Hacker News Reader

Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

Use what you're best at, and if you're paid to use something, use it. If you don't like what you're using at work, take your time to find a new job opportunity. I feel like SPA's are overrated they take away performance and stability from standard HTML websites with some AJAX capabilities thrown in. When I first heard of a SPA it sounded perfect: you download all the HTML you'll ever need once, and load content to the appropriate DIVs accordingly, but now you gotta take a hike and basically do more work to show a button, or a text box, or whatever. I mean no disrespect to people who love SPA web dev, all power to you, but unless I'm paid a lot more, or I'm working on some multimedia / social media type of site, I don't see the point. Sometimes SPA's I see are done poorly which is another pet peeve.

View on HN

I'm not totally sure about the context for the OP, but just recently there are a lot of folks doing low-end PHP dev work for WordPress, and many of them are now having to learn React because WordPress has changed its backend editor to a system that is based around React.

Personally, I think that this is a good choice-- the editor system in that CMS is a very good use case for complex JS technologies.

But at the same time, there are a whole lot of of folks who have been doing a lot of work with PHP who didn't want to learn that toolchain.

In that context, it's a little complex: we have a whole ecosystem of businesses and developers and software tooling that is being pushed over by some core changes. I'd bet that there are going to be a lot of frustrated low-end PHP devs dragged into learning modern-ish JS tooling.

Interesting, I knew they had a new editor, since I have a few WordPress blogs, but I only use them, I don't code anything with them, so I hadn't considered how they're rewritten. I don't mind when SPA is used properly, and in this case it only affects one specific use case which makes a lot of sense.

> modern-ish JS tooling

This need a lot more scary quotes around modern and tooling.

The JS "ecosystem" is a cancer: nowadays when you want to do some front-end work with some CSS you usually end with an install of node and npm/webpack/the-shit-du-jour, half of them crying about incompatibilities and how you should use the shit-du-lendemain instead to compile you don't really don't know what, it still takes 20mn to see the result. All you wanted was to edit some CSS. And surprise: now half of your other projects won't build anymore because you had to install npm-1.911-HELP-ME-DAD and the option to not install globally changed from -not-everywhere to --just-a-local-beer.

npm only installs globally when you tell it to, it's not like pip or ruby gems. And you don't need to install project dependencies globally to run scripts from packages, npm puts all that stuff in node_modules/.bin so you can just add that to your $PATH and you're set.

no $PATH editing is necessary when using npx

Yikes. There's nothing stopping someone from creating a CSS and HTML file and being done. The trap is following standards and common practices for enterprise-level front end development when they don't suit the requirements. Simply editing a CSS file requires none of the things you are complaining about. It certainly doesn't require globally installing npm packages.

It does if you're coming into an existing project that was build that way.

Let's say you want to use bootstrap 4 and sprinkle some gradients. You'll have to rebuild it. Which imposes the use of npm.

Yeah, if you want to use the tools you need to use the tool chain.

On the other hand, I work with a whole lot of other peoples' WordPress projects. A lot of folks just crap some CSS wherever they can find a spot and call it done.

FWIW, I'd rather troubleshoot someone's gulpfile than dick around with a 4K line CSS file. But that's my choice and I know plenty of folks who pay their bills and would rather grep (well, they don't use grep because they don't know the CLI) and who love a monolithic CSS file.

I like the tools, some folks don't. But they aren't inherently bad tools, they are just not right for everything.

If someone has hitched their entire career to one particular software then it's their responsibility to stay abreast of the changes that the developers of that software introduce.

> a whole lot of of folks who have been doing a lot of work with PHP who didn't want to learn that toolchain.

Those people are not entitled to learn one thing and then be able to get work forever, the wordpress technical leadership (i.e. the ones who actually work on the core software day to day and make the technical decisions) are making changes that they feel enhance the product or make it easier to maintain, if a particular wordpress developer has a problem with that then they can either choose to support only the old versions or just learn something new. The other option is to work on some other PHP software that isn't making changes.

Yeah, I agree.

But the WordPress "Community" has a lot of peculiarities that are unique to that system.

> If you don't like what you're using at work, take your time to find a new job opportunity.

Or gain enough seniority / technical respect to convince your team or company to use a different technology for some aspect of the business, and transform where you are working into where you want to be working.

>and load content to the appropriate DIVs

Well, I develop SPA and never did something like that. More work to show button? Oh, it must be React or Vue. I find them very prehistoric. The way I write a button in ExtJS for example is

{ xtype: "button", text: "OK" }

That's it, no CSS, no HTML.

This comment is deliciously ironic:

> Oh, it must be React or Vue. I find them very prehistoric.

Modern JS development in a nutshell.

Yes that's much simpler than the vue way of just using <button>

In Vue you still need to use CSS to center it or align it to right if is part of a window component.

If that's the hardest part then there are no issues at all.

Getting a button to appear in ExtJS ain't the problem. Getting it to appear where you like often is. Comapared to nested panels with umpteen different layout managers, flexbox ain't that hard (nevermind subtle cross-browser bugs that aren't priorities in Russia when compared to spurious pivot table features).

And let's not even get into customizing. Attaching CSS rules to four different generated nested divs, inline style declarations to both the object and its underlying element, custom XTemplates... Abstractions get leaky rather fast, if you're not doing the "3270 terminal forms meet Excel 2003" enterprise UI.

I don't like php.

I need Go with ADT and pattern matching.

In JavaScript i also want to see JS being used as vmcode and a higher level language similar to Go with ADTs/pattern matching compiling down to JS and everyone using it.

I never said use PHP though? I am loving Go more lately though, and might use it instead of Python for personal web development projects.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com