://blog.haschek.at/2014/why-hackits-are-the-first-thing-i-teach.html https://blog.haschek.at/2014/why-hackits-are-the-first-thing... [1] https://www.0xf.at/ https://www.0xf.at/
- tangwwwei 3y ago
  thank you for this, i just had alot of fun with 0xf.at !
progmetaldev 3y ago
My guess is the lack of income from providing this information from a browser vendor (who are all mostly Chromium based, so there's no reason to offer anything that makes it easier to use their specific browser), and the number of companies that have popped up offering to sell you tutorials on web development. I am in my almost mid-40's, so I got to watch the web grow, and have my skills grow with it. Reading uncompressed source code from libraries like PrototypeJS/Scriptaculous, and early jQuery, along with the custom code per website, definitely made me the developer I am today (in regards to web development, although desktop tools have definitely gotten better, as well).
- WorldMaker 3y ago