And where do you think this "complexity" is coming from? There are ill designed standards - but you can leverage that. There are tons of frameworks - you can ignore them. There are broken protocols - wrap them into something sane.
PureScript is the right thing indeed, I like the approach, but what exactly makes PureScript so special? I quickly skimmed through, expecting something cool and innovative like, say, gradual typing, but it looks like something fairly standard, I could not find any particularly new ideas there. What did I miss?
UI design is very complex, because humans are complex. Often you're automating business processes that work based on implicit judgements that are so obvious to the humans performing them that they're not even aware they're making them, making it very difficult for them to explain the rules they follow.
What I like about PureScript is the careful typeclass hierarchy - it feels like a rethinking of the Haskell standard library from the ground up. They often end up with a hierarchy of single-method typeclasses, which feels like a first step to something along the lines of http://degoes.net/articles/principled-typeclasses/ . I'd like to combine that with Idris-style full dependent typing but you can't have everything and there's a tension between what's state of the art and what's designed for practical use (I feel like I'd be happier using PureScript in production than Idris). Gradual typing I don't find particularly interesting; YMMV.
As I answered elsewhere in this thread, I did not say a word about design. I was talking about programming solely.
Design is not only a complex problem, it is an unsolved problem. Is there any passable design out there? I have not seen it yet. It is either disgusting, incomprehensibly disgusting, or, in the best case, barely tolerable. And the same thing is going on in any kind of an industrial design, it is not limited to web.
As for the type class hierarchy, yes, I did not notice this bit, thanks. I'll take a closer look now.
Programming is nothing but design - a full spec of what needs to happen is a program.
Like any other kind of programming, if parts are trivial you automate them, until you're at a state where what you have to do to accomplish a given task is precisely the amount of thought/uniqueness that that task involves; if you're a programmer then you never need be doing mindless drudge work (you've got a computer for that). When you've automated most of what used to be your job, reaching up or down the stack is a good way to find more things to automate (or you can simply increase throughput, but often that just means other parts of the business become the bottleneck). IME it's if anything easier to get closer to the "full brain all the time" state with web programming, because there's so little external latency, whereas in hardware there's only so much you can do before you're spending most of your time waiting for slow test cycles or actual manufacturing (even if you try to reduce the importance of those by introducing things like formal methods, others will often want to see a few test cycles to prove the effectiveness of those).
No, it's a different kind of a "design". It's an engineering. You've got a set of constraints and need to optimise a solution until all the constraints are met. Purely mechanical.
Designing something for a human interaction is different. It involves extorting information from a not necessarily cooperative and not very sane human, reducing it to a reasonably sane subset and then finding out the workflows that would make sense for a living human being. Unsolvable. Impossible.
Got nothing in common with something as simple as "here's a high level formal description of an algorithm, turn in into a code".
> whereas in hardware there's only so much you can do before you're spending most of your time waiting for slow test cycles or actual manufacturing
In my book, it's a blessing. Time to slow down and reflect on what a mess you've just created.
PureScript is the right thing indeed, I like the approach, but what exactly makes PureScript so special? I quickly skimmed through, expecting something cool and innovative like, say, gradual typing, but it looks like something fairly standard, I could not find any particularly new ideas there. What did I miss?