Hacker News Reader

Comment by Zelphyr | Hacker News Reader

Not to mention; web developers are constantly having to context switch between HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Old school days they also had a backend language like PHP or Perl. Many still do. Then there was/is SQL. By my count, that's at least five different languages to know all at once.

View on HN

“Look at how many plates I can juggle at once!”

“Aren’t you just trying to walk to the store?”

“Look! I added a fifth! Everyone do this now!”

I don't understand your analogy. What is walking to the store without juggling any plates in web development? I'm not aware of any stack that allows you to write styles, markup, business logic, and database queries in a single language.

I'm doing that today with Clojure/EDN: Garden, Reagent, Clojure/ClojureScript, HoneySQL.

(You might think it cheating somewhat because HoneySQL is just a thin syntactic wrapper on SQL, but then again, if I weren't cheap/poor, I could use Datomic, where it really is the same language.)

I don't understand the analogy either but I do know that when I'm doing iOS development it's almost always all in Swift. Sometimes some C or Objective-C or even C++ smattered in but that actually kinda proves my point because when I have to deal with one of those languages in a Swift project I slow down.

Arc does, fwiw. And that’s an important design goal. There is a lot of progress left to be made in this space.

In C#, you can almost do everything in a single language (linq to sql, model binding). You still need extensible application markup language (XAML) for the view.

Non-trivial websites are more complicated than walking to the store.

Isn’t using Java, PyTorch, Elasticsearch, and neural networks for a TODO iOS app the same?

Why would you use any of those technologies to build a TODO app?

My point is that overengineering and CV- or grant- driven development is not exclusive to the web.

Well instead of you telling TODO app what you have to do, TODO app tells you what you have to do, and that frees you up to think about doing it. Or it just does it for you and you go to beach.

This made me burst in laughter. I am indeed using Java and Elasticsearch, and no PyTorch, but Spark for an app I am working on. Way more complex than it should be.

It's a little weird to count a markup language, a presentation language, and a query language on the same axis as Turing-complete programming languages. If we go by that metric, the average sysadmin knows dozens of languages all at once. Yet sysadmin work is also often looked down on for some reason.

I don't have a good explanation for either of those phenomena, but I think language-counting isn't a good way to combat them.

I've done sysadmin work as well and the context switching didn't feel as prohibitive. Generally I was using something like Perl, Python, Bash, etc... but rarely switching between more than one in any given day.

With web development, I have to know HTML, CSS, and JS at least. I probably really need to know SQL. And I switch between those four (at least) every day, many times a day.

I think those markup and styling languages and even SQL have all been used in turing-completeness examples. Everything is bad, nothing is easy, and we might as well stop using the internet. We're all going really fast, but nobody knows where ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Before "full stack" was invented that used to be spread out across 2 or more jobs, you'd have frontend people, backend people, maybe database people, maybe even designers in addition to the front end people.

The context switching existed but not at the same frequency.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com