Comment by vrde | Hacker News Reader

Comment by vrde | Hacker News Reader

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The thing that backend devs don't realize is that frontend is not easy. A frontend dev builds something that will be used by a HUMAN, while a backend dev builds something that will be used by a PROGRAM. Related to the comment, things were changing a lot because there is not one single way to do things, as in iOS/Android. There is no standard imposed by a huge private company like Apple or Google. Everyone is free to reinvent the wheel.

Facebook did something super valuable, that is ReactJS, and this is becoming the _de facto standard_. ReactJS is simple, opinionated, and supported by a large corporation. Thanks to ReactJS a new ecosystem was born, and now finally you have many projects gravitating around it, and this is good. It's just a matter of time IMO.

I strongly disagree with _"the browser is a bad app platform and javascript is a bad language"_. JavaScript has its quirks, but it's also really plesant to work with if you don't do weird shit like `isNaN('wft' - 1) // it's true`. The browser is a great virtual machine that is democratizing the web. If you are doing things right, you can have graceful degradation (it degrade gracefully to a lower level of user in experience in older browsers) to increase the audience of your web app, from the dev in SF with gigabit internet to someone living in a rural area in a not so tech advanced country. This of course has a cost, that is spending time developing your app.

What's so unusual about the current web platform is that none of the technologies involved were actually created for the task they are being used for right now.

HTML wasn't meant to build interactive application UIs. CSS wasn't meant to do layouting (or if it was it was done so badly that the intention is unrecognisable). HTTP wasn't meant to carry fine grained API calls. JavaScript wasn't meant to do large scale application development.

It's a long list of wrong tools for the job that are being cobbled together to supposedly form the right tool for the job. It's working to some degree but it's messy.

That's not to say that creating a technology for a specific purpose guarantees that it will work well. EJB, SOAP, WS-*, there are many examples of failed purpose built technologies.

But having an entire platform built exclusively from components that are unfit for purpose isn't something that happens very often.

This is a really interesting reply. I have lots of questions regarding your comment:

1) What was CSS meant to do if not layouting?

2) What should we have used instead of HTML for building interactive application UI's?

3) What advantage does using the right language for the right job confer?

I'm a beginner so please excuse any ignorance on my part.

As a fullstack dev, it amuses me when my underlings claim that backend is hard and they want to learn it. They're already doing front-end. (And yes, we're working them towards more and more backend, and even mobile.)

It's just different, IMO. Programming is programming, but different specialties have different things you need to worry about.

Absolutely. I've been doing "frontend" work before it was even a term (ie. html tables for layout), and it's still the #1 thorn in my side. Even with all the tools available, developing a functional, aesthetically pleasing GUI is not an easy task.

Plus, organizing your code so it's not a 15-nested-div mess with inline CSS just to make the damn thing look right.

It's probably why most of my personal projects have a CLI, and that's it.

"The thing that backend devs don't realize is that frontend is not easy." - I think that's a false dichotomy, one that describes no professional programmer I have ever encountered except the most junior, or the most foolish of hopefully-soon-to-be-ex colleagues. In my experience it is product managers, architects with a mostly-infrastructure background, and nontechnical stakeholders, who tend to assume that frontend is easy. All developers who prefer to work in the backend will have built a user interface at some time, and learned that programmatically fulfilling human needs and intentions is a tough ask.

"ReactJS ... is becoming the _de facto standard_ ... and this is good" - strong disagree, standards that aren't standards that are controlled by a proprietary actor have rarely been a good thing. The woes of dealing with Microsoft Office file formats, or Adobe Flash, or Google Reader pay testament. Heck, QWERTY keyboards. Or Edison's AC/DC feud with Westinghouse, a struggle over proprietary preferences that can be directly blamed for the extended length of my tea breaks when visiting the US.

I feel like there's something missing from core ES, something conceptual that would encourage an ecosystem to develop that isn't framework-specific. We just don't know what that is, yet.

I've been a web developer for 15 years now. Building the UI is always hard and where the waste of time is felt the most. That's why i prefer to work on the backend as much as i can.

I'm against the front x back end split. I think any web dev need to know html, css and js. That's mandatory. Besides that, you should definetely learn the server side too, specially databases, since they'are by far the biggest bottleneck and performance hog you'll need to optimize.

But I'm getting old and I know that because I think everything new is stupid. Once upon a time, we had RAD tools to build UI's, but unfortunately, that's lost in the past...

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