Good rant on the current state of web development tools | Hacker News Reader

Good rant on the current state of web development tools

blogs.harvard.edu

37 pointstjr12 comments

Our users expect much more involved and interactive websites. (i.e facebook notifications). So you have to accept that we need some ajax and a js framework to update the DOM. And as long we've cracked open that barrel of monkeys, we might as well batch DOM updates and make other improvements around client-state and how it communicates to server-state.

I think the nodejs "problem" of "download this library and 400 other modules" comes about because it's so _easy_ to write a library nowadays! Which can be a good thing, although it's correct that it leads to a lot of noise and low-quality libraries out there.

And if I continue this post any more, I'm at risk of straw-manning his argument as being nostalgia for mothertongues.

I followed the link through to his 1990's examples and noticed that it talked about www.ge.com.

I dug up the version which would have been live when the section was written: https://web.archive.org/web/20020603030453/http://ge.com/

Comparing that to the current http://www.ge.com/ I do feel like it was easier to find content that an end user would be after.

Sure it looks dated, but functionality wise I definitely feel like the "modern web" has moved to form over function. It annoys me.

Interesting.

Load times are also noticeably longer on the modern site.

Is this really a 'good rant' on web development tools?

It's a rant on the node.js community and the state of front-end development, kinda.

The thing is, I have no problem with these. I make sites with node, I make sites with Play (scala). I need a front-end so use React, Angular, whatever.

Recently I've been thinking more about the state of hosting than of web development. I thought hosting was a solved problem, than I created my first meteor app and pushed it to a meteor server and thought to myself 'WOW, why isn't everything so easy'.

Anybody have thoughts on hosting? Heroku et al are easy, but I still end up setting up dbs, s3 storage and a bunch of other services all the time, and of course, I do these things for each dev/test/stage/prod.

That same realization can be made with UI libraries that don't have to deal with the history and standards of modern web.

The front end js libs (react, angular) are a nice patchwork over a pile of mess, but do you really think that we would have the same problems making simple websites if we could design it without the standards agreements and history?

Look at authoring tools of UIs outside of web and you'll find theyre much simpler, intuitive, wysiwyg, but still powerful. E.g. Unity's UI lib, even flash had something nice for it's use case. Like Hypercard was. Remember that?

The web front end could be a lot better.

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sad%20state%20of%20web%20devel...

"You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever designed and put it on the server. Combine that with all the magpies that were using Ruby at the time, and you have the perfect fucking storm. Lets take everything that was great in Ruby and re write it in Javascript, I think was the official motto."

Heh, too true :D

To quote Aaron Sorkin somewhat out-of-context: "If liberals are so fucking smart, how come they lose so goddamn always?"

I don't want to say that javascript is a good language, but it can get the job done. And nodejs' value comes from allowing devs who have only had client-side experience to quickly jam on the server-side.

> And nodejs' value comes from allowing devs who have only had client-side experience to quickly jam on the server-side.

And this leads to clusterfucks like the Trend Micro Remote Command Execution clusterfuck a couple of days ago (https://code.google.com/p/google-security-research/issues/de...).

It took a decade until enough braindead morons got away from PHP to fix its underlying deficiencies (like mysql_x, register_globals, ...); I'm afraid the same (or worse!) will happen to NodeJS.

Reason: On client you can get away with a LOT more crap than on server because the browser will protect you from the worst (SOP, memory, infinite loops, ...), and so people aren't used to think about security or best practices or code size or code quality. Or about memory leaks.

On the server you're left on your own - and to make crap worse, a PHP app always starts in a clean state, so unless you use external services, given the same inputs you will get deterministic behavior from your script. NodeJS not, yummy memory leaking bugs <3. Happy debugging!

Is Javascript the worst language ever designed? No, not by a long shot. It's a little hyperbole for humor. I think the majority of the article went over peoples heads. Maybe because developers are more analytical in nature, or the fact that it's text and is interpreted differently by each person.

The goal was to make a few points, but more to get people thinking. Web developers are taken too much by trends without understanding them.

I wrote the original article.

Yeah, it's line he's never heard of PHP.

JS is probably 2nd, among languages still in common use.

It's a good point, but any usable language can work out okay as long as the people coding it know what they're doing and how to write code that other people can work with.

The thing that irritates me about the node.js trend is that the people who are using it don't always understand the environment they are in because they never write for the server side. It's a case of an entire community needing to RTFM.

OTOH, it's not like anyone outside the community is forced to use their code. And some of them at least know what they are doing.

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