4 ms·

> It's been like that for at least 3 decades I've been there since the start, too. I disagree that it's been like that for that long, though. JavaScript was an

> It's been like that for at least 3 decades I've been there since the start, too. I disagree that it's been like that for that long, though. JavaScript was an awkward add-on at first, then a barely usable tool (early vanilla), then a stopgap measure to fix browser compatibility problems (jQuery, moo tools, underscore etc) and start to flesh out some libraries. But the Angular/React phase was the first time people gravitated toward using the frontend as a proper language. Before then it was just a thing you had to deal with. So 3 decades? Nah. 2 decades of "why do we have to deal with this" and 1 decade of "ok let's make this work somehow"

pcthrowaway 3y ago
> But the Angular/React phase was the first time people gravitated toward using the frontend as a proper language. Don't forget Backbone which preceded Angular by checks 7 days.
intrasight 3y ago
36 years at least. I'm not talking about WWW. HTML and JS were never meant to be the end-all of human computer interaction, but yet here we are. I imagine an alternative history where good distributed software got traction.
- nkozyra 3y ago
  > 36 years at least. I'm not talking about WWW. HTML and JS were never meant to be the end-all of human computer interaction, but yet here we are. I have to be honest I don't know what you mean here. The web and its frontend (and tooling) is what this thread is about. We've thrown out a lot in the mean time. Java applets, Flash/Shockwave, ActiveX, dynamic HTML ... the web has grown a lot and will continue to do so. But the world of JS as a front-end application language is still fairly new. Until the late 2000s it was just a bolt-on for doing little things around static HTML.
  - intrasight 3y ago
    The thread has been extended to cover all distributed front-end paradigms.
    - nkozyra 3y ago
      But your complaint was about HTML and JS being all there is? I'm not sure what it is you're looking for.
      - intrasight 3y ago
        That is my complaint. And yes, I don't know what I'm looking for. All I can say is that the stack that I used 35 years ago was just as good as what I use today. An even more senior developer than myself says it this way. Humans achieve a certain level of complexity and sophistication in any given domain and have an hard time increasing it. I think we've arrived at that point with UX frameworks, and we did decades ago.

pcthrowaway 3y ago

> But the Angular/React phase was the first time people gravitated toward using the frontend as a proper language. Don't forget Backbone which preceded Angular by checks 7 days.

intrasight 3y ago

36 years at least. I'm not talking about WWW. HTML and JS were never meant to be the end-all of human computer interaction, but yet here we are. I imagine an alternative history where good distributed software got traction.

nkozyra 3y ago
> 36 years at least. I'm not talking about WWW. HTML and JS were never meant to be the end-all of human computer interaction, but yet here we are. I have to be honest I don't know what you mean here. The web and its frontend (and tooling) is what this thread is about. We've thrown out a lot in the mean time. Java applets, Flash/Shockwave, ActiveX, dynamic HTML ... the web has grown a lot and will continue to do so. But the world of JS as a front-end application language is still fairly new. Until the late 2000s it was just a bolt-on for doing little things around static HTML.
- intrasight 3y ago
  The thread has been extended to cover all distributed front-end paradigms.
  - nkozyra 3y ago
    But your complaint was about HTML and JS being all there is? I'm not sure what it is you're looking for.
    - intrasight 3y ago
      That is my complaint. And yes, I don't know what I'm looking for. All I can say is that the stack that I used 35 years ago was just as good as what I use today. An even more senior developer than myself says it this way. Humans achieve a certain level of complexity and sophistication in any given domain and have an hard time increasing it. I think we've arrived at that point with UX frameworks, and we did decades ago.