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Javascript Frameworks Are Amazing and Nobody Is Happy

272 points by EvilTrout 13y ago

ascendantlogic 13y ago
As a 35 year old developer who was using CSS and Javascript in the pre-jQuery days, this really strikes a chord with me. Things like Meteor and Angular and Bootstrap BLOW MY MIND. I understand this is the way of technology but truly we live in a gilded age of app development. Sometimes it's nice to take a retrospective and think about how awesome things really are.
- sliverstorm 13y ago
  Sometimes it's nice to take a retrospective and think about how awesome things really are But are you sure it isn't nicer to just complain? It's certainly easier! ;)
  - ascendantlogic 13y ago
    Yes, people definitely thrive more on complaining.
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > truly we live in a gilded age of app development Are you intentionally referring to a superficial positive veneer hiding serious, fundamental, and widespread problems [1] or are you meaning to refer to a "golden age" [2] instead of a "gilded" one? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_age [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age
  - geoka9 13y ago
    I believe "gilded" is spot on here, because that's what the state of the art Web essentially is: sleek designs rendered by stacks of software/technologies "hiding serious, fundamental, and widespread problems" (browsers).
- KirinDave 13y ago
  I'm gonna pretend you're just bad with word choice and were sincere with your post... While it's good to maintain a positive attitude and congratulate ourselves on the progress we've made, it's unwise to call ourselves "awesome." We're anything but. Web development is still way harder than it should be. Javascript is still much worse than it could be. Node.js is still a bad plan. Software is very much in its infancy. We're still 10-25 years behind the state of the art in the industry, and many people get defensive if you point it out because their egos are tightly coupled with their work work methodology. It's not hopeless, but it's nowhere near done. And hyper-nested callbacks are a primitive that we should grow beyond, and numerous methods to do so are not only possible, but already researched and proven before you and I were born.
  - ascendantlogic 13y ago
    This "we're anything but" mindset is self-perpetuating. 10-25 years from now the next generation of programmers will be saying the same thing. Before 1995 the concept of spending a weekend, making a reasonably functional web app and having the entire planet access it at a moment's notice simply was not feasible to even entertain mentally to anyone except those in academic and military circles who already had access to the Internet, and even then the "reasonably functional in a weekend" was not part of that equation. If we stop focusing on what's "wrong" and take a moment to see how incredible people's reach and speed-to-market is compared to even 10-15 years ago, we might actually take a moment to stop talking about how terrible everything is and marvel at just how far we've come. Glass half-full is what I'm trying to accomplish here.
    - KirinDave 13y ago
      > This "we're anything but" mindset is self-perpetuating. 10-25 years from now the next generation of programmers will be saying the same thing. Depends. If they're still 20 years behind academia, they deserve to be saying it. If they still have this weird culture that abhors modern advances in favor of "getting shit done" and wastes time arguing what kind of text editor matters, they deserve to say that. > Glass half-full is what I'm trying to accomplish here. I like to say that the glass has 118.29 cubic centimeters of water in it.
- svachalek 13y ago
  I think you're probably about 5 years too young (maybe that's where OP is coming from). You started in the Dark Ages but didn't experience the Classical times before them of desktop and client/server apps. There are a lot of advantages to web development, but in terms of tools really helping you to whip up something that meets the standards of the day, we still haven't caught up to those times. Meteor is the only framework I've used that I'd say is as painless as Delphi and its like were at the time.
  - ascendantlogic 13y ago
    Actually I taught myself how to program in my early teens using C++ on DOS and Windows 3.x in the early 90's, so I do in fact remember those days.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  If you cover it with sugar glazing it looks just like a cake, right?
sergiotapia 13y ago
I've never met people like this before. Almost everybody who I've heard trash-talk a language or framework was either very new to it and felt frustrated, or just a bad programmer. Having said that, not all JS frameworks are built the same. ;) And you're entitled to have a preference and not be "Louis CK'd" into loving everything under the sky.
gavinlynch 13y ago
tldr; it's a satirical cross-section of programming and comedy, and is specifically a play on the classic Louis C K cellphones/airplane rant as it pertains to javascript frameworks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk
- zalew 13y ago
  Even more specifically, the blog post is an adaptation of the shorter version he told on Conan's show. (linked below the post)
pspeter3 13y ago
I feel like part of the problem is that there seems to be a weird form of commodity fetishism that happens with front-end frameworks where your choice defines you as a developer. While that's always been true for OS, language and text editor, it seems more inane when applied to front end frameworks. They all have their own use cases and the major three are all impressively written
losethos 13y ago
praise God for lightening bugs and gnats and humidity and punkin fields and punkin seeds and swimming in lakes and ice skating on lakes and slush and sillypuddy and playdough and clay and corn starch and vinegar and baking soda. God says... 3:6 And king Jehoram went out of Samaria the same time, and numbered all Israel. 3:7 And he went and sent to Jehoshaphat the king of Judah, saying, The king of Moab hath rebelled against me: wilt thou go with me against Moab to battle? And he said, I will go up: I am as thou art, my people as thy people, and my horses as thy horses. 3:8 And he said, Which way shall we go up? And he answered, The way through the wilderness of Edom. 3:9 So the king of Israel went, and the king of Judah, and the king of Edom: and they fetched a compass of seven days' journey: and there was no water for the host, and for the cattle that followed them. 3:10 And the king of Israel said, Alas! that the LORD hath called these three kings together, to deliver them into the hand of Moab! 3:11 But Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD, that we may enquire of the LORD by him? And one of the king of Israel's servants answered and said, Here is Elisha the son of Shaphat, which poured water on the hands of Elijah. 3:12 And Jehoshaphat said, The word of the LORD is with him. So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat and the king of Edom went down to him. 3:13 And Elisha said unto the king of Israel, What have I to do with thee? get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of thy mother. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-3jXrNUsLY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-3jXrNUsLY
f055 13y ago
People are spoiled easily. And contrary to common belief, programmers are people too.
deleted 13y ago
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qntmfred 13y ago
Along these same lines, I can't even imagine what it must have been like to be a programmer (or any other kind of knowledge worker) before the web. You mean I have this problem and I need to wait 6 months for somebody to write a book about it, and then read the whole thing cover to cover in hopes that he/she wrote about something pertaining to my problem? phfft this is bullshit
- jamesbritt 13y ago
  Well, before the Web there was Gopher and Archie and BBS's. It wasn't the Dark Ages. Maybe more like the Early Dawn Ages.
  - klibertp 13y ago
    There was also an option of sitting down with paper and pencil and actually solving the problem, reinventing the wheel for the thousandth time. Or you could reach out to specific people you knew were likely to know something about the problem and socialize a bit by the way. Both approaches had some good sides to them and it's a shame that they're not even considered as options now, which GP seems to demonstrate.
    - jamesbritt 13y ago
      Yeah, it occurred to me that way back when, as I was learning C on a C=64 (though later I was able to buy a super powerful 386 machine) that as I was trying to code up alife and neural net programs my problems were rarely of the "What's the workaround for a bug in alife.js or alife.rb" sort. I wrote out a lot of pseudo-code and drew diagrams and when stuff didn't work I could often figure it out by poking through the K&R book or the manual for my compiler. As it became easier to spread code and ideas it also became easier to spread more sophisticated but sometimes opaque libraries and tools, and perhaps ironically it is those new libraries and tools that most require the increased communication because while they offer more power they also introduce more complex bugs and quirks.
  - facorreia 13y ago
    Plot twist: the so-called "Dark Ages" were not the Dark Ages either.
mmanfrin 13y ago
We're also doing a magnitude more with these frameworks than was ever possible before. Tools are better and bigger, but so are roles and responsibilities. There are different sets of problems that now need to be solved.
ialex 13y ago
Haters gona hate. You can't make everybody happy, but there are enough frameworks out there you pick one you like and let everybody do the same
deleted 13y ago
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aznjons 13y ago
The drive of the hacker is to solve problems and find novel or efficient solutions to problems and the tools used to solve those problems. It's not surprising that this can be taken to the extreme as we strive to continually optimize our tools, which are especially flexible since they are spun out of almost pure abstraction. A healthy dose of perspective is helpful to reminds us that at the end of the day we solve problems and make cool things. Though dealing with poorly designed man-made abstractions can be frustrating, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to improve our tools and environments and it's especially incredible how collaborative the effort is (open source) compared to some other industries.
gtrak 13y ago
My interpretation: javascript is slowly catching up to the rest of the world. It's reach both makes it a lingua franca and slows it down. Maybe one day it will be suitable for real programming, if people who complain after 10 minutes would stop holding it back.
fizx 13y ago
Programming tends to this pattern where people get super-excited when a language gets a feature everyone else has taken for granted forever. It's like a guy getting out of the hospital after shooting himself in the foot. You know what's better? Not shooting yourself. Congrats Javascript--on almost being as good at data-binding and layout as VB6! Me, I'm going to keep kvetching about javascript frameworks until flexbox is widely supported, the strongly-typed language flavor-of-the week actually is stable, and frameworks like angular don't embrace silent failure modes as a feature.
- lucisferre 13y ago
  > don't embrace silent failure modes as a feature. I love Angular and perhaps in some places, and at certain times silent failures make sense (but would a console.log kill you?) but yeah... A-men!
  - catnaroek 13y ago
    The problem with silent failures is that they are a bad default. Sometimes, the best default is providing no default at all: just throw an exception that must be handled by the programmer. If you want to recover the silently failing behavior, you can always provide a wrapper function that catches the exception and handles it by doing nothing at all. (Admittedly, this is not so easy in nonfunctional languages like JavaScript that make it painful to program with combinators.)
    - alxhill 13y ago
      The reason Angular has silent failure by default is because failure is designed to happen all the time - this means angular expressions can deal with data that hasn't arrived/hasn't been created yet. This might sound like a bad thing, but it actually makes the page work without confusing the expression syntax with endless or statements. That said, I do see your point - it's frustrating to find something not working due to a typo in an expression, with no errors to point it out. A halfway solution could be some kind of debug directive/tag that logs when an expression doesn't evaluate? Or perhaps something integrated into Angular Batarang? (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/angularjs-batarang/ighdmehidhipcmcojjgiloacoafjmpfk?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/angularjs-batarang...)
ultimatedelman 13y ago
This is incredible, and oh so true
pothibo 13y ago
I believe the problem with _every_ framework out there is that they focus too much on how they solve trivial problems and not enough on how you can use them in complex scenario. I think people are pissed when they start with a new framework is the lack of ERROR messages. I wished errors were more verbose. I don't care if the error message takes 5 lines. When I'm used to a framework, i'll know from the second word what is the error. On the other hand, when I don't know the framework, I have no ideas what is assumed and what isn't. Print all the remotely possible culprit. That will give me an idea how it works. Errors will help me learn and progress.
- rasmuskl 13y ago
  Agreed. I wish more open source would make it an actual goal to provide awesome error messages. A good example is the Rebus service bus for .NET which has it as an actual goal to have the best error messages - resulting in stuff like: https://github.com/mookid8000/Rebus/blob/master/src/Rebus/Configuration/DetermineMessageOwnershipFromRebusConfigurationSection.cs#L40-L76 https://github.com/mookid8000/Rebus/blob/master/src/Rebus/Co...
tn13 13y ago
I started off as a Rails web developer in 2007 and slowly moved to PHP and Javascript. A little before NodeJS got popular I was a full time JS developer mostly writing client side code. When I started with NodeJS, I was like a kid in the candy store. Before I blinked there were hundreds of npm modules supporting everything including aws management to controlling robots. I have tried a lot of nodejs web frameworks. They are all amazing and I wish them success but I have realized that there is nothing great to be gained by using JS at server side compared to using say rails.
- twerquie 13y ago
  > I have realized that there is nothing great to be gained by using JS at server side compared to using say rails. Web sockets, anything with many thousands of concurrent connections is better in node.js. They each have their strengths, which overlap very little.
ZenoArrow 13y ago
To me, the issue isn't that modern JavaScript frameworks are sub-optimal, but rather that proficiency in the high number of competing frameworks is a sizeable time sink that shouldn't need to exist. These frameworks are essentially band-aids over the true issues in the core web development tools, and until that core matures to the point where the frameworks are unnecessary then you'll still see people reluctant in investing much time in absorbing knowledge that is likely to rapidly become obsolete.
- mzarate06 13y ago
  Fully agree. I love JavaScript, but I hate having to switch between BackBone, Angular, Dojo, etc. between projects. Learning each one, as well intentioned as they are, winds up being a productivity hit at some point, if not semi-regularly. In a way I feel as if I've spent more time learning how to get things done w/JavaScript frameworks, than actually getting them done.
  - sophacles 13y ago
    Even more frustrating than what you said (which is very frustrating) - Having already learned ember or backbone or whatever last year, I need to revisit it, or want to use it in my current project because it fits nicely. Or rather it used to. Turns out that in making it better (for whatever the "it" is) they changed fundamental bits on you, in such a way that you basically have to learn another new framework. Heaven forbid you go back and maintain the stuff written with the old version of the framework...
    - mzarate06 13y ago
      Yes, and that's why I'm now gun-shy to adopt any framework, JavaScript or otherwise. For example, in LAMP context, I hit the problem you mention w/the Zend Framework 1 -> Zend Framework 2 upgrade path, as well as with Kohana 2 -> Kohana 3. ZF 2, in particular, pushed a lot of loyal ZF devs away, and after trying to upgrade existing projects, and use it for new projects, I'd say rightfully so. Now I'm stuck maintaining a large handful of projects built on top of unsupported frameworks.
Zigurd 13y ago
There are two facts about Web apps that few people seem to be able to hold in their heads at the same time: 1. Web apps are incredibly useful and convenient. Web apps are always up to date and pervasive because the Web runtime is everywhere. Some apps only need ever be Web apps. 2. The Web was designed to be a feature-rich hypertext system, not an application runtime and system-wide UI framework. Web apps will never be as good as native apps, something that was rediscovered in mobile devices. Both are true. Both will be true for a long time to come.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  In a different world everyone wound up using Java Net Launching Protocol ...
  - jack9 13y ago
    JNLP really should be more common.
toddh 13y ago
When I detect this attitude in myself it's often because I'm thinking of these things as a means to an end instead of a thing in itself. So I get impatient because I WANT TO GET STUFF DONE RIGHT NOW and pick your framework is in my way. This a great reminder to step back, appreciate, and give props to all the hard work people do out there.
santoshalper 13y ago
Maybe they're annoyed because even though the frameworks are great, they are still stuck programming in shitty JavaScript and they know there are about 1,000 better programming languages.
- CmonDev 13y ago
  Hey, I beg to differ! HTML and CSS are pretty crappy as well!
surrealize 13y ago
It's a cliche by now that oldsters always think that youngsters are spoiled by having it too easy. "In my day, we had to walk to school uphill two miles in the snow" etc. And, like so many other cliches, it's true! Things used to really suck, and now they're a lot better. That happens every generation--mankind's physical culture does keep on improving in a lot of ways. Older people are proud of all the progress they've made. And young people take the new and improved stuff for granted and complain. But that complaining is a good thing! Expectations keep increasing with every generation. If we didn't always have new people coming on scene and getting frustrated with the status quo, then we'd stagnate as a culture. The kids are all right. It would be nice if they appreciated what they have more. On the other hand, they'll get old and have the same experience too.
- jacques_chester 13y ago
  You have it precisely backwards. The old-timers are looking at the youngsters getting excited about only having to walk 1.5 miles uphill in the snow. And scratching their heads, because they remember the days when they had hovercraft to get around.
  - deckar01 13y ago
    We stopped using hovercrafts because they were dangerous, and hard to maintain.
    - reeses 13y ago
      Mine was full of eels.
- PommeDeTerre 13y ago
  I'm not sure that's true at all. A lot of us older developers look at the tools we used in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and we can't help but notice how much better they are, even today, than many of the most-hyped tools these days. I feel sorry for many of the younger developers today who only know of JavaScript, PHP, NoSQL and web development. They don't know what they're missing out on, nor do they truly know how inferior their tools are. And when it comes to getting serious work done, we still use C, C++ and Fortran today. Yes, they've advanced in many ways over time, but I think they just go to show how much better many technologies were in years past. Even modern tools just can't compete with them.
dvt 13y ago
I think that what the "problem" really is, is that programming has become so accessible. Of course, I don't mean that this is an actual problem, but just that with more people writing code, the community has more people being generally shitty. Furthermore, the general shittiness of post-y2k developers has seeped into the corporate veins of tech companies everywhere. So this is why you see Go "gunning" for Ruby or Rust "gunning" for Go, or whatever. And I speak from experience. When I was in my late teens (I'm 27 now), I totally thought Javascript sucked; and, in many senses, it's not an ideal language. But I mean, I was really out there with my shitty (and uninformed) opinion that JS sucks. Fast-forward a couple of years after I forced myself to do a lot of development with many (many) languages -- as opposed to being force-fed X or Y language by Z company -- and I have a different outlook. There are very few languages (or frameworks, for that matter) that suck -- furthermore, saying X sucks is simply insulting the (probably much smarter than you) author of X. This doesn't happen much on HN (people usually have well-thought out opinions) but it's very apparent on SO or the myriad of other forums/newsgroups. I now love JS. I don't think it's amazing or anything, but I've been having as much fun writing JS as I've had writing C (which is saying a lot -- C is very fun). If I could get a freebie, though, I'd have to say that C++ sucks :P So I agree with the sentiment of the OP and I think this is more prevalent now rather than 10 or 20 years ago because we have a much larger community of developers. Which, in some ways, is good but in others can be bad.
DrewAllyn 13y ago
The people who complain about how things work are the people who make things better. If everyone was satisfied with jQuery and felt that JS development could stop after that then we wouldn't be where we are today, and if everybody thinks that where we are now is fine then tomorrow will look exactly the same as today. I, for one, want tomorow to look different (and better) regardless of how rosy it looks today, so I will continue complaining. When I can, I will also do something about my complaints, and I do submit patches when I can, but unfortunately thats not always feasible.
monokrome 13y ago
I loved JavaScript during what this calls the "rotary phone" era, and I'll have to say that JavaScript "frameworks" haven't come very far. They just grow as fast as the browsers do. Browsers have gone far. Browsers are amazing. Frameworks are still boring.
eonil 13y ago
No. Wrong. They're not happy because it's not amazing. Because they can sensing something you cannot sense. Well, only for certain type of apps - static input/output forms -, this maybe true. But none of them is amazing for any further type of apps. You can be happy because you don't know any further.
oscargrouch 13y ago
different languages tend to attract different personalities eg. people from c/c++ are more conservatives and like to know the internals of everything.. Javascript(PHP?) tend to attract people who wants instant reward, without too much work.. to point out that a little more is easy to see that even here at HN.. when a new project come from c/c++/go etc.. the tools are more sophisticated and take more planning, labor and research to see the light.. so this kind of projects tend to endure a little bit more on the other half javascripters launch are more fragmented and you see a lot of iterations over the same problems already solved by previous framework as just because its a matter of taste combining the technologies one like most.. i cant say this for every developer of course, im sure there are people away from this pattern.. but its a just a feeling from the outside.. i come from other generation i guess.. ut when i was younger pascal, delphy and php were cool and just get things done.. i think its also a question of age.. when you are younger you are more pragmatic, and want everything fast and instant.. Javascript is that platform now.. the one who tends to call the younger and people who are starting programming.. this is not a critic, and not a bad thing at all.. its just more a general observation.. so excuse-me if i was unfair in anyway (thats the problem with generalizations though) Well the problem with pragmatism its just that... people start doing things with a low critical thinking about the tool they are using.. they tend to experiment less with other languages and the different solutions those languages may point out.. so the problem pointed out by miguel de icaza over the callbacks.. they were spread all around in the code like if they were the solution for everything.. or just _to get things done_ to be fair this is not _just_ a problem of javascript or another language.. its technology in general and the open source.. people should be more cooperative and less competitive.. why create a new blog engine just because you want to use another template system and do not try to help the other project by adding the template system you like.. there are much of ego in technology today.. people want to be the new linus torvalds, or the new steve jobs.. but behind all of those big stars, and what they acomplished, there A LOT of people working in the same project , all together.. so its the real spirit of cooperation behind it, even if they dont tkae the medals.. they deserve it they are also the everyday heros you can argue that this is may outside of the scope of this post.. but im trying to point what i think are the real reasons, of why those things are happening.. and its not enough to look just at technology.. we need to take a look at the people behind it and how they move.. just my 2 dollars (because this comment its a little big for 2 cents)
daemonl 13y ago
Our customers demand more of us, we demand more of our frameworks. It wasn’t long ago that building a site that worked on a mobile was the most fantastic and impressive thing they had ever seen. Before that, there weren’t even ‘mobiles’ to have ‘sites’ on. If the demands put on programs were the same as they were 10, 20 years ago, I would have my week’s work done in 5 minutes. But it’s not amazing any more, it’s boring and usual and old as soon as it is released. Our customer or boss just saw a new example up on nvd3, so d3’s dead now, and you better have already learned nvd3 (that’s a pretty old example), oh and it still works on a mobile, and fills my retina display, right? Oh and it doesn’t move properly when I scroll on my android tablet. That’s the same as an iPad, right? Oh and John said it’s broken in IE. Our demands come from our customer’s expectation that this stuff is easy now. And hells yeah it is SO much easier than it used to be, but it’s far from being as easy as they think it is. We usually only have an hour to get going in a new framework, if it’s not clear after that, we move on, because something newer (better?) just hit #1 on HN. But let’s remember how exiting all of this is. Programming has changed for the better. It’s cool and in demand now. People are paying us to do the cool things we used to dream about, they just might not be giving us quite enough time, so we blame the frameworks.
javajosh 13y ago
The best thing about JavaScript is jsfiddle and codepen. There's really no equivalent for any other programming environment.
eponymous 13y ago
A million thumbs down for the author stealing Louie CK's stand-up routine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk) and reapplying it to Javascript in a way that just didn't fit. Also nothing substantial was said. Boo!
- StevenXC 13y ago
  > A million thumbs down for the author stealing Louie CK's stand-up routine Note the line at the bottom of the piece: > Credit: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8m5d0_everything-is-amazing-and-nobody-i_fun http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8m5d0_everything-is-amazin...
  - vehementi 13y ago
    Not... really a good enough attibution... I'm supposed to go watch that link at the bottom of the article and then cross reference it with the funny things said in the article? I was expecting the very first link in the heading to point to that routine and for it to be 'the joke'.
    - reeses 13y ago
      If you don't know the routine, it won't be funny anyway. It's an easy way of excluding people under 40. Like when we talk about being afraid to visit Northern Ireland or getting nuked.
  - eponymous 13y ago
    I didn't see the attribution. But everything I said still stands. The whole thing just didn't work.
teeja 13y ago
"Wow, Catullus, thanks for the chariot ride ... the last time I had to run for a day and a half and .... Recedite! excreta caballus!" "Wow, beaming to the surface is so much faster than that goddamn shuttle. And ... hey! This shirt wasn't this shade of blue before! Mother$#)!($&!"
bobwaycott 13y ago
> "Well, I can't do any more things now. I can't do any more things." I just love that. I've encountered that attitude so many times.
acv 13y ago
Sooo, am I the only one on here who thinks this is really funny? Like laugh-out-loud funny? Like, literally right now there are 110 comments on this page about a light-hearted spoof and not one mention of the word funny. Like I know you're just dying to tell someone their argument is absurd, precisely backward, badly false, from another reality, or some other hyperlogical sounding construction that no human would ever actually use in normal conversation - but chill OUT. Do you really need to immediately jump into a flame war about BASIC? Can't you just chuckle at the fact that yeah, we are all kinda entitled turds form time to time when it comes to tech, and then like go about your day and build something and go home? I mean come on -- "It's going to space, give it a sec." -- that's funny.
- dalacv 13y ago
  I think that everyone was probably put off that this was a total ripoff of Louie CKs bit. More credit should have been given at the top of the article.
  - reeses 13y ago
    It was better with the credit buried. Those who know, know. There was this delightful, hopeful, uncertainty at first. "Is he going to pull a Louis CK riff? I think he is...yes!" Then it was a matter of seeing if he was going to drop the ball (there were some fumbles) but maybe "x is awesome and nobody is happy" will be the aristocrats for a less obscene demographic. So yeah, we can bitch about the 19 location-aware social cloud startups announced each day, but it's also good to get frickin' excited with what you can do for free with some stuff you download onto a laptop while on an airplane. Imagine going up to your 8-year old self and saying,"You know that Atari 800 you love second only to your dog? Look at my PHONE! It could tell you the weather right where we are, without having to tell it where we were! I could look up what you were doing right now! Um, look at these birds going after these pigs!"
dalacv 13y ago
You should give more credit to the original creator of these ideas. Put the link at the top and at least mention him in your article.
locusm 13y ago
"it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don’t care, because this is what people are like now" Louis CK sums it up better than I could ever articulate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk&feature=player_detailpage#t=35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk&feature=player_d...
cdl 13y ago
Let's not forget about the awesome tooling that is available and actively development for JS web development (yes, Yeoman).

272 points by EvilTrout 13y ago

As a 35 year old developer who was using CSS and Javascript in the pre-jQuery days, this really strikes a chord with me. Things like Meteor and Angular and Bootstrap BLOW MY MIND. I understand this is the way of technology but truly we live in a gilded age of app development. Sometimes it's nice to take a retrospective and think about how awesome things really are.

sliverstorm 13y ago
Sometimes it's nice to take a retrospective and think about how awesome things really are But are you sure it isn't nicer to just complain? It's certainly easier! ;)
- ascendantlogic 13y ago
  Yes, people definitely thrive more on complaining.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> truly we live in a gilded age of app development Are you intentionally referring to a superficial positive veneer hiding serious, fundamental, and widespread problems [1] or are you meaning to refer to a "golden age" [2] instead of a "gilded" one? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_age [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_age
- geoka9 13y ago
  I believe "gilded" is spot on here, because that's what the state of the art Web essentially is: sleek designs rendered by stacks of software/technologies "hiding serious, fundamental, and widespread problems" (browsers).
KirinDave 13y ago
I'm gonna pretend you're just bad with word choice and were sincere with your post... While it's good to maintain a positive attitude and congratulate ourselves on the progress we've made, it's unwise to call ourselves "awesome." We're anything but. Web development is still way harder than it should be. Javascript is still much worse than it could be. Node.js is still a bad plan. Software is very much in its infancy. We're still 10-25 years behind the state of the art in the industry, and many people get defensive if you point it out because their egos are tightly coupled with their work work methodology. It's not hopeless, but it's nowhere near done. And hyper-nested callbacks are a primitive that we should grow beyond, and numerous methods to do so are not only possible, but already researched and proven before you and I were born.
- ascendantlogic 13y ago
  This "we're anything but" mindset is self-perpetuating. 10-25 years from now the next generation of programmers will be saying the same thing. Before 1995 the concept of spending a weekend, making a reasonably functional web app and having the entire planet access it at a moment's notice simply was not feasible to even entertain mentally to anyone except those in academic and military circles who already had access to the Internet, and even then the "reasonably functional in a weekend" was not part of that equation. If we stop focusing on what's "wrong" and take a moment to see how incredible people's reach and speed-to-market is compared to even 10-15 years ago, we might actually take a moment to stop talking about how terrible everything is and marvel at just how far we've come. Glass half-full is what I'm trying to accomplish here.
  - KirinDave 13y ago
    > This "we're anything but" mindset is self-perpetuating. 10-25 years from now the next generation of programmers will be saying the same thing. Depends. If they're still 20 years behind academia, they deserve to be saying it. If they still have this weird culture that abhors modern advances in favor of "getting shit done" and wastes time arguing what kind of text editor matters, they deserve to say that. > Glass half-full is what I'm trying to accomplish here. I like to say that the glass has 118.29 cubic centimeters of water in it.
svachalek 13y ago
I think you're probably about 5 years too young (maybe that's where OP is coming from). You started in the Dark Ages but didn't experience the Classical times before them of desktop and client/server apps. There are a lot of advantages to web development, but in terms of tools really helping you to whip up something that meets the standards of the day, we still haven't caught up to those times. Meteor is the only framework I've used that I'd say is as painless as Delphi and its like were at the time.
- ascendantlogic 13y ago
  Actually I taught myself how to program in my early teens using C++ on DOS and Windows 3.x in the early 90's, so I do in fact remember those days.
CmonDev 13y ago
If you cover it with sugar glazing it looks just like a cake, right?

sergiotapia 13y ago

I've never met people like this before. Almost everybody who I've heard trash-talk a language or framework was either very new to it and felt frustrated, or just a bad programmer. Having said that, not all JS frameworks are built the same. ;) And you're entitled to have a preference and not be "Louis CK'd" into loving everything under the sky.

gavinlynch 13y ago

tldr; it's a satirical cross-section of programming and comedy, and is specifically a play on the classic Louis C K cellphones/airplane rant as it pertains to javascript frameworks: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk

zalew 13y ago
Even more specifically, the blog post is an adaptation of the shorter version he told on Conan's show. (linked below the post)

pspeter3 13y ago

I feel like part of the problem is that there seems to be a weird form of commodity fetishism that happens with front-end frameworks where your choice defines you as a developer. While that's always been true for OS, language and text editor, it seems more inane when applied to front end frameworks. They all have their own use cases and the major three are all impressively written

losethos 13y ago

praise God for lightening bugs and gnats and humidity and punkin fields and punkin seeds and swimming in lakes and ice skating on lakes and slush and sillypuddy and playdough and clay and corn starch and vinegar and baking soda. God says... 3:6 And king Jehoram went out of Samaria the same time, and numbered all Israel. 3:7 And he went and sent to Jehoshaphat the king of Judah, saying, The king of Moab hath rebelled against me: wilt thou go with me against Moab to battle? And he said, I will go up: I am as thou art, my people as thy people, and my horses as thy horses. 3:8 And he said, Which way shall we go up? And he answered, The way through the wilderness of Edom. 3:9 So the king of Israel went, and the king of Judah, and the king of Edom: and they fetched a compass of seven days' journey: and there was no water for the host, and for the cattle that followed them. 3:10 And the king of Israel said, Alas! that the LORD hath called these three kings together, to deliver them into the hand of Moab! 3:11 But Jehoshaphat said, Is there not here a prophet of the LORD, that we may enquire of the LORD by him? And one of the king of Israel's servants answered and said, Here is Elisha the son of Shaphat, which poured water on the hands of Elijah. 3:12 And Jehoshaphat said, The word of the LORD is with him. So the king of Israel and Jehoshaphat and the king of Edom went down to him. 3:13 And Elisha said unto the king of Israel, What have I to do with thee? get thee to the prophets of thy father, and to the prophets of thy mother. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-3jXrNUsLY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-3jXrNUsLY

f055 13y ago

People are spoiled easily. And contrary to common belief, programmers are people too.

deleted 13y ago

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qntmfred 13y ago

Along these same lines, I can't even imagine what it must have been like to be a programmer (or any other kind of knowledge worker) before the web. You mean I have this problem and I need to wait 6 months for somebody to write a book about it, and then read the whole thing cover to cover in hopes that he/she wrote about something pertaining to my problem? phfft this is bullshit

jamesbritt 13y ago
Well, before the Web there was Gopher and Archie and BBS's. It wasn't the Dark Ages. Maybe more like the Early Dawn Ages.
- klibertp 13y ago
  There was also an option of sitting down with paper and pencil and actually solving the problem, reinventing the wheel for the thousandth time. Or you could reach out to specific people you knew were likely to know something about the problem and socialize a bit by the way. Both approaches had some good sides to them and it's a shame that they're not even considered as options now, which GP seems to demonstrate.
  - jamesbritt 13y ago
    Yeah, it occurred to me that way back when, as I was learning C on a C=64 (though later I was able to buy a super powerful 386 machine) that as I was trying to code up alife and neural net programs my problems were rarely of the "What's the workaround for a bug in alife.js or alife.rb" sort. I wrote out a lot of pseudo-code and drew diagrams and when stuff didn't work I could often figure it out by poking through the K&R book or the manual for my compiler. As it became easier to spread code and ideas it also became easier to spread more sophisticated but sometimes opaque libraries and tools, and perhaps ironically it is those new libraries and tools that most require the increased communication because while they offer more power they also introduce more complex bugs and quirks.
- facorreia 13y ago
  Plot twist: the so-called "Dark Ages" were not the Dark Ages either.

mmanfrin 13y ago

We're also doing a magnitude more with these frameworks than was ever possible before. Tools are better and bigger, but so are roles and responsibilities. There are different sets of problems that now need to be solved.

ialex 13y ago

Haters gona hate. You can't make everybody happy, but there are enough frameworks out there you pick one you like and let everybody do the same

deleted 13y ago

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aznjons 13y ago

The drive of the hacker is to solve problems and find novel or efficient solutions to problems and the tools used to solve those problems. It's not surprising that this can be taken to the extreme as we strive to continually optimize our tools, which are especially flexible since they are spun out of almost pure abstraction. A healthy dose of perspective is helpful to reminds us that at the end of the day we solve problems and make cool things. Though dealing with poorly designed man-made abstractions can be frustrating, we are fortunate to have the opportunity to improve our tools and environments and it's especially incredible how collaborative the effort is (open source) compared to some other industries.

gtrak 13y ago

My interpretation: javascript is slowly catching up to the rest of the world. It's reach both makes it a lingua franca and slows it down. Maybe one day it will be suitable for real programming, if people who complain after 10 minutes would stop holding it back.

fizx 13y ago

Programming tends to this pattern where people get super-excited when a language gets a feature everyone else has taken for granted forever. It's like a guy getting out of the hospital after shooting himself in the foot. You know what's better? Not shooting yourself. Congrats Javascript--on almost being as good at data-binding and layout as VB6! Me, I'm going to keep kvetching about javascript frameworks until flexbox is widely supported, the strongly-typed language flavor-of-the week actually is stable, and frameworks like angular don't embrace silent failure modes as a feature.

lucisferre 13y ago
> don't embrace silent failure modes as a feature. I love Angular and perhaps in some places, and at certain times silent failures make sense (but would a console.log kill you?) but yeah... A-men!
- catnaroek 13y ago
  The problem with silent failures is that they are a bad default. Sometimes, the best default is providing no default at all: just throw an exception that must be handled by the programmer. If you want to recover the silently failing behavior, you can always provide a wrapper function that catches the exception and handles it by doing nothing at all. (Admittedly, this is not so easy in nonfunctional languages like JavaScript that make it painful to program with combinators.)
  - alxhill 13y ago
    The reason Angular has silent failure by default is because failure is designed to happen all the time - this means angular expressions can deal with data that hasn't arrived/hasn't been created yet. This might sound like a bad thing, but it actually makes the page work without confusing the expression syntax with endless or statements. That said, I do see your point - it's frustrating to find something not working due to a typo in an expression, with no errors to point it out. A halfway solution could be some kind of debug directive/tag that logs when an expression doesn't evaluate? Or perhaps something integrated into Angular Batarang? (https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/angularjs-batarang/ighdmehidhipcmcojjgiloacoafjmpfk?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/angularjs-batarang...)

ultimatedelman 13y ago

This is incredible, and oh so true

pothibo 13y ago

I believe the problem with _every_ framework out there is that they focus too much on how they solve trivial problems and not enough on how you can use them in complex scenario. I think people are pissed when they start with a new framework is the lack of ERROR messages. I wished errors were more verbose. I don't care if the error message takes 5 lines. When I'm used to a framework, i'll know from the second word what is the error. On the other hand, when I don't know the framework, I have no ideas what is assumed and what isn't. Print all the remotely possible culprit. That will give me an idea how it works. Errors will help me learn and progress.

rasmuskl 13y ago
Agreed. I wish more open source would make it an actual goal to provide awesome error messages. A good example is the Rebus service bus for .NET which has it as an actual goal to have the best error messages - resulting in stuff like: https://github.com/mookid8000/Rebus/blob/master/src/Rebus/Configuration/DetermineMessageOwnershipFromRebusConfigurationSection.cs#L40-L76 https://github.com/mookid8000/Rebus/blob/master/src/Rebus/Co...

tn13 13y ago

I started off as a Rails web developer in 2007 and slowly moved to PHP and Javascript. A little before NodeJS got popular I was a full time JS developer mostly writing client side code. When I started with NodeJS, I was like a kid in the candy store. Before I blinked there were hundreds of npm modules supporting everything including aws management to controlling robots. I have tried a lot of nodejs web frameworks. They are all amazing and I wish them success but I have realized that there is nothing great to be gained by using JS at server side compared to using say rails.

twerquie 13y ago
> I have realized that there is nothing great to be gained by using JS at server side compared to using say rails. Web sockets, anything with many thousands of concurrent connections is better in node.js. They each have their strengths, which overlap very little.

ZenoArrow 13y ago

To me, the issue isn't that modern JavaScript frameworks are sub-optimal, but rather that proficiency in the high number of competing frameworks is a sizeable time sink that shouldn't need to exist. These frameworks are essentially band-aids over the true issues in the core web development tools, and until that core matures to the point where the frameworks are unnecessary then you'll still see people reluctant in investing much time in absorbing knowledge that is likely to rapidly become obsolete.

mzarate06 13y ago
Fully agree. I love JavaScript, but I hate having to switch between BackBone, Angular, Dojo, etc. between projects. Learning each one, as well intentioned as they are, winds up being a productivity hit at some point, if not semi-regularly. In a way I feel as if I've spent more time learning how to get things done w/JavaScript frameworks, than actually getting them done.
- sophacles 13y ago
  Even more frustrating than what you said (which is very frustrating) - Having already learned ember or backbone or whatever last year, I need to revisit it, or want to use it in my current project because it fits nicely. Or rather it used to. Turns out that in making it better (for whatever the "it" is) they changed fundamental bits on you, in such a way that you basically have to learn another new framework. Heaven forbid you go back and maintain the stuff written with the old version of the framework...
  - mzarate06 13y ago
    Yes, and that's why I'm now gun-shy to adopt any framework, JavaScript or otherwise. For example, in LAMP context, I hit the problem you mention w/the Zend Framework 1 -> Zend Framework 2 upgrade path, as well as with Kohana 2 -> Kohana 3. ZF 2, in particular, pushed a lot of loyal ZF devs away, and after trying to upgrade existing projects, and use it for new projects, I'd say rightfully so. Now I'm stuck maintaining a large handful of projects built on top of unsupported frameworks.

Zigurd 13y ago

There are two facts about Web apps that few people seem to be able to hold in their heads at the same time: 1. Web apps are incredibly useful and convenient. Web apps are always up to date and pervasive because the Web runtime is everywhere. Some apps only need ever be Web apps. 2. The Web was designed to be a feature-rich hypertext system, not an application runtime and system-wide UI framework. Web apps will never be as good as native apps, something that was rediscovered in mobile devices. Both are true. Both will be true for a long time to come.

jacques_chester 13y ago
In a different world everyone wound up using Java Net Launching Protocol ...
- jack9 13y ago
  JNLP really should be more common.

toddh 13y ago

When I detect this attitude in myself it's often because I'm thinking of these things as a means to an end instead of a thing in itself. So I get impatient because I WANT TO GET STUFF DONE RIGHT NOW and pick your framework is in my way. This a great reminder to step back, appreciate, and give props to all the hard work people do out there.

santoshalper 13y ago

Maybe they're annoyed because even though the frameworks are great, they are still stuck programming in shitty JavaScript and they know there are about 1,000 better programming languages.

CmonDev 13y ago
Hey, I beg to differ! HTML and CSS are pretty crappy as well!

surrealize 13y ago

It's a cliche by now that oldsters always think that youngsters are spoiled by having it too easy. "In my day, we had to walk to school uphill two miles in the snow" etc. And, like so many other cliches, it's true! Things used to really suck, and now they're a lot better. That happens every generation--mankind's physical culture does keep on improving in a lot of ways. Older people are proud of all the progress they've made. And young people take the new and improved stuff for granted and complain. But that complaining is a good thing! Expectations keep increasing with every generation. If we didn't always have new people coming on scene and getting frustrated with the status quo, then we'd stagnate as a culture. The kids are all right. It would be nice if they appreciated what they have more. On the other hand, they'll get old and have the same experience too.

jacques_chester 13y ago
You have it precisely backwards. The old-timers are looking at the youngsters getting excited about only having to walk 1.5 miles uphill in the snow. And scratching their heads, because they remember the days when they had hovercraft to get around.
- deckar01 13y ago
  We stopped using hovercrafts because they were dangerous, and hard to maintain.
  - reeses 13y ago
    Mine was full of eels.
PommeDeTerre 13y ago
I'm not sure that's true at all. A lot of us older developers look at the tools we used in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and we can't help but notice how much better they are, even today, than many of the most-hyped tools these days. I feel sorry for many of the younger developers today who only know of JavaScript, PHP, NoSQL and web development. They don't know what they're missing out on, nor do they truly know how inferior their tools are. And when it comes to getting serious work done, we still use C, C++ and Fortran today. Yes, they've advanced in many ways over time, but I think they just go to show how much better many technologies were in years past. Even modern tools just can't compete with them.

dvt 13y ago

I think that what the "problem" really is, is that programming has become so accessible. Of course, I don't mean that this is an actual problem, but just that with more people writing code, the community has more people being generally shitty. Furthermore, the general shittiness of post-y2k developers has seeped into the corporate veins of tech companies everywhere. So this is why you see Go "gunning" for Ruby or Rust "gunning" for Go, or whatever. And I speak from experience. When I was in my late teens (I'm 27 now), I totally thought Javascript sucked; and, in many senses, it's not an ideal language. But I mean, I was really out there with my shitty (and uninformed) opinion that JS sucks. Fast-forward a couple of years after I forced myself to do a lot of development with many (many) languages -- as opposed to being force-fed X or Y language by Z company -- and I have a different outlook. There are very few languages (or frameworks, for that matter) that suck -- furthermore, saying X sucks is simply insulting the (probably much smarter than you) author of X. This doesn't happen much on HN (people usually have well-thought out opinions) but it's very apparent on SO or the myriad of other forums/newsgroups. I now love JS. I don't think it's amazing or anything, but I've been having as much fun writing JS as I've had writing C (which is saying a lot -- C is very fun). If I could get a freebie, though, I'd have to say that C++ sucks :P So I agree with the sentiment of the OP and I think this is more prevalent now rather than 10 or 20 years ago because we have a much larger community of developers. Which, in some ways, is good but in others can be bad.

DrewAllyn 13y ago

The people who complain about how things work are the people who make things better. If everyone was satisfied with jQuery and felt that JS development could stop after that then we wouldn't be where we are today, and if everybody thinks that where we are now is fine then tomorrow will look exactly the same as today. I, for one, want tomorow to look different (and better) regardless of how rosy it looks today, so I will continue complaining. When I can, I will also do something about my complaints, and I do submit patches when I can, but unfortunately thats not always feasible.

monokrome 13y ago

I loved JavaScript during what this calls the "rotary phone" era, and I'll have to say that JavaScript "frameworks" haven't come very far. They just grow as fast as the browsers do. Browsers have gone far. Browsers are amazing. Frameworks are still boring.

eonil 13y ago

No. Wrong. They're not happy because it's not amazing. Because they can sensing something you cannot sense. Well, only for certain type of apps - static input/output forms -, this maybe true. But none of them is amazing for any further type of apps. You can be happy because you don't know any further.

oscargrouch 13y ago

different languages tend to attract different personalities eg. people from c/c++ are more conservatives and like to know the internals of everything.. Javascript(PHP?) tend to attract people who wants instant reward, without too much work.. to point out that a little more is easy to see that even here at HN.. when a new project come from c/c++/go etc.. the tools are more sophisticated and take more planning, labor and research to see the light.. so this kind of projects tend to endure a little bit more on the other half javascripters launch are more fragmented and you see a lot of iterations over the same problems already solved by previous framework as just because its a matter of taste combining the technologies one like most.. i cant say this for every developer of course, im sure there are people away from this pattern.. but its a just a feeling from the outside.. i come from other generation i guess.. ut when i was younger pascal, delphy and php were cool and just get things done.. i think its also a question of age.. when you are younger you are more pragmatic, and want everything fast and instant.. Javascript is that platform now.. the one who tends to call the younger and people who are starting programming.. this is not a critic, and not a bad thing at all.. its just more a general observation.. so excuse-me if i was unfair in anyway (thats the problem with generalizations though) Well the problem with pragmatism its just that... people start doing things with a low critical thinking about the tool they are using.. they tend to experiment less with other languages and the different solutions those languages may point out.. so the problem pointed out by miguel de icaza over the callbacks.. they were spread all around in the code like if they were the solution for everything.. or just _to get things done_ to be fair this is not _just_ a problem of javascript or another language.. its technology in general and the open source.. people should be more cooperative and less competitive.. why create a new blog engine just because you want to use another template system and do not try to help the other project by adding the template system you like.. there are much of ego in technology today.. people want to be the new linus torvalds, or the new steve jobs.. but behind all of those big stars, and what they acomplished, there A LOT of people working in the same project , all together.. so its the real spirit of cooperation behind it, even if they dont tkae the medals.. they deserve it they are also the everyday heros you can argue that this is may outside of the scope of this post.. but im trying to point what i think are the real reasons, of why those things are happening.. and its not enough to look just at technology.. we need to take a look at the people behind it and how they move.. just my 2 dollars (because this comment its a little big for 2 cents)

daemonl 13y ago

Our customers demand more of us, we demand more of our frameworks. It wasn’t long ago that building a site that worked on a mobile was the most fantastic and impressive thing they had ever seen. Before that, there weren’t even ‘mobiles’ to have ‘sites’ on. If the demands put on programs were the same as they were 10, 20 years ago, I would have my week’s work done in 5 minutes. But it’s not amazing any more, it’s boring and usual and old as soon as it is released. Our customer or boss just saw a new example up on nvd3, so d3’s dead now, and you better have already learned nvd3 (that’s a pretty old example), oh and it still works on a mobile, and fills my retina display, right? Oh and it doesn’t move properly when I scroll on my android tablet. That’s the same as an iPad, right? Oh and John said it’s broken in IE. Our demands come from our customer’s expectation that this stuff is easy now. And hells yeah it is SO much easier than it used to be, but it’s far from being as easy as they think it is. We usually only have an hour to get going in a new framework, if it’s not clear after that, we move on, because something newer (better?) just hit #1 on HN. But let’s remember how exiting all of this is. Programming has changed for the better. It’s cool and in demand now. People are paying us to do the cool things we used to dream about, they just might not be giving us quite enough time, so we blame the frameworks.

javajosh 13y ago

The best thing about JavaScript is jsfiddle and codepen. There's really no equivalent for any other programming environment.

eponymous 13y ago

A million thumbs down for the author stealing Louie CK's stand-up routine (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk) and reapplying it to Javascript in a way that just didn't fit. Also nothing substantial was said. Boo!

StevenXC 13y ago
> A million thumbs down for the author stealing Louie CK's stand-up routine Note the line at the bottom of the piece: > Credit: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8m5d0_everything-is-amazing-and-nobody-i_fun http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8m5d0_everything-is-amazin...
- vehementi 13y ago
  Not... really a good enough attibution... I'm supposed to go watch that link at the bottom of the article and then cross reference it with the funny things said in the article? I was expecting the very first link in the heading to point to that routine and for it to be 'the joke'.
  - reeses 13y ago
    If you don't know the routine, it won't be funny anyway. It's an easy way of excluding people under 40. Like when we talk about being afraid to visit Northern Ireland or getting nuked.
- eponymous 13y ago
  I didn't see the attribution. But everything I said still stands. The whole thing just didn't work.

teeja 13y ago

"Wow, Catullus, thanks for the chariot ride ... the last time I had to run for a day and a half and .... Recedite! excreta caballus!" "Wow, beaming to the surface is so much faster than that goddamn shuttle. And ... hey! This shirt wasn't this shade of blue before! Mother$#)!($&!"

bobwaycott 13y ago

> "Well, I can't do any more things now. I can't do any more things." I just love that. I've encountered that attitude so many times.

acv 13y ago

Sooo, am I the only one on here who thinks this is really funny? Like laugh-out-loud funny? Like, literally right now there are 110 comments on this page about a light-hearted spoof and not one mention of the word funny. Like I know you're just dying to tell someone their argument is absurd, precisely backward, badly false, from another reality, or some other hyperlogical sounding construction that no human would ever actually use in normal conversation - but chill OUT. Do you really need to immediately jump into a flame war about BASIC? Can't you just chuckle at the fact that yeah, we are all kinda entitled turds form time to time when it comes to tech, and then like go about your day and build something and go home? I mean come on -- "It's going to space, give it a sec." -- that's funny.

dalacv 13y ago
I think that everyone was probably put off that this was a total ripoff of Louie CKs bit. More credit should have been given at the top of the article.
- reeses 13y ago
  It was better with the credit buried. Those who know, know. There was this delightful, hopeful, uncertainty at first. "Is he going to pull a Louis CK riff? I think he is...yes!" Then it was a matter of seeing if he was going to drop the ball (there were some fumbles) but maybe "x is awesome and nobody is happy" will be the aristocrats for a less obscene demographic. So yeah, we can bitch about the 19 location-aware social cloud startups announced each day, but it's also good to get frickin' excited with what you can do for free with some stuff you download onto a laptop while on an airplane. Imagine going up to your 8-year old self and saying,"You know that Atari 800 you love second only to your dog? Look at my PHONE! It could tell you the weather right where we are, without having to tell it where we were! I could look up what you were doing right now! Um, look at these birds going after these pigs!"

dalacv 13y ago

You should give more credit to the original creator of these ideas. Put the link at the top and at least mention him in your article.

locusm 13y ago

"it’s wasted on the crappiest generation of just spoiled idiots that don’t care, because this is what people are like now" Louis CK sums it up better than I could ever articulate https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk&feature=player_detailpage#t=35 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpUNA2nutbk&feature=player_d...

cdl 13y ago

Let's not forget about the awesome tooling that is available and actively development for JS web development (yes, Yeoman).