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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

Webdev is the pinnacle of over engineering.

Imagine you wanted to make a native desktop app that runs on Windows (going back to Windows 95), and OSX, and Linux, and have it use the end users choice of native components, QT, or GTK. It also has to load fast, be accessible, and work on desktop, laptop, and phones. Also, you're only allowed to ship a single binary but you can load in assets based on the device when it runs.

The app could be anything from a single page that renders one image up to a complete 3D game. Users want 60FPS regardless of what it is.

I reckon you'd end up with a relatively complicated build pipeline.

That's what webdev is today.

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I think you'd just end up with WxWidgets. Because it can do all of that.

Most of the jank of the modern platform doesn't come from JavaScript - it comes frame dependency hell, framework layered over framework, and over abstraction. It is a _cultural_ problem, rather than a technical one.

not only does it have to load fast, it has to _stream_ the content from the server to the client

Thats not a true comparison, MAYBE that was sort of a thing back in the IE6 era. Today the web is capable of "a good enough" UX for most things. But how we do interactive apps on the web today is just madness. Most sites dont need anything close to React, and those who do could have just used something more simple without the madness what is the react ecosystem / bundlers / packages etc.

The best non-web analogy I can think of is when someone builds a 2D platformer in Unreal Engine. The complexity of the tooling is necessary because someone else is making Witcher 4 in it. The fact the 2D platformer is using a vastly more complicated tool than necessary is on the dev, not the tool.

It's not React's fault that some devs don't know how to make a form in HTML. There is an argument that React doesn't spend much time telling people they might not need it, but that's not really their responsibility, plus there are some things (reactivity to other things on the page) that are common enough that seeing the boundary where you do or don't need it is actually quite hard.

in defence of using ue5 for a 2d platformer, you still get a ton of features to help you build out the platformer, cross platform support, and you can reuse your knowledge across projects.

it's kind of the same for react. yes you could build one thing in vanilla js, another thing with htmx, and then a third in react. or just build all three in react and be done with it.

modern web dev is actually pretty simple now, there is still a stigma around webdev from the olden days but spinning up vite + react is trivial, doesn't pull a ton of dependencies, and makes it easy to build anything you want. yes you can still overcomplicate it massively but that's on the dev at that point.

Its 2026. You thinking you know more about other people's requirements in an absolutely enormous field is just plain naive and its embarrassing reading this stuff on HN.

Not sure what your point is? Are you saying that this mountain of complexity is somehow justified for the 99% of stuff out there? Complex stuff can and should be as simple as possible, and that something a good software developer strive to do.

But now we have abstractions upon abstraction, slow ands heavy solutions for almost every thing.

Software is slower than ever, not because of hardware, but because of the endless bloat and abstraction every framework brings.

> Are you saying that this mountain of complexity is somehow justified for the 99% of stuff out there?

No, I'm saying that I, as a single person, couldn't have any idea what the other 99% is doing and what their needs are. This field is ENORMOUS. There are hundreds of thousands of different types of problems being worked on. I don't know what complexity or requirements they're face and neither do you.

I've got 15 years and 6 jobs and I've still probably seen < 1% of the actual development work being done. And thinking that I can extrapolate form that 1% the other 99% is insane to me.

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