Hacker News Reader

Comment by Andrex | Hacker News Reader

I get where you're coming from but your comment boils down in favor of unoptimized and insecure code. And I can't agree with that.

I would also point out that the web is the most backwards-compatible platform of all time and Alice and Bob can continue doing their thing for as long as they want.

The tools that professionals use today are an abstraction to increase efficiency and reduce code reuse, in the same way most programmers don't code assembly or C anymore. I'm not sure every part of the modern web stack is a universal good, but I'd be lying if I didn't say I'm more pleased coding on the web today than I was hacking together a Geocities page in my teenage years.

View on HN

I appreciate your position, I really do. It's not like I am clear-cut on this myself, even if my frustration makes it sounds like I am. I appreciate that the language, the platform and the web itself needs to evolve.

But I object to the argument that people can just continue to do their thing, because people in that position are overwhelmingly dependent on the ecosystem. Guidance, libraries, tools. And that ecosystem has left them behind, or is at least very far along that road.

Of course reasonable people might disagree, but to me, that people might write unoptimized (or just plain horrible) code is a very, very small price to pay for the empowerment the web delivers to them. And as to "insecure" - Jane and Joe want to show a slideshow of their hand-baked Macarons, not write banking auth systems. If they manage to open up a security risk, the attack surface is usually rather small, and the fault lies with the platform.

No, I stand by this: Javascript was our generations Hypercard, on steroids, and we've almost completely squandered its potential.

jQuery still exists. IMO, the ecosystem has just moved towards rich-client front end applications. There was no good tool/framework for that and people started fulfilling that need. Of course you could write like you said "unoptimized (or just plain horrible) code" which in an actual application is huge price to pay. I think it all boils down to being able to use the right tool for the job. I wouldn't advise using React or Angular to show static content e.g an splash page.

It's certainly an interesting conundrum, and I agree that eventually without ecosystem support Alice and Bob might find things a little tough.

However, it's important to realize that the way the web is moving is to not only benefit the working professionals being paid to write it, but also the consumers who experience it.

Why do we have minifiers and transpilers and modules and font icons? Why do we aim for one script tag instead of 50?

Because for a consumer, the web sucked (and still sucks to an extent, but less so with AMP and offline APIs.) For "prosumers" like Alice and Bob, it was a buffet, but for people browing their web pages it sucked. It was slow and unresponsive and that's even before the rise of the mobile web.

And whether the ecosystem leaves them behind or not, Alice and Bob can always create a new slideshow.js file on any given platform they want.

The web is moving towards being better for professionals and consumers, and I agree that those in the middle might lose out a little, but they are very small peanuts. I'd rather optimize for the next billion users in Africa, India and beyond, most of whom are on sub-2G speeds, than for the script kiddies making an easy living pilfering jQuery widgets without learning the platform.

I miss the days of the plain-old html web. It might have been ugly, and there might have been marquees and blink tags, and under construction signs, and webrings and webmasters, but it loaded over my 56k modem, nobody was screwing with my back button, or messing up scrolling, or popping modals in my face, or pestering me with anti-anti-anti-ad-blocking nag modals and interstitials.

I was just reading a blog post where a guy had written about Steve Reich and Brian Eno's experiments and his attempts at replicating them. It was posted on HN a few days ago: http://teropa.info/blog/2016/07/28/javascript-systems-music....

There are embedded YouTube videos, MP3s, and code samples to illustrate what he's writing about. He's implemented their ideas using the Web Audio API and you can run the code from within the page and listen to the music being generated in real-time. It's a real testament to how great the web can be.

I think being able to do things like that is worth all the annoying parts of the modern web, in the end. For the developer and the end user. I wouldn't want to go back to the old way. I think it's easy to focus on the annoying parts and take the good parts for granted.

> It's a real testament to how great the web can be

Doing something in a browser that we could do 30 years ago on a desktop isn't that great a testament.

But you're clicking on a link, not downloading and installing an application.

You are downloading an application, arguably installing one temporarily too.

Is this that much more efficient than "apt-get install foo"?

Yes, because it means all my users can install the same application and I only have to write it once for all platforms.

Not every platform/OS even has a (good) package manager. So I think this alone is what makes the web great.

True. But users don't care. Not only that, such ease had only created more noise and less expertise. Piss all you want about MS and Apple back in the day but they understood quality control. Today? Ha. We just have lower expectations. We accept shite because we have no other choice.

Furthermore, free isn't free when my privacy is sold and/or my eye balls are subjected to even more ads. This is progress? No fucking way.

> Piss all you want about MS and Apple back in the day but they understood quality control

I don't know what you are on about as there weren't any app stores controlled by Apple or MS. Anyone was able to release crap software on floppy disks or BBS, and they did.

Which platforms don't have good package management? Linux has, if anything, too many. Windows has chocolatey. Apple has homebrew. Writing portable applications can be done in a variety of ways and packaged for each platform.

Windows might have chocolatey, one among a small number package managers for Windows (including the bleh Windows 10 Store), but not being baked into the OS distribution means the average user isn't going to install it. Users want what's already in the Start menu/page, not something they have to go to a site, copy some (as far as they know) random text, paste it into a power shell, and then hope it works. You effectively need a package manager to install the package manager. That might be ok for your power users, but the average person what wants to install GIMP because he's been told by his mate down the pub that it's "like a free Photoshop", would rather go to the GIMP site and download it, he won't even know about chocolatey because he's so used to using Windows without a package manager that he'll just Google "GIMP" and hope the fist link is the right one. Windows missed the boat on package managers and the Windows 10 Store definitely does not make it any easier.

the advance of minifies and transpilers and modules doesnt seem to increase page performance. one of the effect of it being so efficient to minify and transpile is that large imports and frameworks are easier to use, and that boosts the total JS lines of code, making the JS parsing take a long time, and the page performance get "janky"

Good point. And you could argue HTTP2/SPDY and GZIP makes concatenating and minifying files even less of an issue.

I'm not sure it's completely comparable though, file sizes would have increased even without minification.

Mediocrity expands to fill the space and time available.

Mediocre solutions are fixed with an endless array of tools. Learning tools takes time. And that's just to break even. And around we go again.

Can we really say the average web experience is better than the average of 10 or just 5 years ago? (Hint: Nope.) Find someone who is less frustrated with technology and you'll find someone who has given up on technology.

The catch is that using NPM and CommonJS modules for front end packages makes it so that tools like Rollup and the Closure compiler can't do the kinds of optimizations they are capable of. The code we ship is doing a lot of runtime dependency resolution that could be done at compile time if we constructed our modules properly.

I think that many of the front end tools we use now result in an optimized developer workflow, but usually not optimized code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com