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I upvoted you, but I disagree with you. The Web is built on a system of hacks, but those hacks are usually temporary and we can ultimately ignore most of them

I upvoted you, but I disagree with you. The Web is built on a system of hacks, but those hacks are usually temporary and we can ultimately ignore most of them eventually. I was writing JavaScript back in '98, it is much easier now (and we have CoffeeScript to make it even easier!). Browser incompatibilities are slowly going away (and we have jQuery to make it even easier!). Things that used to be hard, like organizing an application to take keyboard input and respond to property changes, are now easy with things like Ember (and soon EmberUI will be out of alpha, and common things like searchable selects, buttons, date pickers, etc., will be easier) and other JS frameworks. I would reword it to "Good Enough For Now", because things do get fixed after the cool kids have kinda hacked around it for a while.

mattgreenrocks 13y ago
Why should we have to hack around it? This is exactly the sort of defeatism and learned helplessness I was alluding to. We've accepted this crappy universal platform because it distributes software well. Despite being in a discipline where we can easily change the tools to work better for us, we just sit here and take it.
- eric_h 13y ago
  We've accepted this crappy universal platform because it is universal. Replacing something that is used by literally Billions of people is decidedly non-trivial and takes _decades_.
  - sanderjd 13y ago
    Not to mention that "because it distributes software well" is stated as if it isn't a huge deal. Has anything ever distributed anything so well, so cheaply, and so accessibly as the internet distributes web software?
- jfb 13y ago
  We've accepted this crappy universal platform because it distributes software well. Given that until very recently, the overwhelming majority of software consumers were also software producers, one can see how this attitude would be very attractive. It's New Jersey all the way down.
icedchai 13y ago
Yeah, but it's still hacks underneath. Does building a UI in HTML, CSS, and JS feel right to you? It's awful.

mattgreenrocks 13y ago

Why should we have to hack around it? This is exactly the sort of defeatism and learned helplessness I was alluding to. We've accepted this crappy universal platform because it distributes software well. Despite being in a discipline where we can easily change the tools to work better for us, we just sit here and take it.

eric_h 13y ago
We've accepted this crappy universal platform because it is universal. Replacing something that is used by literally Billions of people is decidedly non-trivial and takes _decades_.
- sanderjd 13y ago
  Not to mention that "because it distributes software well" is stated as if it isn't a huge deal. Has anything ever distributed anything so well, so cheaply, and so accessibly as the internet distributes web software?
jfb 13y ago
We've accepted this crappy universal platform because it distributes software well. Given that until very recently, the overwhelming majority of software consumers were also software producers, one can see how this attitude would be very attractive. It's New Jersey all the way down.

icedchai 13y ago

Yeah, but it's still hacks underneath. Does building a UI in HTML, CSS, and JS feel right to you? It's awful.