The Web. It Is. So. Deep | Hacker News Reader

The Web. It Is. So. Deep

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The web has become so deep. Anyone else feeling this? When I started it was jQuery and manual imports using <script>

Now its NPM installs and those installs are DEEP.

Anyone asked NPM what commands it suports? access, adduser, audit, bin, bugs, c, cache, ci, cit, clean-install, clean-install-test, completion, config, create, ddp, dedupe, deprecate, dist-tag, docs, doctor, edit, explore, fund, get, help, help-search, hook, i, init, install, install-ci-test, install-test, it, link, list, ln, login, logout, ls, org, outdated, owner, pack, ping, prefix, profile, prune, publish, rb, rebuild, repo, restart, root, run, run-script, s, se, search, set, shrinkwrap, star, stars, start, stop, t, team, test, token, tst, un, uninstall, unpublish, unstar, up, update, v, version, view, whoami

you can SEARCH at command line with npm.

being a webdeveloper these days has added some much DEPTH and I want to know how other older folks feel about this. Old folks? I'm only 36...

Its not depth. Its just a landfill. The easier it has gotten for people to publish software, the more the wasteland has grown. No end in sight. I used to contribute to firefox. But have reached the stage where I have uninstalled the browser on my phone. And am half way to uninstalling the browser on my desktop/laptop. I have been building up a content repo offline using Kiwix and Zeal docs for work related stuff, target is to reduce contact with the internet to less than 4 hours a week.

No end in sight is right.

When does this stop? I have seen the same problem solved 50 times.

This is seriously depressing. The endless frameworks and endless tooling that is supposed to make things easier is actually adding a whole new layer of learning and difficultly that was never necessary.

Not op but had to chime in..

> When does this stop? I have seen the same problem solved 50 times.

I don't think it does or will. I think we're all seeing it.

> This is seriously depressing.

Absolutely. I enjoyed those threads/the SSH chat(devzat?) discussions about how all we needed are just SSH and a terminal and a few langs to code with and things have just been perpetually just re-inventing the same stuff over and over and over and making solutions to new problems that arise created from those solutions.

It is seriously depressing.

Now it's just a mountain with AI labels slapped on it.

Using htmx with a backend is very refreshing. Some memes which share the same sentiment! [1]

1. https://htmx.org/essays/#memes

That isn't the web, that's NPM. It's tooling. Mistaking the two is like mistaking C++ for Visual Studio, confusing the forest for the trees. You can write C++ in a text editor and compile it in a shell.

And all that "depth" comes with a cost. There was no "left-pad" in the JQuery days. No installation or compilation necessary. No brittle dependency tree hundreds of levels deep loading God knows what God knows where for purposes God only knows. No single point of failure in a proprietary package manager with only a single global namespace. You put files on your server, maybe linked to a CDN, and it all just worked.

I first used npm about 10 years ago to install something I needed and all was fine. I came back to it again, same package, 3 years ago and it was such a mess. The dependencies had mushroomed out of control. I went through the code and couldn't believe people were using packages for one line of code for a slightly different approach to something js did anyway.

The problem is adding dependencies is free to the developer. It is everyone else who pays.

The pain of logging in to a fleet of servers and seeing the number of npm packages that need updating and how many critical packages need updated..

I see your point, and I agree. Maybe I should have said “web development” because while it’s true that the WEB can still be simple, it’s the world of professional development that has gone off the rails.

So much tooling. So many packages. It seems like the essence of web development that we once had is gone, replaced by this enormous tool chain and 3rd party developer hellscape.

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