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Comment by platz | Hacker News Reader

> errors result from the interaction between the server, CSS, HTML, and JS

this may be true, but I'm not sure spending resources trying to solve those problems, are the best use of resources?

I would rather be happy with a strict separation between the front-end and the server than try and deal with such an impedance mismatch and the framework cruft that generates.

I guess it just seems overly ambitious to me.. finding the right abstraction for the server is difficult enough without polluting it with the front-end.

It seems to me people are very productive in other languages that don't tightly bind the front-end code to the server; why spend time solving problems are are more incidental than essential?

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> I guess it just seems overly ambitious to me.. finding the right abstraction for the server is difficult enough without polluting it with the front-end.

Certainly. That's why I'm skeptical that this will ever happen.

> why spend time solving problems are are more incidental than essential?

I wouldn't characterize these kinds of errors as incidental, inasmuch as they account for a very high percentage of the web app bugs I've encountered.

Designers of languages like Rust and Haskell noted that null pointer dereferences were the single largest class of errors in other languages. Thus, the designers chose to make null pointer dereferences impossible at the language level. With that choice, they turned a huge number of run-time errors, which developers often miss, into compile-time errors, which developers cannot ignore. This has proven itself beneficial to productivity and software quality.

So too here: If I'm correct that client-side type and name errors constitute a large fraction of all web app errors, then catching them at compile time will be a big win.

But again, I don't know how feasible this is. Nor do I know whether it would involve compiling from a type-safe language to HTML/CSS/JS or just static analysis of raw HTML/CSS/JS.

the logic of your analysis is sound. I suppose I'm just not sure that client-side type and name errors constitute a large fraction of all web app errors.

Anecdotally, the team I am on doesn't have these issues (we certainly have other issues), but I could see them being important to prevent on certain projects.

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