Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by tambourine_man 978 days ago
What’s hard is making up languages that compile down to JS/HTML/CSS, debugging through source maps, having 50k dependencies just to create a view to choose between 3 shirt sizes and 2 colors.

What’s not that hard is managing a bit of state and writing sensible CSS to make it reusable.
2 comments
shirogane86x 978 days ago
As someone who worked in a decently sized company working on a software product written with TS/HTML/SCSS (at least we had those) and jQuery: no, absolutely not.

as the apps get big, state becomes a mess, fully reusing code is very hard, making anything even slightly reactive becomes not only a lot of code, but a jumbled mess of mutability, usually copy pasted from somewhere else. I will take any other type of app over that - I don't care if it's angular, vue, react, next, whatever.

So i contend that not only is "managing a bit of state and writing sensible CSS to make it reusable" very hard, I haven't even seen it done ever, at least in my personal experience of the code I touched

link
brailsafe 977 days ago
Yes, exactly. The requirements of most functional production applications on the web already have so many complicated bits to get right, people shouldn't be burning their energy on what end up being inane details like synchronization UI with state.

At a much much smaller scale however, jQuery and CSS or in many cases just HTML and CSS will do just fine. Knowing which approach to take is the mark of someone with some level of experience above junior.

link
tambourine_man 976 days ago
> people shouldn't be burning their energy on what end up being inane details like synchronization UI with state

Instead they burn an insane amount of energy (and unfathomable bandwidth) inventing, learning and debugging crazy abstractions and build systems (that change every year or so) on top of the native platform that is the web.

It really feels like a collective bad trip that I hope the industry wakes up from, eventually. But after more than a decade of this insanity, I’m not holding my breath.

link
brailsafe 977 days ago
Those are also hard, but supportive tooling to make that process run more smoothly is part of the decision-making process of whether or not to choose which tools for the requirements of your contract.

Sometimes you choose hypothetically difficult debugging if it eliminates the need to deal with the mechanics of the lowest level of interacting with a system. If you haven't needed to do that, then you'd be inclined to think it's an unlikely situation to be in.

link