
Good rant on the current state of web development tools - tjr
http://blogs.harvard.edu/philg/2016/01/21/good-rant-on-the-current-state-of-web-development-tools/
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civilian
Our users expect much more involved and interactive websites. (i.e facebook
notifications). So you have to accept that we need some ajax and a js
framework to update the DOM. And as long we've cracked open that barrel of
monkeys, we might as well batch DOM updates and make other improvements around
client-state and how it communicates to server-state.

I think the nodejs "problem" of "download this library and 400 other modules"
comes about because it's so _easy_ to write a library nowadays! Which can be a
good thing, although it's correct that it leads to a lot of noise and low-
quality libraries out there.

And if I continue this post any more, I'm at risk of straw-manning his
argument as being nostalgia for mothertongues.

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Fuzzwah
I followed the link through to his 1990's examples and noticed that it talked
about www.ge.com.

I dug up the version which would have been live when the section was written:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20020603030453/http://ge.com/](https://web.archive.org/web/20020603030453/http://ge.com/)

Comparing that to the current [http://www.ge.com/](http://www.ge.com/) I do
feel like it was easier to find content that an end user would be after.

Sure it looks dated, but functionality wise I definitely feel like the "modern
web" has moved to form over function. It annoys me.

~~~
mark_integerdsv
Interesting.

Load times are also noticeably longer on the modern site.

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pedalpete
Is this really a 'good rant' on web development tools?

It's a rant on the node.js community and the state of front-end development,
kinda.

The thing is, I have no problem with these. I make sites with node, I make
sites with Play (scala). I need a front-end so use React, Angular, whatever.

Recently I've been thinking more about the state of hosting than of web
development. I thought hosting was a solved problem, than I created my first
meteor app and pushed it to a meteor server and thought to myself 'WOW, why
isn't everything so easy'.

Anybody have thoughts on hosting? Heroku et al are easy, but I still end up
setting up dbs, s3 storage and a bunch of other services all the time, and of
course, I do these things for each dev/test/stage/prod.

~~~
throwaway13337
That same realization can be made with UI libraries that don't have to deal
with the history and standards of modern web.

The front end js libs (react, angular) are a nice patchwork over a pile of
mess, but do you really think that we would have the same problems making
simple websites if we could design it without the standards agreements and
history?

Look at authoring tools of UIs outside of web and you'll find theyre much
simpler, intuitive, wysiwyg, but still powerful. E.g. Unity's UI lib, even
flash had something nice for it's use case. Like Hypercard was. Remember that?

The web front end could be a lot better.

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dang
[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sad%20state%20of%20web%20devel...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=sad%20state%20of%20web%20development&sort=byPopularity&prefix=false&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story)

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GordonS
"You see the Node.js philosophy is to take the worst fucking language ever
designed and put it on the server. Combine that with all the magpies that were
using Ruby at the time, and you have the perfect fucking storm. Lets take
everything that was great in Ruby and re write it in Javascript, I think was
the official motto."

Heh, too true :D

~~~
dham
Is Javascript the worst language ever designed? No, not by a long shot. It's a
little hyperbole for humor. I think the majority of the article went over
peoples heads. Maybe because developers are more analytical in nature, or the
fact that it's text and is interpreted differently by each person.

The goal was to make a few points, but more to get people thinking. Web
developers are taken too much by trends without understanding them.

I wrote the original article.

~~~
nikdaheratik
It's a good point, but any usable language can work out okay as long as the
people coding it know what they're doing and how to write code that other
people can work with.

The thing that irritates me about the node.js trend is that the people who are
using it don't always understand the environment they are in because they
never write for the server side. It's a case of an entire community needing to
RTFM.

OTOH, it's not like anyone outside the community is forced to use their code.
And some of them at least know what they are doing.

