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by shroompasta 1606 days ago
This comes off incredibly naive of FE engineering.

Buttons and Doodads? sigh.

A significant factor as to why Apple has succeeded the past 2 decades is due to the design of their products - from the sleek aluminum bodies of their hardware to the UI/UX of their operating systems.

Unless you want your UI to look like something out of 1995, you're going to have to make it look good.

Making it look good will require a decent amount of code.

From animation libraries like Framer Motion, or data visualizations using d3, or even After Effects renders from Lottie.

That isn't even mentioning the amount of state that is required to be stored so that proper renders could occur - If your user has logged in, if your user has typed something into an input field, how many times you should retry a request if it fails, what functions to run due to a websocket response, and myriads of other things that FE engineers have to deal with.

Please reconsider your thoughts.

2 comments

I feel the conversation will just cycle if we try to push people to the poles of opinion and insult them. Accidental complexity is an enormous, pervasive problem across all software stacks. The ratio of lines of code to pixels on the screen is pretty bonkers. Since you mention Apple, if you look at the ratio of lines of code per pixel, it's really hard to understand how an OS weighs in at 10GB, even for Apple which is brazen about deprecating and only catering to their own hardware and products. That speaks to a universal bloat problem that shows no signs of slowing down. I mean we could dive down into the details and keep coming up with special pleading for every little functionality, but it won't be a productive conversation, really, and the big picture will be completely lost.

> Please reconsider your thoughts.

Just leave that part out next time. Anyone can write this at the end of any comment and it only injects a bad vibe into the whole conversation.

Your whole line of comments is equivalent to "No offense, but.." -> proceeds to offend.

Especially with your "buttons and doodads" comment.

I wasn't even trying to get personal, but If you're going to hit, be prepared to take a hit.

------------

Never once has the weight of my OS been a concern for me, and I'm going to make the assumption that is the general case for the majority of users.

Never once have I heard the metric of LOC/pixels.

You say it's bloat. I say its necessity.

It's just keeping up with the times - beautifying and manicuring to attract eyes.

And you failed to address my comment about all the logic that FE engineers have to deal with - which is more of the meat in FE development than what happens skin deep.

>> I feel the conversation will just cycle if we try to push people to the poles of opinion and insult them.

> Your whole line of comments is equivalent to

You're doing exactly what I won't respond to, which is pushing me towards an extremist position I did not, in fact, state. I'll point you to the guidelines ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html), which states:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

And I won't be responding further.

I, for one, would love if UIs looked like it's 1995 again. Imagine the crispness, everything is fast, responsive and written in sensible languages. A simpler, and better time.
I don't know you, but from what i recall Windows 95 and 98 were anything but with fast and responsive UIs. Many windows were fixed size, and with significant input lag
I still remember Win 3.1 as being incredibly fast UI wise (once loaded), a feeling that propagated until around the Win7 era. As soon as this newer, non win32 stuff started happening in Windows, I lost that feeling. I have it again on Linux/Wayland, where native GTK controls are just such a joy to use.

And yeah - even if there was lag or slowness I don't recall, imagine those systems on today's hardware. I recently used a WinXP on fast hardware, and by god was that thing responsive, lean and fast.

While I agree in some cases, tech companies aren't marketing to those with that specific taste pallete
Yeah, it's unfortunate. No money in a small minority.