Comment by 5cott0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 5cott0 | Hacker News Reader

No, no it is not.

It's somewhat amusing to see people complain about the supposedly increasing complexity of web development. Sorry-not-sorry it's not that bad or even that complex. In fact things are far easier and less complex then they were just a few years ago and improvements continue at a rapid pace (modern browser module support, vitejS, ESbuild). I don't even need to use babeljs anymore whereas just a few years ago it would have been required for cross browser support.

Developers as a cohort love to feel themselves and ego trip about how smart they are until they hit something they don't understand immediately and suddenly it's too complex and they have to write 5k words bemoaning webpack configs as the worst thing ever.

I think the problem is actually the opposite and things are way too easy now because, like anything in life, effectively simple web development requires self discipline and simplifying abstractions like React make it too easy to just throw shit at the wall and see if it resembles a working webapp and then I end up having to maintain a lot of seemingly working apps that are an absolute mess of tightly coupled spaghetti code with no clear architectural design whatsoever but product thinks it works because the side effects show up at the right time.

If using babeljs for cross browser support is your starting point, then you likely started way later then the article author.

Go back a few more years to 2005 or even earlier. If you wanted a website you installed Apache on a server (or used a shared hosting package), FTP your files to it and you're done. That's it. No pipelines, no builds, no package managers. Just files in a folder, that you copy to the server.

If you wanted to do cross browser JS you downloaded the latest version of jquery.min.js, FTP it to the server and reference it in a script tag.

I wrote my first websites in notepad.exe and used something like FileZilla to upload.

That is what I call simple web development.

I agree with the author that now things are just way more complex than they should be.

edit: looks like jQuery was first released in 2006, which is 4 years after Firefox was released, and 2 years before Chrome. So take my `2005` line as rough estimate.

I don't think you're smart enough to make any inference about when I started.

But if you insist on this crusty bonafides peen measuring contest I got started serving php via cgi on apache deployed with scp.

I’m not insisting on anything, sorry if I might have offended you, that was definitely not the intent.

I assumed that you might have started later than the author because you compared the current state to just a few years ago, while the article mainly talks about even further back in history.

The tools I mentioned were not meant for bragging. I just wanted to indicate that back then it was all way simpler, which you know as you apparently started in a similar timeframe to myself.

The main point I wanted to make was that back then things were so much simpler.

I know I was being sarcastic because hn discussions around the history of JS always devolve into this silly flamebait and no one should take them seriously.

By what standard are you saying things are easier? Certainty not less complexity, abstraction, volume of code, number of moving pieces, raTe of change or configuration.

If you don't understand how the foundational technologies work and don't care to learn then things may indeed seem easier. If you have 15+ years of experience and seek to understand today's technology at the same level as when you first learned, things are definitely harder.

It's easier if you want to achieve the same things. Our expectations have just increased even faster than things became easier.

IE7

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