Wait till you hear about Typescript, you know adding types to ECMAScript, like Macromedia did some 20 years ago. :)
Being in the industry for 20+ years and starting as a teenager making games in Flash it makes really hard for me to treat webdev seriously with all their revolutionary innovations.
At work I often encounter a resistance to a tech or solution I propose, because "there hasen't been any substational contribution to the repository in a week, seems dead to me". To which I kindly respond with a question - how do you calculate hypotenuse, because it's been a long time since Pythagoras made the last commit.
Meanwhile, some of my friends are still doing side jobs using CakePHP, 20 years later. :)
Careless bastard. If safety wasn't his concern he at least should have written it with style using NextJS with tRPC using React Server Side components hydrated on the fly with edge locations in mind utilizing streaming components backed by Drizzle ORM further cemented by AuthJS. I'm sure there would have been plenty of starter kits had he tried npm create.
Today I value web stuff for one thing and one thing only: they run in the best sandbox we have. I can run untrusted programs from hackernews folks without worrying! I wouldn't do that with native code of course, way too easy to hack me. But they won't waste a browser 0-day on random HN readers... Whatever can be done in the web, I usually like to do it there as no-body has to trust my code then.
> I can run untrusted programs from hackernews folks without worrying
The assumption is that native code has virtually unrestricted access to your system while JS programs don't, which is true. But if the untrusted JS program is wrapped up in web extension, in 2024, it could do almost as much damage than native code especially since most non-techies don't have much of value in their machines. The value exists on walled sites
> Being in the industry for 20+ years and starting as a teenager making games in Flash it makes really hard for me to treat webdev seriously with all their revolutionary innovations.
I think the framing here is unfair.
It's not that the people innovating in JS or HTML think what they're doing is "revolutionary" or has never been done before. Generally they are applying ideas that have been developed elsewhere, but are currently lacking in whatever their specific area is.
(1) Some time ago I'm at a coding interview and I'm tasked with an algorithm to calculate the biggest rectangle you can make of a set of segments. Or something similar. I'm presented with a computer, with VSCode, with an open file with some code already. I left my chair, approached the whiteboard available in the room and started thinking about how to address the problem. The interviewer was not pleased with my approach and eventually after I exchange my thought process he invited me back to the computer, asked to write some code, and when he saw I was doing for loops with vars he interrupted me, pointed at the beginning of the file which was "import lodash" and showed me the expected solution. A lot of functional mambo jumbo which was obviously very sexy at that time.
I looked at his code and asked him what's the computional complexity of his solution. He looked at the code, thought for a minute and said the session is over.
(2) About that time I was doing a web app that was a huge web form. The user could exit and resume a session at any given time so the input was stored in database and was supposed to be retrieved when the session resumed.
At one point I noticed that the initial loading time was noticeably slower, and after inspection it turned out that the init time raised from zero to about 800ms. It was the same time when our senior JS programmer with 9 years of experience shipped the code that was responsible for retrival of the data from the backend.
It was functional masterpiece. No loops, lots of map and reduce and he was very proud of it.
When I pointed out it had O(N^6) complexity and could be fixed with a simple for loop matching ids he got offended and stated that "we don't program that way anymore, functional is the future".
I'm glad to have mostly avoided frontend dev, but we've also had some bonkers backend trends like SOAP. It was like closing your eyes and wishing for a full-stack impl to appear if you write enough XML.
Actually, one of the things I miss the most from AS is... E4X.
I work with ton of json, including hundreds of kubernetes definitions per project, and I really miss the ability to parse the data so swiftly and effective with native syntax.
I've never used E4X, but it at least looks like it'd make XML more tolerable.
Most XML experience I had was ejabberd and XMPP. Was thoroughly pissed off by the end of it. We ended up sending JSON over IQ messages instead because we were super done with XML, only to find that iOS's XML parser takes O(N^2) time to parse each element. Had to split the elements to make it work. 0/10 would not recommend.
A few gigs ago I joined a BigCo as a part of contractor group to build a new project. The BigCo had a staff member to bootstrap the project and build a prototype which was internally reviewed and approved. When we put our foots on the ground it was already settled that the app will be build with X, Y and Z as the core components.
Two months later that staff member left the BigCo for another organization, and when we found the actual job posting for his position the X, Y and Z were explicitly stated as nice to have for a candidate.
> how do you calculate hypotenuse, because it's been a long time since Pythagoras made the last commit.
Asinine - everything advances and needs maintenance over time, even geometry. I invite you to try building a game without using quaternions or projective (ie non-euclidean) geometry.
Edit: does hn award points based on contrariness? Or is it just that people on hn think they're super clever with their contrary point?
No one said it invalidated his theorem. They said it has been expanded upon.
Also, comparing web technologies to something as fundamental as the pythagorean theorem is reductionist and overall pretty ridiculous. Web technologies need maintenance. Proven mathematical formulas don’t.
> does hn award points based on contrariness? Or is it just that people on hn think they're super clever with their contrary point?
It’s both, and seems to be a theme here. HN generally despises the mainstream, so anything that goes against that is praised with little additional thought. A great example is the recent article about “founder mode” which is definitely one of the most idiotic contrarian things I’ve ever read, but receives heaps of upvotes every time it gets posted.
Came in to post something similar. Dreamweaver was where my pro web life began. I want the WYSIWYG idea to work, but with the complexity of responsive design with modern css, I don’t see the model working well, at least in my workflow.
I was so excited when I first discovered Dreamweaver and was gonna make so many great websites. ironically my Engineering degree program had other thoughts
Well, Visual Studio 6.0's Visual Interdev (1998) had actual browser rendering (via the Trident engine used in Internet Explorer I assume), including Java applets, which would run in the "Quick view" mode, but also amazingly in the Source [code] mode!
Mozilla Composer also existed and is the root of a lot of WSISWYG editors today because of the legacy it and others left in the HTML spec (content editable).
I do! Wow, what a flashback. I think it was formed from Mozilla's built in editor, and later on died quite quickly and was forked under a different name, which, in turn, died quickly.
We still use Dreamweaver just because you can drop well structured Word documents in and get a decent HTML document out of it. Still not found a better process really.
Being in the industry for 20+ years and starting as a teenager making games in Flash it makes really hard for me to treat webdev seriously with all their revolutionary innovations.
At work I often encounter a resistance to a tech or solution I propose, because "there hasen't been any substational contribution to the repository in a week, seems dead to me". To which I kindly respond with a question - how do you calculate hypotenuse, because it's been a long time since Pythagoras made the last commit. Meanwhile, some of my friends are still doing side jobs using CakePHP, 20 years later. :)