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The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, en

The problem is two-fold: it sucks for web developers who end up having to learn a new shitty framework every day, dogshit tools to even work with CSS and JS, endless preprocessor and transpilers, perverted markup and tag hell to support said shitty frameworks and having to deploy massive fuuckton heavy sites for a simple blog post. It also sucks hard for the end users : they can see their whole months mobile data allowance get pissed away on a couple of bling websites. It can takes ages now for modern site to finally work as it downloads so much shite. Some big name sites used to render quicker five or ten years ago. At least in the past, you could turn off scripting, images and styling and get to the basic content, but not even that works now due to crap developers. It all sucks. Diseased turtles all the way down.

wpietri 11y ago
Sure. And you're also made out of meat and will die soon. And we're living on a planet that is in the long term doomed even if we half-evolved, tool-using monkeys get our shit together. (Did you know that we're half-way through the lifespan of forests? [1] That one day the conditions just won't be right for them anymore? That never fails to sadden me.) But the interesting thing to me is what happens when we move past the existential despair that comes when we first recognize the true nature of things. Sure, things are fucked, but they always have been. What's next? When I was as bitter as you sound here, I took a break. Burnout sucks. But eventually I found myself coming back to technology because it's my best chance to make the world suck slightly less. Or, put more accurately, to shift it in the direction of my irrationally high ideals. So maybe take a break? Go hike the Pacific Crest Trail or work on a goat farm or something. You're not going to help anybody, yourself included, by soaking in something you hate indiscriminately. At least rest until you can come back and focus your hate in a laser-like beam on one particularly awful thing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth
- corndoge 11y ago
  He didn't say all technology is diseased. He was talking about the web. Writing native applications is still as fun as it has always been. Not that there isn't disease there too, but it isn't scripted and marked up to hell like the technostew that is the current web, which is what the parent was describing.
  - wpietri 11y ago
    So you think burnt out native app developers can't produce similar rants?
bphogan 11y ago
I keep hearing this argument touted, but if you view source on the HN home page it uses tables and a <center> tag. You do not have to learn a new framework to do things on the web. The browsers all seem to support stuff that's worked for years. The problem is that web developers feel the need to learn new things because they fear getting out of date. "oh, dude, I learned React this weekend. It's hot stuff! You need to learn this." No, you really don't. You have a plethera of choices, and one of those choices is to rock it like it's 1999.
- wwweston 11y ago
  You don't need to know the new hot stuff if (a) you currently have a job and (b) that job is with an employer where people carefully think about their user needs, product goals, and then pick tech and write code with those needs in mind (much like the article recommends). Otherwise, there's an extent to which you have to accommodate the absolutely rampant fetishization of current fashion for How We Do Things Now Because It's Better(TM) so you can sell yourself properly. In more concrete terms: right now if you're looking for a gig as a front-end dev, you're going to have a much easier time finding a job if you can put Angular and React on your resume. The fact that this isn't particularly rational (or fair) as a hiring filter doesn't really matter.
  - bphogan 11y ago
    I disagree. Here's why. If you're good at web development... that means you understand HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and you understand them at the level you should if you want to call yourself a web developer, then learning whatever framework a hiring manager wants you to know this week is trivial because you understand how the web works. The problem is a lot of people just learn Angular for a gig. Then they leave 12-18 months later and go learn something else. It's never enough time to actually get good at anything. And let me tell you... the hiring managers are taking instructions from development teams looking for talent. Those teams often inform management what is the hot new tech that needs to be used. But none of these things that people think they need to know have been so battle-tested yet that they are for sure the "next big thing." I think experimenting is great. I don't think developers should worry themselves to death over having to keep up with whatever's new this week. I think devs would be better off investing that time in getting really great at the web. Really learn what semantic markup is. Really understand floats, clears, various display types. Really understand the fact that the web, without any JS or CSS, works great on mobile, because when it started, screens were 640px wide, and as a gang of developers, we've layered on boatloads of code to make it not responsive, only to make it responsive again. :) And then, I believe everyone will be in a much better position to make informed decisions on whether or not "hot new thing this week" is really worth learning. But what do I know? Trust me -
yellowpop 11y ago
I can't help but feel like a lot of this has to do with "business realities", but maybe more importantly, it is also due to a whole generation of "developers" who have simply failed to learn CS fundamentals or did not start out with more traditional languages. The bad practices of the web are far easier to spread
voidhorse 11y ago
The framework problem is a real interesting one... I'm a hobbyist--I am not employed as a web developer, but I like too experiment and see what I can create, so for me, learning a new framework is always a fun little project to embark on. At the same time, i can't imagine how hellish it would be to work for a company that always wants to use the latest technology -- the framework market seems saturated to me, and I would wager it's probably better for a company to find a few technologies and stick to them, tackling problems/weak points as they arise and brewing custom solutions for those if necessary. Having to stop and shift over to a new framework every now and then seems like it would be a massive productivity hit. I also don't like it when a framework becomes a crutch. Though I don't think that happens too often for most people. I've also run into the heavy weight problem -- there have been a few instance where I've wanted to create something simple, and in most cases using a framework in that situation becomes the very definition of over kill. So instead I'll usually just write a simple php script or something to do whatever I need to get done, but even that feels a bit unnecessary. While I'm not sure if javascript should be elevated to all the use cases it has been recently, I do think it should be a language that enables a developer to natively(that is to say, w/o a framework) handle any simple functionality that might be expected for a site that is just a little bit fancier than a static site, so handling very simple data such as bare-bones blog or a simple mailing system. While it is getting there you still can't do something like write a simple form based mailer in pure js as far as I know, you can only open the client's native mailing app. You'd have to write a single php file or some other mechanism for that simple purpose. But yeah, it seems like bloat is a tricky thing to avoid these days, especially since frameworks are the easiest, usually most error proof, and quickest way to get your website full of some modern bells and whistles, when in reality you may only be putting half of the technologies features to use.

wpietri 11y ago

Sure. And you're also made out of meat and will die soon. And we're living on a planet that is in the long term doomed even if we half-evolved, tool-using monkeys get our shit together. (Did you know that we're half-way through the lifespan of forests? [1] That one day the conditions just won't be right for them anymore? That never fails to sadden me.) But the interesting thing to me is what happens when we move past the existential despair that comes when we first recognize the true nature of things. Sure, things are fucked, but they always have been. What's next? When I was as bitter as you sound here, I took a break. Burnout sucks. But eventually I found myself coming back to technology because it's my best chance to make the world suck slightly less. Or, put more accurately, to shift it in the direction of my irrationally high ideals. So maybe take a break? Go hike the Pacific Crest Trail or work on a goat farm or something. You're not going to help anybody, yourself included, by soaking in something you hate indiscriminately. At least rest until you can come back and focus your hate in a laser-like beam on one particularly awful thing. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth

corndoge 11y ago
He didn't say all technology is diseased. He was talking about the web. Writing native applications is still as fun as it has always been. Not that there isn't disease there too, but it isn't scripted and marked up to hell like the technostew that is the current web, which is what the parent was describing.
- wpietri 11y ago
  So you think burnt out native app developers can't produce similar rants?

bphogan 11y ago

I keep hearing this argument touted, but if you view source on the HN home page it uses tables and a <center> tag. You do not have to learn a new framework to do things on the web. The browsers all seem to support stuff that's worked for years. The problem is that web developers feel the need to learn new things because they fear getting out of date. "oh, dude, I learned React this weekend. It's hot stuff! You need to learn this." No, you really don't. You have a plethera of choices, and one of those choices is to rock it like it's 1999.

wwweston 11y ago
You don't need to know the new hot stuff if (a) you currently have a job and (b) that job is with an employer where people carefully think about their user needs, product goals, and then pick tech and write code with those needs in mind (much like the article recommends). Otherwise, there's an extent to which you have to accommodate the absolutely rampant fetishization of current fashion for How We Do Things Now Because It's Better(TM) so you can sell yourself properly. In more concrete terms: right now if you're looking for a gig as a front-end dev, you're going to have a much easier time finding a job if you can put Angular and React on your resume. The fact that this isn't particularly rational (or fair) as a hiring filter doesn't really matter.
- bphogan 11y ago
  I disagree. Here's why. If you're good at web development... that means you understand HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and you understand them at the level you should if you want to call yourself a web developer, then learning whatever framework a hiring manager wants you to know this week is trivial because you understand how the web works. The problem is a lot of people just learn Angular for a gig. Then they leave 12-18 months later and go learn something else. It's never enough time to actually get good at anything. And let me tell you... the hiring managers are taking instructions from development teams looking for talent. Those teams often inform management what is the hot new tech that needs to be used. But none of these things that people think they need to know have been so battle-tested yet that they are for sure the "next big thing." I think experimenting is great. I don't think developers should worry themselves to death over having to keep up with whatever's new this week. I think devs would be better off investing that time in getting really great at the web. Really learn what semantic markup is. Really understand floats, clears, various display types. Really understand the fact that the web, without any JS or CSS, works great on mobile, because when it started, screens were 640px wide, and as a gang of developers, we've layered on boatloads of code to make it not responsive, only to make it responsive again. :) And then, I believe everyone will be in a much better position to make informed decisions on whether or not "hot new thing this week" is really worth learning. But what do I know? Trust me -

yellowpop 11y ago

I can't help but feel like a lot of this has to do with "business realities", but maybe more importantly, it is also due to a whole generation of "developers" who have simply failed to learn CS fundamentals or did not start out with more traditional languages. The bad practices of the web are far easier to spread

voidhorse 11y ago

The framework problem is a real interesting one... I'm a hobbyist--I am not employed as a web developer, but I like too experiment and see what I can create, so for me, learning a new framework is always a fun little project to embark on. At the same time, i can't imagine how hellish it would be to work for a company that always wants to use the latest technology -- the framework market seems saturated to me, and I would wager it's probably better for a company to find a few technologies and stick to them, tackling problems/weak points as they arise and brewing custom solutions for those if necessary. Having to stop and shift over to a new framework every now and then seems like it would be a massive productivity hit. I also don't like it when a framework becomes a crutch. Though I don't think that happens too often for most people. I've also run into the heavy weight problem -- there have been a few instance where I've wanted to create something simple, and in most cases using a framework in that situation becomes the very definition of over kill. So instead I'll usually just write a simple php script or something to do whatever I need to get done, but even that feels a bit unnecessary. While I'm not sure if javascript should be elevated to all the use cases it has been recently, I do think it should be a language that enables a developer to natively(that is to say, w/o a framework) handle any simple functionality that might be expected for a site that is just a little bit fancier than a static site, so handling very simple data such as bare-bones blog or a simple mailing system. While it is getting there you still can't do something like write a simple form based mailer in pure js as far as I know, you can only open the client's native mailing app. You'd have to write a single php file or some other mechanism for that simple purpose. But yeah, it seems like bloat is a tricky thing to avoid these days, especially since frameworks are the easiest, usually most error proof, and quickest way to get your website full of some modern bells and whistles, when in reality you may only be putting half of the technologies features to use.