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by LeoNatan25 3376 days ago
What saddens me is that instead of improving the web software development process with tried and tested methodologies, the inverse happened, and the web and its terrible software ecosystems and perpetrators are somehow seen as the "cool kids" of software development. When observer pattern is seen as the holy grail of modern web development, you know we are in trouble.
2 comments
tracker1 3376 days ago
The observer pattern isn't sold to everyone... The thing is, Web browsers have been nearly as diverse as OSes both historically and recently... But, you get a mostly compatible UI and runtime engine that's installed on pretty much every personal computing device out there. There's a lot to be said for that.

As to the "cool kids", they exist in every corner of things that get done by people. I think WebASM will open up to higher-level tools once it's widely available, and signalling between the UI layer and WebASM code becomes easier to deal with.

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LeoNatan25 3376 days ago
> But, you get a mostly compatible UI and runtime engine that's installed on pretty much every personal computing device out there. There's a lot to be said for that.

Only "lowest common denominator" comes to mind.

But to the point of this thread, what bothers me is the transcendence of web tech outside of browsers, where a technology known historically for terrible practices with a very low barrier to entry is now considered the "assembly" of all these platforms, such as mobile and desktop, and the developers, that until yesterday could only make a web page that loads 20MB of dependencies to show a few paragraphs of text, now call themselves "mobile developers" or "full-stack developers".

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tracker1 3376 days ago
Well, I take a bit of offense to the last statement... in only that JavaScript is just as, or more valid as a server-side language for development as any other scripting language is. The engines themselves tend to be more optimized than alternatives, and combined with NPM/CJS modules a much nicer experience than many of the alternatives.

As to being able to target mobile/desktop, why not? I mean with Cordova and Electron you can target 4+ platforms with minimal code variance. And in most cases the performance is good enough, until you need more. And React-Native can go even further towards native/compiled language performance, with slightly more variance.

Yes, there is more memory and cpu use than alternatives, but there's also a real cost in developer time, and time to launch. In many cases it's the difference between having platform X, or not... the alternative is nothing, not something better in most cases.

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mschuster91 3376 days ago
"Tried and tested" cannot be sold for money (as it's already known).

So in order to create demand for consultants the ecosystem repeats history and willfully messes up... and we all know where the consultantocracy finally ended up goes looking at Enterprise FizzBuzz

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