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Comment by anw | Hacker News Reader

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> Mobile page weight increased by 337% between 2013 and 2020

that is a huge span of time, with the birth and death of stars in-between in the Web Development cosmos. So much has changed in Web Dev, especially for mobile.

The issue is not the Web getting slower. It's with the developers and their companies focusing on the time to iterate. We have traded consumer convenience for speed to develop and using shiny new tech/methodologies.

We have traded doing things server-side to having most things in an SPA; using tracking pixels and Google Analytics to now also incorporating New Relic, Optimizely, a host of CDNs, bot protection scripts, social media scripts for "better personalisation", CAPTCHAs.

I feel we are moving backwards. Back to when developers used ActiveX plugins because it was more convenient for them. Only ActiveX is now a combination of "Javascript in the browser, and a powerful enough laptop to handle it without choking".

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7 years isn't even close to a "huge span of time".

In relation to Web development, a lot can (and has) happened within 7 years.

If you were a Web developer in 2013, you could find plenty of jobs if you knew Django (Python), Rails (Ruby), Zend, CakePHP, Symfony (PHP), or Spring (Java). Those were the frameworks used by either companies (Zend, Spring, etc.), or loved by devs (especially Rails and Django). Node was starting to come into its own for Web development, but nowhere close to the others.

Fast forward to 2020. Rails and Django are on the decline from their fame peak. Most of those frameworks are still being used for legacy reasons. Web dev work I see is primarily related to Javascript (React, Vue, Typescript) or the JVM (Scala, Kotlin, Java). The other interpreted languages are nowhere close to their 2013 status.

Between 2013 and 2020, we also have a huge ecosystem of Golang and Rust coming out, let alone Docker. All of these helped influence or play a crucial role in developing web sites and applications.

While a lot of these technologies were around in 2013, they definitely weren't as pervasive or mature as now, and developing in 2013 was a whole different animal than doing so in 2020.

Java : 1995 : 25 y/o.

RoR : 2004 : 16 y/o.

Scala : 2004 : 16 y/o.

Django : 2005 :15 y/o.

golang : 2009 : 11 y/o.

Rust : 2010 : 10 y/o.

Kotlin : 2011 : 9 y/o.

Typescript : 2012 : 8 y/o.

React : 2013 : 7 y/o.

Docker : 2013 : 7 y/o.

Vue : 2014 : 6 y/o.

Not even the majority of the tech you mentioned is 7 y/o or less. And you can't name a single piece of tech on that list that isn't actively developed today because they're all actively developed, including Java, the tech that's been around for 25 years.

This is specifically why people talk about fad driven development and make fun of younger people who have no sense of history.

7 years just isn't a lot of time, anyone who thinks it is is a junior who thinks they're a senior.

-- I have deleted a long comment I was going to reply with as I'm sure you are not open to hearing actual counter arguments. I don't want to waste my time. --

My reply instead is to read more carefully, think more carefully, and do not throw puerile thoughtless sentences out like the last one in your reply above.

Watch as my eyeballs roll out of my head, onto the floor, and out the door.

Oh also...

-- I have deleted a long comment I was going to reply with as I'm sure you are not open to hearing actual counter arguments. I don't want to waste my time. --

My reply instead is to read more carefully, think more carefully, and do not throw puerile thoughtless sentences out like the last one in your reply above.

Weird... it seems I too can go with the better than thou act.

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