7 ms·

Great read. We have been trying our best in the project I work on to rip out as much JS as we can and implement things using the right html tags among other thi

by oglop 3y ago

Great read. We have been trying our best in the project I work on to rip out as much JS as we can and implement things using the right html tags among other things. Frankly, JS for an open source project used by thousands of users is a nightmare. This was a reason we have done our best to remove it and provide much more stable uses through yaml that then is used to construct the correct html rather than the spaghetti of JS from before. I’ve come to view JS with a lot of skepticism the older I’ve become. People are free to use it, but I do hope web assembly gives more choice in this monopoly, which I believe is the only reason people fundamentally use JS, though they will invent many reasons why “it’s great!”

demosthanos 3y ago
Do you have a link to the FOSS project? I'd be interested to see the specific JS (and YAML) code that you're referring to. My experience over the years has been that the language and tech stack matter much less than the discipline of the team. Rewrites always feel like a huge improvement for the first few months, but as time wears on they become just as convoluted and bloated, either because the domain is inherently complex or because the team thought that the old tooling was to blame for their own poor coding discipline. I find it particularly interesting that YAML of all things is what you've turned to as an improvement. You'll find plenty of people on HN and elsewhere who've learned to avoid YAML like the plague because of bad experiences with it, so it seems clear that it's not objectively a better choice than JS for avoiding spaghetti.
- oglop 3y ago
  If the admins using your project are sys admins, they seem to prefer yaml. Shrug. I hesitated posting just because I had a feeling this would not make sense. The project is for super computers and so it’s niche for the admins since they are overburdened at their centers and don’t have time or sometimes the expertise to role their own JavaScript to do advanced things with a form that is then used on the backend to submit jobs to clusters and apps on HPC systems. But this is a niche. My perception of the web dev space is it’s a mess and often has endless debates that do nothing for users, and much of the mess and debate centers around JS, a language that is the only choice (a monopoly) which then claims to be a great choice (how is that choice? Seriously, I’ve never understood that statement).

by oglop 3y ago

demosthanos 3y ago

Do you have a link to the FOSS project? I'd be interested to see the specific JS (and YAML) code that you're referring to. My experience over the years has been that the language and tech stack matter much less than the discipline of the team. Rewrites always feel like a huge improvement for the first few months, but as time wears on they become just as convoluted and bloated, either because the domain is inherently complex or because the team thought that the old tooling was to blame for their own poor coding discipline. I find it particularly interesting that YAML of all things is what you've turned to as an improvement. You'll find plenty of people on HN and elsewhere who've learned to avoid YAML like the plague because of bad experiences with it, so it seems clear that it's not objectively a better choice than JS for avoiding spaghetti.

oglop 3y ago
If the admins using your project are sys admins, they seem to prefer yaml. Shrug. I hesitated posting just because I had a feeling this would not make sense. The project is for super computers and so it’s niche for the admins since they are overburdened at their centers and don’t have time or sometimes the expertise to role their own JavaScript to do advanced things with a form that is then used on the backend to submit jobs to clusters and apps on HPC systems. But this is a niche. My perception of the web dev space is it’s a mess and often has endless debates that do nothing for users, and much of the mess and debate centers around JS, a language that is the only choice (a monopoly) which then claims to be a great choice (how is that choice? Seriously, I’ve never understood that statement).