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This is missing another big reason: we're not just writing this stuff and casting it out into the void, fulfilling weird demands of weird space aliens somewhere

This is missing another big reason: we're not just writing this stuff and casting it out into the void, fulfilling weird demands of weird space aliens somewhere. No, much more than producers, we're also - like everyone else - users of software written by others, too. I don't do much frontend work these days, and when I need something, vanilla JS and CSS serve me just fine. Yet, I get angry or saddened by new things in web space all the time, and yes, sometimes even "offended to the bone that this new generation of developers is just running in circles" - that's because even if I don't work with frontend myself, I will be on the receiving end of all the bloated webshit garbage. Will be, and am - like everyone, I already am drowning in kaka felota. Take SPAs: yes, they have a place, and frameworks can be used correctly and efficiently. But they mostly aren't, and instead, almost every single website I use - news sites, bank sites, online stores, e-mail services, blogs - they are all now steaming pile of half-broken garbage. Shmaybe they look cuter, and are easier to use with fat fingers on a tiny phone, but they're also less functional than generation before, and take longer to do anything. We've been through couple iterations of SPA-fication, and each one made things worse. No, the true reason I get angry about new tech, is that new tech is shit, and I'm going to be force-fed that shit, because everything is going digital, everything is being written by juniors, and the market at this stage is structurally unable to make things better, or take feedback. So each time I see a new turd get a spike in popularity, I know that one year for now, I will be suffering at the receiving end of it.

deleted 2y ago
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wruza 2y ago
The effect that you’re describing applies to vanilla js sites as well. It’s usually the result of an average team competence, or of just having a team. You’re cool with vanilla only until there’s few more random guys who slap the patches over the code. The only difference is that this method may break the codebase so bad that the site won’t see the light at all and there will be nothing to complain about.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > The only difference is that this method may break the codebase so bad that the site won’t see the light at all and there will be nothing to complain about. Yes. Or put another way: new shitty frameworks let teams of average competence to handle more challenging tasks, raising the complexity cut-off above which the shit pile collapses on itself and the product never gets published. This is not a good thing, because in practice, this means more garbage software being produced, and competing against older software that - by definition - had to be not shit just to see the light of day. Thing is, more and cheaper garbage always wins on the market because it's cheaper to make (= more money on polishing the turd and marketing the heck out of it). Overall result: instead of fewer good offerings, we have a glut of garbage ones.
  - wruza 2y ago
    I sort of agree, but believe that we are in our own shitty tech bubble, of which vanilla is actually rock bottom. It just doesn’t float as much. It always puzzled me that we haven’t collectively invented some ways to skip all this “complexity” like e.g. ERP/CRM/CMS platforms do. Instead every team figuratively rewrites their whole stack from scratch in assembly. Even google sheets can publish a document and make it dynamically work faster and easier than any real-world webapp. I get your ideas, but we all are missing something here.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      I'm guessing that's a bit of the dreaded "Not Invented Here" syndrome at play, but mostly just that everything is evolving too fast, in too many places, all at the same time. Consider, we've pretty much solved the problem of quickly creating good GUIs for software with RAD tools in the 1990s/2000s. But that was on the desktop. Then the web happened, and then mobile happened, and we couldn't port RAD tools to them because the web platform, having been created with documents in mind, was fundamentally incompatible with ideas behind GUI. We've collectively spent the last 20 years simultaneously trying to paper over this incompatibility, while slowly pushing the underlying platform to be more app-friendly. Today, the platform is still torn between the document and app paradigm, and we've managed to begin replicating the most basic features of RAD tools of yore, but all on top of a mile-high heap of bloat. But the Earth didn't stop in its tracks for those 20 years - the world underwent the digital transition in that period, businesses had to make do with whatever tools were available, no matter how shitty, and thus we've been experiencing a high-paced churn, with services being constantly upgraded as old hacks stopped working, and new ones promised (often falsely) to be less shitty than those before. Maybe it'll all settle one day. The web will slow its evolution, and people will have time to clean up all the mess, and then we'll finally dig ourselves out of this big regression in software quality, capabilities, and production time, relative to the RAD times. But until then, we suffer. Transitional periods suck.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

wruza 2y ago

The effect that you’re describing applies to vanilla js sites as well. It’s usually the result of an average team competence, or of just having a team. You’re cool with vanilla only until there’s few more random guys who slap the patches over the code. The only difference is that this method may break the codebase so bad that the site won’t see the light at all and there will be nothing to complain about.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
> The only difference is that this method may break the codebase so bad that the site won’t see the light at all and there will be nothing to complain about. Yes. Or put another way: new shitty frameworks let teams of average competence to handle more challenging tasks, raising the complexity cut-off above which the shit pile collapses on itself and the product never gets published. This is not a good thing, because in practice, this means more garbage software being produced, and competing against older software that - by definition - had to be not shit just to see the light of day. Thing is, more and cheaper garbage always wins on the market because it's cheaper to make (= more money on polishing the turd and marketing the heck out of it). Overall result: instead of fewer good offerings, we have a glut of garbage ones.
- wruza 2y ago
  I sort of agree, but believe that we are in our own shitty tech bubble, of which vanilla is actually rock bottom. It just doesn’t float as much. It always puzzled me that we haven’t collectively invented some ways to skip all this “complexity” like e.g. ERP/CRM/CMS platforms do. Instead every team figuratively rewrites their whole stack from scratch in assembly. Even google sheets can publish a document and make it dynamically work faster and easier than any real-world webapp. I get your ideas, but we all are missing something here.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I'm guessing that's a bit of the dreaded "Not Invented Here" syndrome at play, but mostly just that everything is evolving too fast, in too many places, all at the same time. Consider, we've pretty much solved the problem of quickly creating good GUIs for software with RAD tools in the 1990s/2000s. But that was on the desktop. Then the web happened, and then mobile happened, and we couldn't port RAD tools to them because the web platform, having been created with documents in mind, was fundamentally incompatible with ideas behind GUI. We've collectively spent the last 20 years simultaneously trying to paper over this incompatibility, while slowly pushing the underlying platform to be more app-friendly. Today, the platform is still torn between the document and app paradigm, and we've managed to begin replicating the most basic features of RAD tools of yore, but all on top of a mile-high heap of bloat. But the Earth didn't stop in its tracks for those 20 years - the world underwent the digital transition in that period, businesses had to make do with whatever tools were available, no matter how shitty, and thus we've been experiencing a high-paced churn, with services being constantly upgraded as old hacks stopped working, and new ones promised (often falsely) to be less shitty than those before. Maybe it'll all settle one day. The web will slow its evolution, and people will have time to clean up all the mess, and then we'll finally dig ourselves out of this big regression in software quality, capabilities, and production time, relative to the RAD times. But until then, we suffer. Transitional periods suck.