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Comment by austin-cheney | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like blaming the victim. How do you on one hand call these people engineers, as if they are engineering something, and then on the other hand blame everything else for their inability to perform? That is weird.

Its just a software platform. Would you really blame society for being too harsh if doctors, lawyers, police, teachers cannot do their jobs? It is weird to see so many people blame the web platform for hostility when its so much less challenging than it used to be.

The most common cause of these frustrations I encountered while working in JavaScript is that developers are educated in something that looks like A, but JavaScript is not A, there is no training for JavaScript/Web, so therefore JavaScript/Web is hostile. As a self-taught developer that never made sense to me.

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The web is not an application platform, it’s a document rendering platform that has been hacked together to be an application platform.

Without libraries it’s incredibly hard to be productive building applications. It’s only with dependencies that the web becomes an acceptable application platform.

Look at how much JS it takes to implement a material-ui textfield that automatically grows and shrinks. Building a date picker is a pain in the ass. Making sure those things follow all the arcane aria standards to be accessible is difficult. There’s no good reason why everyone should have to rebuild their own date picker.

Without libraries the web is the hardest application platform to use by far if you are trying to build actual apps and not just websites with content.

> Look at how much JS it takes to implement a material-ui textfield that automatically grows and shrinks.

I would do that with CSS.

> Building a date picker is a pain in the ass. Making sure those things follow all the arcane aria standards to be accessible is difficult.

If you want to display a visual calendar then yes, mostly. However, if instead you make date picking relative to now then it becomes very simple. It’s just adding or subtracting numbers from Date.now(). You can even produce date spans super easily.

I understand where you are going. When everything starts from a visual UI perspective the code is just an implementation detail except that it’s dense. If instead you start at from the implementation perspective of how it really works at the lowest level then everything just appears step by step. Nobody starts building beautiful skyscrapers from the visual exterior first. No, they lay the foundation, a boring slab of concrete around some grounding poles.

I dunno. Would you blame doctors if they were unable to perform in a single hospital and had a verifiably good track record anywhere else?

If in the other hospitals they were able to rely on the expertise of others, but in that single hospital they could not hide their lack of deep knowledge and that led to deaths? I think the answer of that analogy is obvious—though I realise it is an analogy, not directly comparable.

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