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by crabbone 1215 days ago
This argument reminds me of people who confuse market success with product quality. I.e. some people believe that if the product sells well, then it must be a good product.

You don't need to try hard to convince yourself that there's no causal link between the two (eg. fast food sells well, but isn't good food, high-end goods usually don't sell well because buyers aren't willing to pay extra for marginal improvements).

And so does your argument. The post OP was the reaction to was talking about quality and how misguided the whole field is in terms of using existing, concrete pieces of software s.a. React. And that is, unfortunately, the reality. Web is awful, especially because of how it's been developed, especially due to things like React. But it also sells well. But this wasn't the point.

> Pay people to fix the tech/replace the janky or slow stuff/automate manual things.

Sometimes? When circumstances allow that? This is not a given. And with the way Web is, and the way it's going, it's only getting worse. HTML is a bloated standard. JavaScript is an idiotic language. The GUI toolkit that browser offer is a combo of bloat and idiocy. The whole idea of making "single page applications" is idiotic because Web was never meant for that. It was meant to be an interface to what today we'd call a distributed document database. But is this going to change because individual programmers or individual companies recognize the problem? Are they going to fix / automate it? -- well, there's no way a single company, not even a mega international corporation at this point, which could do that.

The argument the OP was the counter-argument to was saying that Web needs a different foundation and that no modern frameworks are any good. It didn't go as far (as I did) in claiming that the whole stack is garbage. Still, you are missing the point when you are making an abstract argument about using frameworks. The point was: "we have garbage frameworks in Web, and things are getting worse, let's take action to do things differently".

1 comments

Exactly, the point of frameworks like React is to patch over issues with html, css, javascript and the DOM. Dropping React (the framework) will just make you deal with those issues in particular ways that only you understand, but it won't make them disappear.
That’s strange, I thought the point of React was to make websites slow and laggy so you can save on server costs by just serving json after the initial payload.
Some of us still remember the golden years of doing the same but with jQuery snippets spread through hundreds of files with zero logical connection between them except in the developer's mind.
I have no issues with frameworks and libs but the fact I know I’m on site built with react because everything gets laggy and my laptops fans start spinning is not a great selling point.
Yes, the web is a terrible platform for applications. Anything on the web that goes beyond the equivalent of linked PDFs will be wonky.

There's nothing on the web even approaching 1990s desktop applications. Specially if you care about latency, precision, and text inputs not randomly eating what you type.

Even with the wonkiness, the web is usually worth using because of the access you get to big amounts of data and backend servers providing nice services.

I've literally never experienced this with react. This sounds like an infinite loop of some sort.
It's not even ancient history. React is only 10 years old.
Aaaand... this doesn't make React good. It makes HTML+CSS+JavaScript bad. Here's the problem. These three need fixing. Or, rather, replacing altogether if you want a platform for distributing applications. While any strategy for replacement right now seems impractical, the opposite of it is not good either. Not being able to do the right thing doesn't make the least wrong thing the right thing.
Yes, but as you said the web is a broken platform for applications. Painting a picture where we lived in a perfect world until React introduced some problems is a wrong analysis. React solved some (not all) problems of the web as a platform for GUIs, and introduced a new set of problems. People make their choice and choose which set of problems they prefer to work with.

The web works well for displaying static pages with links between them (if you are ok with some ugly things while the page loads), but once you introduce Forms or any sort of interactivity with the user all hell breaks loose and you will have to choose what you patch over, and what sacrifices you make.