> What's really frustrating about all this is how passive and helpless the current generation of web developers seem to be in all this. It's as if they've all been lulled into complacency by convenience. They seem afraid to carve out their own ambitious paths, and lack serious gusto for engineering. If there isn't a "friendly" bot spewing encouraging messages with plenty of emoji at every turn, they won't engage.
> As someone who took a classical engineering education, which included not just a broad scientific and mathematical basis, but crucially also the necessary engineering ethos, this is just alien to me. Call me cynical all you want, but it matches my experience. Coming after the generation that birthed Git and BitTorrent, and which killed IE with Firefox and Konqueror/WebKit, it just seems ridiculous.
> Fuck, most zoomers don't even know how to dance. I don't mean that they are bad at dancing, I mean they literally won't try, and just stand around awkwardly.
> Just know: nobody else is going to do it for you. So what are you waiting for?
It seems like ranting about how the older generations were better, and conversely the younger generation is decadent, is as old as history itself. Anybody know why this is the case? Is it that our overall character has really been heading downhill for all of history? Or is it something else, like how we generally remember the best of the past but mostly notice the worst or merely average in the present?
I didn't read the article, but just based on the passages you have quoted and based on my recent experience, I will have to agree with the author.
I recently learned that GitHub has a discussions page which is separate from the issues pages. To pass the time and to give back to the community I try to help people and answer their questions.
It's a bit concerning to me that when I point some people to the right direction by making suggestions, linking to the docs, or linking to a relevant stackoverflow answer, they are unable to formulate an answer for their problem. Sometimes I literally have to create a reproduction repository so that they can see how the answer I gave can solve their problem.
I am not concluding anything here. But this has been my experience so far when engaging the community of an open source frontend framework.
If I had a candidate that did things like that for fun I'd hire them before getting their name.
Dev work has gotten too abstract and covered in bullshit.
Not that 6502 assembler is useful in 2022, but computers were a focused study that would result in productive capacity. For whatever reason that's been diffused and our attention is spent less fruitfully.
Because it's often true, although it's more cyclical than downhill. You have an open emerging technology and people start out self-reliant and have to learn from the ground up out of necessity, and over time things become so tower of babel like that new people can't or don't need to understand it anymore. Then it gets so bad that someone tears it down and you're back to the starting point
It’s because older generations inevitably devalue an evolving culture they can no longer comprehend as a defense mechanism to avoid admitting they can’t keep up. Anyone who seriously makes this argument that the Kids These Days are lazy/bad/worse than their own generation is either delusional or just lazy.
It is as old as history itself. What you're witnessing is a result of what I call the problem of knowledge.
Realize that, everything that is learned, any knowledge gained, and new technology invented, will eventually be lost and forgotten - as the people who gained said knowledge or invented said technology will eventually die, and the next generation is born ignorant. Yes, we as a species try to pass our knowledge to the next generation, via teaching, books, or what have you, but it's a never ending problem that can't ever be resolved.
Think about it, If I were to invent - say a new programming language tomorrow, the entire world would be ignorant of its existence, let alone know how it even works. Now I could go on to teach others that my new programming language exists and how it works, but this takes time, and people don't have infinite time to learn things. So as time goes on, and we learn and invent more and more things as a species, the next generation has a greater amount to learn than previous generations. Eventually there comes a point where there's too much knowledge to learn, that even if you spent your entire lifetime trying to learn what your ancestors had recorded, you would die before having learned everything. So knowledge inevitably does get lost between generations, and thus, history tends to repeat itself, and the next generation seems decadent for not knowing what you came to know.
Computer technology is just a perfect microcosm demonstrating this problem, as new things get created all the damn time (often to be just reinventions of old things). Heck, even most old programmers I know say they struggle to keep up to date on things.
And it is as old as history itself, as this is what Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 is essentially talking about. Heck, look at most ancient civilizations, and how little we can comprehend what we still have of their writings.
When reading through the comments here, I really feel like the article was misunderstood. My summary of the article is:
Point 1: React solved all the right things, but its current trajectory, does not prioritize developing the fundamental tooling we need. React does not allow us to build a new Figma (consistent undo/redo in collaborative settings, immediate low-latency mutation of app state to reflect user changes and building fundamentals to SaaS interoperability)
Point 2: People are overwhelmed by the work, and too timid to target the fundamental architecture we need to solve these things. We're just going with the flow.
He is leading https://usegpu.live/ to build the fundamentals right, an encourage people to either:
- help out there, if it fits your use case, or
- start working on targeting these fundamentals, where most needed for your own use cases, don't just go with the flow.
On building the next Figma, my first reaction was that Figma should probably have been a compiled GUI application in a ideal world.
Figma is a work tool where a designers are supposed to spend a decent amount of time, and when working on a specific project there is little navigation or moving to other pages. It being in the browser is a technical artifact to help the business model, but inherently there would be nothing lost if it was a local application synching data and changes with a central server.
If time had to be spent making react closer to desktop apps, can’t that time be spent instead on making desktop apps as sandboxed, OS compatible, easy to download and execute as web pages ?
This is something Apple doesn’t care much about, but react core devs also don’t care about desktop likeness, so it seems a to me to be a suitable alternative solution.
> React does not allow us to build a new Figma (consistent undo/redo in collaborative settings, immediate low-latency mutation of app state to reflect user changes and building fundamentals to SaaS interoperability)
If I wanted to write the next Figma, the first thing I’d reach for is Phoenix Liveview + Channels with Vaxine/AntidoteDB or some other eventually consistent CRDT store for collaborative editing and host it on fly.io - I’d forgo the ‘front end’ completely
This article is kind of sad. In part because it comes from its author, who usually writes interesting stuff. But this one is ranty -and no, it doesn't make me angry. It's ranty and also fluffy, light in content, scarce in any arguments or conclusions other than "youth these days! they don't even try!". I'm not young and I still find this article poor.
After going through the first two thirds of the article with mostly uninteresting "I'm old; I know better" detours, the author seems to sort of relate React to "reactive", and goes on yet another detour on unrelated architecture. So, we're now reaching the end of the article and the only conclusion we get is... hey, stuff is hard, you need to do the work, you can't avoid putting in effort. And... that's it. That's all there is to the article. Eh.
I agree with this guy.
I can see that his tone unfortunately irks many to take offense and post.
I am sad that microsoft has
so dropped the ball on UI,
that even MS' own teams use web
tech to build apps nowadays.
I particularly lament that scroll bars have become a lost art.
We have gone from scroll bars
working perfectly in windows 3.1,
to .. whatever passes for a scrollbar these days.
Often they are even hidden, so you have no idea how big the document is,or where you are in it. But it sure does look minimal and slick, until you have to actually use the thing.
Many established keyboard shortcuts are going missing,but that is OK, since modern people dont like keyboards.
My favorite is when installing current windows 10, when you select language and country. You get a list that displays .. 4 items at a time, from hundreds of choices.
Unlike earlier versions, you can no longer press a key to jump to a letter. You must page through the whole list.
Sorry if I made more millenials cry.
I thought windows had bad UX until I tried macOS. Maybe my taste is different than others but I found macOS UX to be really confusing. I particularly disliked the iconset. Interestingly this is not true for iOS and iPadOS, those are magnificent.
> But it sure does look minimal and slick, until you have to actually use the thing.
Modern UI """design""" in a nutshell. So-called designers (1) optimise for "looking good on a screenshot / promo screen", rather than for usability and aesthetics for the user, and (2) do so according to their own subjective tastes, instead of evidence-based approaches. These are to me the two major sources of the atrocious design of much of modern software.
Given the way UWP and now WinUI 3.0 teams have managed the product, with many not even having an understanding of the capabilities and VS tooling from the frameworks they are supposed to replace, I am starting to think the internal code name for the team is something like Team Titanic.
Recently scrolling through a list of countries to choose 'United Kingdom' I eventually found it under 'G'. The nearest I can figure, it was previously for 'Great Britain' and was never re-sorted? (Never mind that nobody in the UK has called it Great Britain since maybe mid 20th century!)
- you first need to lay out the scrollable content normally, without a scrollbar
- then you need to detect whether it spills over, and whether a scrollbar is needed
- if so, you need to lay out all the content again, in a slightly smaller area
- if the content ever shrinks, you need to detect this too
- and if the content only _just_ fits, then it is possible that without a scrollbar, it doesn't need a scrollbar, but if there is a scrollbar, it needs to be scrollable. Chicken and egg.
This is actually pretty nasty to get right. Now factor in layout models like flex box, which also require part of the content to have a "pre layout" pass done in order to estimate "natural size", and it can get quite gnarly. And if you want to mix vertical and horizontal layouts... oof.
I got an equivalent of HTML/CSS box+flex working in Use.GPU but it took plenty of iteration.
I think the lesson here is that UI is always more complicated than you think. There are countless little tricks and mechanisms that you would only ever notice it if they didn't work. When they do, it is so "obviously" right you literally can't tell.
(As an aside, whoda thunk that a generation raised on participation trophies would be easily triggered???)
This article is weird linking together many unrelated strands of thought.
Like linking reactive programming to “reactive” UIs, when really they mean UIs that are forgiving to their users instead of breaking down.
Or how by coding on the web we’ve lost the immediacy of a UI that runs on our desktop, and the primitives (like undo/redo stacks) that make desktop user interfaces friendlier, at least without having to build them ourselves.
And that new UI frameworks show up claiming to solve the problems that React creates with complexity, by forgoing the functionality that React provides that they pretend is unimportant by hiding behind toy examples.
There’s actually not much in this article that doesn’t resonate with a jaded millenial like myself who knows their computer history, but could have been expressed more cohesively.
As someone who has admittedly worked on approximately 0 user-facing programs, it seems like there are not many revolutionary ideas when it comes UI.
I have some dream of a sort of user-interface system that exposes controls and data more directly to the user, independent of the author's stylistic choices. Sort of like semantic HTML with style-sheets that are configured on a per-user basis. It would be analogous to the unix shell in the sense that it would allow small programs to easily inter-operate, like plan9's pumbing or something. Instead of having a big monolithic program like kdenlive or blender, you would have a number of modifiable general-use programs that can be re-arranged to fit many use-cases in an extensible way.
But instead of that it just seems like every toolkit or library wants to be highly specialized and complex, and provide for a very specific use-case rather than making the most general-possible user interface that is universal. Programmers should not be concerned with the appearance of their UIs like window decorations or the layout of buttons or text fields, for the same reason they should not be concerned with the minutia of optimizing assembly-code. It leads to a non-portable design. That should be left up to the system.
The article started really strong and I believe the point about React and knock-off frameworks not evolving to really solve challenges modern web applications face is good and worth exploring.
Then it took an awkward and very long detour into gushing over Apple design.
And it "circled back" to a rant that seemed to trivialize things like collaborative editing and undo/redo like they were generically solved problems in the past. No, collaborative editing was not a solved problem 20 years ago. It's an evolving space with recent advancements in the CRDT space from Yjs and Automerge really opening things up.
Started really good but I was hoping it would have ended up with an analysis of the gap between where React (and browsers in general) are currently and where it ought to be; with some ideas around how to cross the gap.
> This article is weird linking together many unrelated strands of thought.
You know, this isn't the first time I've thought as much about Acko's writing :\ Often there isn't a coherent thesis, but a bunch of interesting related thoughts that don't add up to anything specific.
I thought this was the most insightful part, though it would be the second most if the author did more than allude to conflict-free replicated data types.
Whenever you build a tiny language for the purpose of templating, it's worth asking yourself if it's really worth it to have to reinvent variables, loops, branches, scoping, expressions, and functions... Poorly.
> Many competing frameworks acted like this wasn't so, and stuck to the old practice of using templates. They missed the obvious lesson here: every templating language inevitably turns into a very poor programming language over time. It will grow to add conditionals, loops, scopes, macros, and other things that are much nicer in actual code. A templating language is mainly an inner platform effect. It targets a weird imagined archetype of someone who isn't allergic to code, but somehow isn't smart enough to work in a genuine programming language. In my experience, this archetype doesn't actually exist. Designers don't want to code at all, while coders want native expressiveness. It's just that simple.
I always thought the point of the template language was more to enforce the boundary of presentation and code. and thus any template language that grows too powerful is a bad template language, because it's no longer doing the one job it has. So I think a template language should have loops, (non mutable) variables and basic conditions, that's it. So if there's something you can't do in your template that you want to do, the solution then isn't to write some sort of hideous thing in a bespoke templating language, but to add another variable/loop/whatever to the template.
Of course this requires coordination and the larger the organization, the more this is going to slow things down. I also don't think this separation is as important on frontend javascript code, since the lines get blurry there anyway.
Yes, JSX (and React) is interesting in this way: it's not a (full) template language. Instead, it's a convenient way to write component fragments that include HTML/XML expressions and further components. Each component top-level is still JavaScript statements.
There's also an escape hatch to include arbitrary JS expressions inside your JSX expressions, although perhaps we should use it only to include variables and not more complex JS expressions.
In the end, templates are not important, components are. JSX provides just what's necessary to make it convenient to define components in JS.
This post ultimately seems to spend a long time complaining about other people not putting in the effort to fix the problems of React... while the author doesn't offer any solutions or even ideas for solutions.
Also, the author makes repeated digs at React 18's concurrent mode work while at the same time complaining about the kind of stuff concurrent mode is supposed to fix (for example, React updates not happening fast enough to keep up with mouse dragging).
> the kind of stuff concurrent mode is supposed to fix (for example, React updates not happening fast enough to keep up with mouse dragging).
How does concurrent mode help with mouse dragging? I went reading through the React docs on this and they only really talk about data fetching patterns. I'm not sure I understand how it would apply to mouse events.
The author of this article also wrote the for me mind blowing things like MathBox2 [0], the Pixel Factory [1] and many more. The often mentioned clone of React in the article, described in "The GPU Banana Stand" [2] is something that wasn't heavily discussed here as I think the concepts are just very advanced. I mention this as I believe this is what the author is concerned about and what some might haven't experienced. Using React for "advanced" things were it just doesn't cut it and one has to go back to manual DOM manipulation, or having to dig very deep to understand how one can build UIs were the elements update 60 times per second. React works great for things were this is not a concern, but if the standard has these innate restrictions, what applications will the future hold if all people know is React?
Though not a fan of some rants and the bashing on Zoomers, give them a chance to build the next iteration of the common tools, the oldest Zoomer is 25 at the moment.
Exactly, I was a bit undecided back in the day thinking React and Angular might be similarly valuable, and I don't remember if there was even Vue yet or not (I believe not yet). Angular had just split, and I had to help contracting for a company using Angular 1, and OH BOY the page was horizontal and most of the programming statements happened within those nightmarish ng-if, ng-repeat, ng-{please-kill-me-know}. I believe there were parts up to 350-400 columns wide.
That's exactly when I learned that same realization, and decided never to use (if I can avoid it) a programming environment that defines its own templating language.
I just wanted to wire up shit, make pages, send requests & receive responses ... and not spend days trying to pick the right router, form, state and whatever library for my view layer, and look for TS definitions for them, so I stayed on Angular2+ ^^
> Crucially, none of the React alternatives solve this
FFS. The context is the web, nobody solves graphic problem like gaming for you, or need to. At this point it doesn't matter because HTML/DOM stuff is not going to suffice what you are talking about either.
I honestly think after reading 50% of the article is all about bragging knowing history. I'm not old but I was there too. WIN32, MFC, QT, 8086 assembly whatever. I got a god damn computer engineering degree too but doesn't make me smarter, having better vision, knowing solution better than random ppl on the internet.
I'm not sure what's the point of React here nor "Saving React". Why it needs to be saved in which sense.
>I'm not sure what's the point of React here nor "Saving React". Why it needs to be saved in which sense.
I read it as “svelte et al gain traction due to inferior younglings, therefore react is a sinking ship, let’s not let it sink because the tooling I use is the adequate choice (despite having to be saved)”
> FFS. The context is the web, nobody solves graphic problem like gaming for you, or need to…
I don’t think you understood the article.
The point he was making is that a good user interface is hard to build and is “app like”, with all the weird edge cases.
…and that, for better or worse:
1) react is the best at doing that.
2) react is (frustratingly) not making itself better at it, and is instead prioritising weird stuff like server side rendering, that is pretty niche in terms of value.
3) react competition is basically just “still the same shit web ui” but easier to build and with nicer tooling.
So, I mean, yeah it’s a rant.
…but hey, I think you’re failing if you walk away from it going “wtf was that?”.
He’s right.
Making “app like” websites is pretty hard; it’s very hard with some frameworks.
Apps are better, in almost every way.
That sucks.
No one except react was really even fighting that battle, and they seem to have lost interest.
That kind of sucks too.
Does react suck? Maybe.
…but, tldr; if you’re gonna take a big dump on react from a grey height, at least do so from a position of thoughtfulness.
“No, I’m happy with building a web ui, I don’t need slick user interactions or an interface design rather than just a form”
Cool. That’s fine. The MVP will be quick to build.
Not everyone needs to be figma.
…but pick the tool for the job; and some of the new frameworks are very finely crafted tools for a very specific job; and that job is building a generic web ui.
He does not mention gaming once though. The web quickly got to the point where UIs are possible, but lately there's seemingly little or no progress in making app-quality UI possible let alone easy.
In this sense, we might be in a situation where the floodgates are about to open, but who and what is able to make it happen?
> I honestly think after reading 50% of the article is all about bragging knowing history.
This is why I can't read most tech articles these days. Won't get to the point without a long detour into the background of the problem; as someone in my forties, it's hard to justify the expense.
> A templating language ... targets a weird imagined archetype of someone who isn't allergic to code, but somehow isn't smart enough to work in a genuine programming language. In my experience, this archetype doesn't actually exist.
In my day job, I write "sequences" to command a spacecraft, in a neutered "sequencing language" with conditionals but no looping. Several people on our team who are great at writing sequences for the spacecraft feel they "can't code" and don't learn other languages. I had assumed the deal with templating languages was similar and this type of people were the target users.
Creating ways for people to interact and control a computer by writing but who don’t need to know about deploying to production, scaling databases, managing memory resources, etc, seems like a good division of labor.
There are two forces at work here when this division of labor disappears: 1.) increasing complexity in the tool designed for non-computer engineers and 2.) the subtleties of a class of worker who don’t want to do literal manual labor like typing in SQL.
At many firms it seems as if there is a layer of operations that is only capable of interacting with a CRUD UI, constricted either by ability or tooling.
That is, there is a pressure from management to split a firm in two: those that code and those that do not. This means that even something as simple as making updates to a CRUD interface is entwined with the the rest of the engineering practices.
Case in point: computer engineers writing SQL at the behest of some other entity at a firm who is not capable or allowed or even encouraged to learn or understand SQL.
> The very notion of "back-end" is a fallacy: it implies that one can produce a useful, working system, without ever having to talk to end-users.
This is a small part of the rant, but he is fundamentally mistaken about what backends are. The real life equivalents are not bridges, but kitchens or back-offices: a place where you make the sausage so that the customer can have a delightful experience without the gory business part in sight.
It’s not disconnected from end-users, quite he opposite, as it’s suppose to realize the core value of the product.
I don’t agree with a lot of other parts of the rant either, but the global message of “react needs to evolve in a different direction” is I think interesting.
Funny how reactive seems recent for people, while dataflow / dag based visuals are old in the movie/cgi industry :)
It always pains me to remember a p2 cpu could do realtime nurbs procedural animation (very complex) and yet we still have manual state machines for simpler tasks like documents / filesystems etc
This article is right that there's a lot to gain in terms of ergonomics by finding leaner ways. I also think the web stack and dev culture is ready to respond well to this idea.
>A templating language is mainly an inner platform effect. It targets a weird imagined archetype of someone who isn't allergic to code, but somehow isn't smart enough to work in a genuine programming language. In
Strange sentiment. Isn't React templating as well? Besides one of the most famous use of templates is macros (in C as well as other languages). Would people who generate code be allergic to coding?
Nope! You can make React apps with just a plain ol' JS file (and doing so is frankly instructive). Most folk add in JSX for extra syntactic sugar tho, so the confusion with templating is understandable.
If this was a rant on boomers, it would be seen as ageist. Let's not blame all the new stuff on the new generation, it's not like a hoard of zoomersTM wrote react right after graduation.
Nevertheless, when it appeared on the scene, it was wild: you're going to put the HTML and CSS in the JavaScript? Are you mad?
I still think plain old CSS - separate from any JS or HTML or JS that generates HTML - is the way to go.
Just so much easier and less brittle. I get that CSS being too hard for binary tree inverting geniuses to learn is now widely accepted folk wisdom, but it's really not true.
I strongly dislike having all the css for the site in one place because the dependencies are opaque and it’s hard to apply local reasoning. For some CSS that’s what you want, but for a lot of use cases you want very specific rules coupled to very specific DOM. When I have that kind of relationship I want to control the blast radius and not let it leak out to the rest of the app. I also want co-location with the thing that’s making the relevant DOM.
I also do think CSS is hard to learn because of how vast it is with the decades of shit piled on. There’s no clear way to do a lot of things, and if I have a solution, there’s always this doubt that I’m holding it wrong and fucking over future me.
People that know CSS tend to hate things like tailwind and css-in-js because it’s an absolute abuse of the core design principles of “correct” CSS. But these things succeed for not 100% bad reasons.
If I had to venture to guess based on how their APIs work, it's probably events. There's a system called "NotificationCenter" which can be observed to receive system events within Apple API's which is quite old.
>But this is the same company that seamlessly transitioned its entire stack from PowerPC, to x86, to x64, and eventually ARM, with most users remaining blissfully unaware this ever took place.
Also from 6502 to 65C03 to 65C816 to 68k to PowerPC... But Apple ][ users were painfully aware of the 68k transition. ;)
> Now, before you close this tab thinking "ugh, not another tech rant", let me first remind you that a post is not a rant simply because it makes you angry. Next, let me point out that I've been writing code for 32 years
Ha, I was wondering if I'm the only one allergic to that attitude. For me it was one sentence later at "You should listen to your elders" where I decided this piece won't be much of a value and head over to the comments which never fail to have some interesting insights without forcing me to read extended history and ramblings.
“The orange site” is some weird euphemism twitter users use when complaining about HN. It’s also a great search term to chuck in to twitter for some entertainment.
The fundamental flaw of this article is that React as far as I know never claimed to solve all these issues. React mainly handles state and rendering. It is also a common crticism of React. The opposite is a common crticism of Angular. Maybe the article should have been about Angular.
The more I think about it, the more this plea to push web frameworks in the direction of desktop apps feels misguided.
I know Chrome OS is really seen as the way forward for many many people, but what if they are just betting on the trend to last, when it is just the usual cycle of “applets” vs local applications ?
The same way Java was pushed in the browser, to then cement its role in desktop apps (or the Flash -> Air progression), wouldn’t javascript heavy work sites at some point move to a native JS hooked into the system and opening the door to system wide drag and drop, undo etc.
Except for the non-dancing zoomers catching stray bullets at the end, this is a really great rant. He’s absolutely right that React won for very good reasons, reasons that new frameworks don’t seem to understand by making old mistakes (templates and directives, looking hard at you). But the rant goes deeper in its accusation that React (and the web) has forgotten the past as well. React (and the web in general) isn’t a great solution for data that is 1) real-time, 2) multi-user, and 3) contextually undo-able.
He’s not wrong, but I wonder what kind of applications he’s working on that require all three of those characteristics simultaneously. If you only need 2 out of his 3 data requirements, then React + Apollo can handle it just fine in experienced hands.
For apps that truly do need all 3 capabilities, the problem isn’t React per-se. The problem is that such apps are just complex by their very nature — even by reducing accidental complexity to zero, you are still stuck with a huge amount of essential complexity. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Although I have long since moved on from Clojure since Rich Hickey made it clear Clojure was not about me but about him and his consulting business, you really need a powerful language like Clojure to do something as tricky as the author wants poor little JS to do. Someone one described JS as a cute dog with three legs — you feel for it, and take care of it, but you know it really isn’t capable of too much. A hard problem needs a powerful tool, and nothing written in JS (kinda-typed or not) is going to get the job done.
No, it won't. Web is an ever changing platform, with a lot of churn.
The most long lived framework currently is emberjs. But it is not the hottest, so you won't find it discussed much. The most "future proof" framework is "React" which is the one mentioned in Original article.
It goes without saying but React is the cause of a lot of churn in js ecosystem, particularly due to its "no-battery included" approach.
## what about other popular frameworks?
Other popular frameworks are angular and Vue.
Angular has gone through such a major shift between angular 1 and angular 2, that angular 2 should have been renamed.
That being said Angular2+ is also going through a paradigm shift (albeit in right direction this time)
The other popular framework is Vue. Vue's templates have has gone through minor changes. And it has gone through a major change (vue 2 to vue3) recently. It is unlikely that another such large rewrite will happen for next 3-4 years. But after that, who knows?
The only option here is to refresh your skills regularly every 2-3 years
i think the back button behavior is intentional - at least on mobile.
if someone sends you a link to a piece of content on FB and then you use the back button it sends you to your feed, and now they have a much greater chance of trapping the dear user in their algoverse.
Did not get the point about back- end. But does people remember how FB used to work? After going to the start-page and some clicks it had sent 1000+ requests. This was back when you could expect max 5 connectios per domain. The site was slow. The Android app was basically just a spinner.
I don’t understand arguments like this. PHP is fortunate enough to run on a real operating system with real APIs. React is running in the browser which is quite possibly the worst place to make anything stable. It will never be as stable.
I also remember something, and you forgot to mention it: other frameworks were honestly saying that they took some ideas from React (or improved their solutions being inspired by React’s ideas).
I don't think it was a good idea to use such a hostile style of writing - it is ok for web frameworks to evolve. It is more than ok to share ideas. Every time I see that some new framework took some idea of React (or Ember, or Angular, or PHP) - I see the “credits”, the authors are not trying to hide it.
Some people are criticizing some frameworks - it is ok, no need to start holy wars because of that. Valid criticism will help, pointless toxicity will just shade away.
>So what exactly did we lose? It's quite simple: by moving software into the cloud and turning them into web-based SaaS offerings, many of the basic affordances that used to be standard have gotten watered down or removed entirely. Here are some examples:
>Menus let you cross over empty space and other menu items, instead of strictly enforcing hover rectangles.
I know the guy, Frank Leahy, who implemented that feature invented by Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini.
When he was at Apple, he rewrote the Menu Manager for Mac SE and Mac II.
We were working together on a project at Current TV, and reminiscing about how great the original Apple Human Interface guidelines were, and how Apple had totally lost their original devotion to excellent user interface design, and I mentioned how the original edition of the Apple HIG book I had actually illustrated, documented, and justified that subtle feature.
Frank proudly told me he was the one who implemented it for the Menu Manager, and that he was touched that somebody actually noticed and appreciated it as much as I did.
>The comments are actually great -- even Tog weighs in! It also mentions Frank Lehey, who rewrote the Menu Manager for Mac SE and Mac II.
>Jake Smith • 5 years ago This was first implemented by Apple's HID team back in the 80s, specifically Bruce Tognazzini, I believe.
>Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini Jake Smith • 5 years ago Yes, I did invent it back in 1986 and it is firmly in the public domain. From what I remember, it was Jim Batson who worked out the math and coded it for the Mac OS. The OS X team later failed to copy the algorithm, so I am happy to see that amazon has resurrected it.
>Josh Davenport Jake Smith • 5 years ago I think it was yes. It looks like it was originally implemented by NeXT and then removed by Apple when they bought NeXT. Tog himself talks about what happened here: https://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html in the answer to question 6 - "When I specified the Mac hierarchical menu algorthm in the mid-'80s, I called for a buffer zone shaped like a <, so that users could make an increasingly-greater error as they neared the hierarchical without fear of jumping to an unwanted menu...........Sadly, the NeXT folks, when coming to Apple, copied Windows, rather than the Mac"
>markr_7 • 5 years ago Can't comment on the HID team, Bruce, or possibly the many times it was even implemented at Apple, but as a young developer at Apple in the 80s, I remember stopping by Frank Leahy's office as he was tweaking his code to get menus to "work right." I've often recalled the experience because of the time he was spending to get it right, and how the behavior wasn't simple once you started really trying to meet a users expectations. If I remember right it wasn't just the direction, but also time and therefore velocity. For example, you wouldn't want to stick with the wrong menu if the user wasn't really moving with purpose in the direction of the sub-menu.
>Many competing frameworks acted like this wasn't so, and stuck to the old practice of using templates. They missed the obvious lesson here: every templating language inevitably turns into a very poor programming language over time. It will grow to add conditionals, loops, scopes, macros, and other things that are much nicer in actual code. A templating language is mainly an inner platform effect. It targets a weird imagined archetype of someone who isn't allergic to code, but somehow isn't smart enough to work in a genuine programming language. In my experience, this archetype doesn't actually exist. Designers don't want to code at all, while coders want native expressiveness. It's just that simple.
This is exactly what I was getting at when I wrote this recent post about Smarty (in response to the following parent comment proposing building a crippled scripting system for designers), to which somebody insightfully commented "Someone doesn’t like Smarty…"
parent> Even in game development, it often turns out to be a huge mess that coders have to go and sort out after the fact, it's almost inevitable if it's general purpose enough. If you do decide to build a scripting system for designers, I would recommend being very conservative with features and thinking twice before adding any new feature.
>Just hire competent and trustworthy designers, instead of purposefully crippling the tools you spend so much time developing. The best designers can also code, and if you design a system that discourages instead of encourages designers from coding, you're wasting the potential of those precious coder/designers, and wasting the opportunity to train your best designers to code too.
>It's not as if Rock Star can't find anybody qualified who wants to work for them, or any designers who are willing to learn to code in a powerful visual scripting language.
>This attitude causes disasters like PHP's "Smarty" templating language.
>PHP was already a templating language, but somebody got it in their head that there should be an iron-clad separation between designers and programmers, and that PHP gave designers too much power and confused them, and that their incompetent untrustworthy designers who refused to learn anything about programming deserved something even "simpler" than PHP, so they came up with Smarty.
>Then over time the realized that their designers were powerless, so their programmers would have to learn TWO languages so they could wade into the Smarty templates to make them actually work with all the extra code they had to write because Smarty was so crippled, so they nickle-and-dimed more and more incoherent programming language elements into Smarty, making it EVEN HARDER to use and more complicated and less consistent than PHP, yet nowhere near as powerful.
DonHopkins on Aug 19, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: YAML: Probably not so great after all
One of the most ridiculous examples of this was the Smarty templating language for PHP.
Somebody got the silly idea in their head of implementing a templating language in PHP, even though PHP is ALREADY a templating language. So they took out all the useful features of PHP, then stuck a few of them back in with even goofier inconsistent hard-to-learn syntax, in a way that required a code generation step, and made templates absolutely impossible to debug.
So in the end your template programmers need to know something just as difficult as PHP itself, yet even more esoteric and less well documented, and it doesn't even end up saving PHP programmers any time, either.
>Most people would argue, that Smarty is a good solution for templating. I really can’t see any valid reasons, that that is so. Specially since “Templating” and “Language” should never be in the same statement. Let alone one word after another. People are telling me, that Smarty is “better for designers, since they don’t need to learn PHP!”. Wait. What? You’re not learning one programming language, but you’re learning some other? What’s the point in that, anyway? Do us all a favour, and just think the next time you issue that statement, okay?
>I think the Broken Windows theory applies here. PHP is such a load of crap, right down to the standard library, that it creates a culture where it's acceptable to write horrible code. The bugs and security holes are so common, it doesn't seem so important to keep everything in order and audited. Fixes get applied wholesale, with monstrosities like magic quotes. It's like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policing policy -- sure some apps get messed up, but maybe you catch a few attacks in the process. It's what happened when the language designers gave up. Maybe with PHP 5 they are trying to clean up the neighborhood, but that doesn't change the fact when you program in PHP you are programming in a dump.
DSLs have their place. Twig for example is/was a nice templating lib for PHP. (Smarty is of course completely cursed.)
There's value in separating the presentation layer from the other parts. There are nice things in Twig that are not in PHP. (Pipes, for-else, etc.)
Of course PHP was (is?) far from a general purpose language, but a templating lib allows PHP core devs to focus less on "templating".
And it's just reality that fixing/improving/iterating/evolving a library is much easier than the host language. Updating a lib version is easier than updating language version. Similarly it's a real constraint that not every company/team/engineer will be able to "just hire competent designers".
React is also suffering from this. (Due to its popularity, hence it's the victim of its own success. Or looking at the big picture it's the normal part of the hype cycle.) The article mentions that every React repo/project is different and full of their own conventions. (And implies that they are broken too.) Oh, who would have guessed? After all it's just a view layer and people will put a myriad things on top of whatever the current "create react app" spits out.
I've been doing front end since the late 90s and I disagree with many points here.
One thing I do agree is the rant at the end about zoomers. We see stuff like tailwind popping up which really reflects the zoomer ethos of not wanting to learn fundamental stuff like CSS. "It's so easy to get started! Why would I learn anything else?"
I think gen Xers and late boomers will be the most tech developped generations because we had to use computers that were hard to use.
On the contrary, Tailwind necessitates learning CSS. I don't see how someone can write "flex flex-col gap-2 mx-2 px-4 py-2 text-gray-600" without understanding flex, margins, paddings, and seeing how children inherit certain properties. Tailwind doesn't replace CSS; it just moves properties out of a stylesheet and into a component template. That said, if someone is trying to learn Tailwind before learning CSS they're going to have a hard time (I doubt they will succeed at all).
People that learned CSS before tailwind was a thing tend to hate the concept. But clearly it has to have some value right? Why is it so popular?
I argue that it solves a clear design deficit in CSS. You cannot have tight coupling with CSS and a lot of the time you want tight coupling. In-line styles are insufficient, so we have tailwind. It’s an API to css that lets you tightly couple your styles. The re-usability of those styles is accomplished by composition of components or composition of atoms via @apply.
mwcampbell|3 years ago
> As someone who took a classical engineering education, which included not just a broad scientific and mathematical basis, but crucially also the necessary engineering ethos, this is just alien to me. Call me cynical all you want, but it matches my experience. Coming after the generation that birthed Git and BitTorrent, and which killed IE with Firefox and Konqueror/WebKit, it just seems ridiculous.
> Fuck, most zoomers don't even know how to dance. I don't mean that they are bad at dancing, I mean they literally won't try, and just stand around awkwardly.
> Just know: nobody else is going to do it for you. So what are you waiting for?
It seems like ranting about how the older generations were better, and conversely the younger generation is decadent, is as old as history itself. Anybody know why this is the case? Is it that our overall character has really been heading downhill for all of history? Or is it something else, like how we generally remember the best of the past but mostly notice the worst or merely average in the present?
b0afc375b5|3 years ago
I recently learned that GitHub has a discussions page which is separate from the issues pages. To pass the time and to give back to the community I try to help people and answer their questions.
It's a bit concerning to me that when I point some people to the right direction by making suggestions, linking to the docs, or linking to a relevant stackoverflow answer, they are unable to formulate an answer for their problem. Sometimes I literally have to create a reproduction repository so that they can see how the answer I gave can solve their problem.
I am not concluding anything here. But this has been my experience so far when engaging the community of an open source frontend framework.
kristopolous|3 years ago
For instance, I've been looking at old Byte Magazine issues on archive.org
Let's take November 1982. Here's an article on building a video digitizer (https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-11/page/n175/...) complete with circuit diagrams, signal examples, and a control program in 6502 assembly.
Hobbyist magazine. For enthusiasts.
If I had a candidate that did things like that for fun I'd hire them before getting their name.
Dev work has gotten too abstract and covered in bullshit.
Not that 6502 assembler is useful in 2022, but computers were a focused study that would result in productive capacity. For whatever reason that's been diffused and our attention is spent less fruitfully.
Barrin92|3 years ago
Because it's often true, although it's more cyclical than downhill. You have an open emerging technology and people start out self-reliant and have to learn from the ground up out of necessity, and over time things become so tower of babel like that new people can't or don't need to understand it anymore. Then it gets so bad that someone tears it down and you're back to the starting point
skywhopper|3 years ago
Rury|3 years ago
Realize that, everything that is learned, any knowledge gained, and new technology invented, will eventually be lost and forgotten - as the people who gained said knowledge or invented said technology will eventually die, and the next generation is born ignorant. Yes, we as a species try to pass our knowledge to the next generation, via teaching, books, or what have you, but it's a never ending problem that can't ever be resolved.
Think about it, If I were to invent - say a new programming language tomorrow, the entire world would be ignorant of its existence, let alone know how it even works. Now I could go on to teach others that my new programming language exists and how it works, but this takes time, and people don't have infinite time to learn things. So as time goes on, and we learn and invent more and more things as a species, the next generation has a greater amount to learn than previous generations. Eventually there comes a point where there's too much knowledge to learn, that even if you spent your entire lifetime trying to learn what your ancestors had recorded, you would die before having learned everything. So knowledge inevitably does get lost between generations, and thus, history tends to repeat itself, and the next generation seems decadent for not knowing what you came to know.
Computer technology is just a perfect microcosm demonstrating this problem, as new things get created all the damn time (often to be just reinventions of old things). Heck, even most old programmers I know say they struggle to keep up to date on things.
And it is as old as history itself, as this is what Ecclesiastes 1:9-11 is essentially talking about. Heck, look at most ancient civilizations, and how little we can comprehend what we still have of their writings.
hantusk|3 years ago
Point 1: React solved all the right things, but its current trajectory, does not prioritize developing the fundamental tooling we need. React does not allow us to build a new Figma (consistent undo/redo in collaborative settings, immediate low-latency mutation of app state to reflect user changes and building fundamentals to SaaS interoperability)
Point 2: People are overwhelmed by the work, and too timid to target the fundamental architecture we need to solve these things. We're just going with the flow.
He is leading https://usegpu.live/ to build the fundamentals right, an encourage people to either:
- help out there, if it fits your use case, or
- start working on targeting these fundamentals, where most needed for your own use cases, don't just go with the flow.
makeitdouble|3 years ago
Figma is a work tool where a designers are supposed to spend a decent amount of time, and when working on a specific project there is little navigation or moving to other pages. It being in the browser is a technical artifact to help the business model, but inherently there would be nothing lost if it was a local application synching data and changes with a central server.
If time had to be spent making react closer to desktop apps, can’t that time be spent instead on making desktop apps as sandboxed, OS compatible, easy to download and execute as web pages ?
This is something Apple doesn’t care much about, but react core devs also don’t care about desktop likeness, so it seems a to me to be a suitable alternative solution.
unknown|3 years ago
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h0l0cube|3 years ago
If I wanted to write the next Figma, the first thing I’d reach for is Phoenix Liveview + Channels with Vaxine/AntidoteDB or some other eventually consistent CRDT store for collaborative editing and host it on fly.io - I’d forgo the ‘front end’ completely
adigau31|3 years ago
unknown|3 years ago
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genezeta|3 years ago
After going through the first two thirds of the article with mostly uninteresting "I'm old; I know better" detours, the author seems to sort of relate React to "reactive", and goes on yet another detour on unrelated architecture. So, we're now reaching the end of the article and the only conclusion we get is... hey, stuff is hard, you need to do the work, you can't avoid putting in effort. And... that's it. That's all there is to the article. Eh.
dhalucario|3 years ago
fifticon|3 years ago
I particularly lament that scroll bars have become a lost art. We have gone from scroll bars working perfectly in windows 3.1, to .. whatever passes for a scrollbar these days.
Often they are even hidden, so you have no idea how big the document is,or where you are in it. But it sure does look minimal and slick, until you have to actually use the thing. Many established keyboard shortcuts are going missing,but that is OK, since modern people dont like keyboards.
My favorite is when installing current windows 10, when you select language and country. You get a list that displays .. 4 items at a time, from hundreds of choices. Unlike earlier versions, you can no longer press a key to jump to a letter. You must page through the whole list. Sorry if I made more millenials cry.
ricardobayes|3 years ago
andrepd|3 years ago
Modern UI """design""" in a nutshell. So-called designers (1) optimise for "looking good on a screenshot / promo screen", rather than for usability and aesthetics for the user, and (2) do so according to their own subjective tastes, instead of evidence-based approaches. These are to me the two major sources of the atrocious design of much of modern software.
pjmlp|3 years ago
klondike_klive|3 years ago
stillkicking|3 years ago
- you first need to lay out the scrollable content normally, without a scrollbar
- then you need to detect whether it spills over, and whether a scrollbar is needed
- if so, you need to lay out all the content again, in a slightly smaller area
- if the content ever shrinks, you need to detect this too
- and if the content only _just_ fits, then it is possible that without a scrollbar, it doesn't need a scrollbar, but if there is a scrollbar, it needs to be scrollable. Chicken and egg.
This is actually pretty nasty to get right. Now factor in layout models like flex box, which also require part of the content to have a "pre layout" pass done in order to estimate "natural size", and it can get quite gnarly. And if you want to mix vertical and horizontal layouts... oof.
I got an equivalent of HTML/CSS box+flex working in Use.GPU but it took plenty of iteration.
I think the lesson here is that UI is always more complicated than you think. There are countless little tricks and mechanisms that you would only ever notice it if they didn't work. When they do, it is so "obviously" right you literally can't tell.
(As an aside, whoda thunk that a generation raised on participation trophies would be easily triggered???)
(Yes this is an alt)
chris_armstrong|3 years ago
Like linking reactive programming to “reactive” UIs, when really they mean UIs that are forgiving to their users instead of breaking down.
Or how by coding on the web we’ve lost the immediacy of a UI that runs on our desktop, and the primitives (like undo/redo stacks) that make desktop user interfaces friendlier, at least without having to build them ourselves.
And that new UI frameworks show up claiming to solve the problems that React creates with complexity, by forgoing the functionality that React provides that they pretend is unimportant by hiding behind toy examples.
There’s actually not much in this article that doesn’t resonate with a jaded millenial like myself who knows their computer history, but could have been expressed more cohesively.
cowtools|3 years ago
I have some dream of a sort of user-interface system that exposes controls and data more directly to the user, independent of the author's stylistic choices. Sort of like semantic HTML with style-sheets that are configured on a per-user basis. It would be analogous to the unix shell in the sense that it would allow small programs to easily inter-operate, like plan9's pumbing or something. Instead of having a big monolithic program like kdenlive or blender, you would have a number of modifiable general-use programs that can be re-arranged to fit many use-cases in an extensible way.
But instead of that it just seems like every toolkit or library wants to be highly specialized and complex, and provide for a very specific use-case rather than making the most general-possible user interface that is universal. Programmers should not be concerned with the appearance of their UIs like window decorations or the layout of buttons or text fields, for the same reason they should not be concerned with the minutia of optimizing assembly-code. It leads to a non-portable design. That should be left up to the system.
Rapzid|3 years ago
Then it took an awkward and very long detour into gushing over Apple design.
And it "circled back" to a rant that seemed to trivialize things like collaborative editing and undo/redo like they were generically solved problems in the past. No, collaborative editing was not a solved problem 20 years ago. It's an evolving space with recent advancements in the CRDT space from Yjs and Automerge really opening things up.
Started really good but I was hoping it would have ended up with an analysis of the gap between where React (and browsers in general) are currently and where it ought to be; with some ideas around how to cross the gap.
AceJohnny2|3 years ago
You know, this isn't the first time I've thought as much about Acko's writing :\ Often there isn't a coherent thesis, but a bunch of interesting related thoughts that don't add up to anything specific.
AaronFriel|3 years ago
Whenever you build a tiny language for the purpose of templating, it's worth asking yourself if it's really worth it to have to reinvent variables, loops, branches, scoping, expressions, and functions... Poorly.
> Many competing frameworks acted like this wasn't so, and stuck to the old practice of using templates. They missed the obvious lesson here: every templating language inevitably turns into a very poor programming language over time. It will grow to add conditionals, loops, scopes, macros, and other things that are much nicer in actual code. A templating language is mainly an inner platform effect. It targets a weird imagined archetype of someone who isn't allergic to code, but somehow isn't smart enough to work in a genuine programming language. In my experience, this archetype doesn't actually exist. Designers don't want to code at all, while coders want native expressiveness. It's just that simple.
asddubs|3 years ago
Of course this requires coordination and the larger the organization, the more this is going to slow things down. I also don't think this separation is as important on frontend javascript code, since the lines get blurry there anyway.
tuukkah|3 years ago
There's also an escape hatch to include arbitrary JS expressions inside your JSX expressions, although perhaps we should use it only to include variables and not more complex JS expressions.
In the end, templates are not important, components are. JSX provides just what's necessary to make it convenient to define components in JS.
crooked-v|3 years ago
Also, the author makes repeated digs at React 18's concurrent mode work while at the same time complaining about the kind of stuff concurrent mode is supposed to fix (for example, React updates not happening fast enough to keep up with mouse dragging).
faraaz98|3 years ago
francislavoie|3 years ago
How does concurrent mode help with mouse dragging? I went reading through the React docs on this and they only really talk about data fetching patterns. I'm not sure I understand how it would apply to mouse events.
TN1ck|3 years ago
Though not a fan of some rants and the bashing on Zoomers, give them a chance to build the next iteration of the common tools, the oldest Zoomer is 25 at the moment.
[0]: http://acko.net/files/pres/siggraph-2014-bof/online.html
[1]: https://acko.net/files/gltalks/pixelfactory/online.html#17
[2]: https://acko.net/blog/the-gpu-banana-stand/
Rapzid|3 years ago
Yeah, give us millennials a shot! The oldest of us are just 42!
ccorcos|3 years ago
This realization is what initially sold me on React. I just wanted program and build abstractions with an actual programming language!
franciscop|3 years ago
That's exactly when I learned that same realization, and decided never to use (if I can avoid it) a programming environment that defines its own templating language.
pas|3 years ago
Existenceblinks|3 years ago
FFS. The context is the web, nobody solves graphic problem like gaming for you, or need to. At this point it doesn't matter because HTML/DOM stuff is not going to suffice what you are talking about either.
I honestly think after reading 50% of the article is all about bragging knowing history. I'm not old but I was there too. WIN32, MFC, QT, 8086 assembly whatever. I got a god damn computer engineering degree too but doesn't make me smarter, having better vision, knowing solution better than random ppl on the internet.
I'm not sure what's the point of React here nor "Saving React". Why it needs to be saved in which sense.
Do you mean, saving the web from React?
friendlyHornet|3 years ago
Don’t talk down and condescend to your audience for no reason
I think the article should be rewritten and all the ranting removed
It’s also difficult to follow where the author‘s going with all the side rants and unrelated remarks
And yes, that is considered ranting, contrary to what the author claims in the beginning of the article
inductive_magic|3 years ago
I read it as “svelte et al gain traction due to inferior younglings, therefore react is a sinking ship, let’s not let it sink because the tooling I use is the adequate choice (despite having to be saved)”
wokwokwok|3 years ago
I don’t think you understood the article.
The point he was making is that a good user interface is hard to build and is “app like”, with all the weird edge cases.
…and that, for better or worse:
1) react is the best at doing that.
2) react is (frustratingly) not making itself better at it, and is instead prioritising weird stuff like server side rendering, that is pretty niche in terms of value.
3) react competition is basically just “still the same shit web ui” but easier to build and with nicer tooling.
So, I mean, yeah it’s a rant.
…but hey, I think you’re failing if you walk away from it going “wtf was that?”.
He’s right.
Making “app like” websites is pretty hard; it’s very hard with some frameworks.
Apps are better, in almost every way.
That sucks.
No one except react was really even fighting that battle, and they seem to have lost interest.
That kind of sucks too.
Does react suck? Maybe.
…but, tldr; if you’re gonna take a big dump on react from a grey height, at least do so from a position of thoughtfulness.
“No, I’m happy with building a web ui, I don’t need slick user interactions or an interface design rather than just a form”
Cool. That’s fine. The MVP will be quick to build.
Not everyone needs to be figma.
…but pick the tool for the job; and some of the new frameworks are very finely crafted tools for a very specific job; and that job is building a generic web ui.
…but hey, the web is the context right?
So that’s fine, if you don’t care.
tuukkah|3 years ago
In this sense, we might be in a situation where the floodgates are about to open, but who and what is able to make it happen?
jeswin|3 years ago
This is why I can't read most tech articles these days. Won't get to the point without a long detour into the background of the problem; as someone in my forties, it's hard to justify the expense.
lawgimenez|3 years ago
foobarbecue|3 years ago
> A templating language ... targets a weird imagined archetype of someone who isn't allergic to code, but somehow isn't smart enough to work in a genuine programming language. In my experience, this archetype doesn't actually exist.
In my day job, I write "sequences" to command a spacecraft, in a neutered "sequencing language" with conditionals but no looping. Several people on our team who are great at writing sequences for the spacecraft feel they "can't code" and don't learn other languages. I had assumed the deal with templating languages was similar and this type of people were the target users.
williamcotton|3 years ago
There are two forces at work here when this division of labor disappears: 1.) increasing complexity in the tool designed for non-computer engineers and 2.) the subtleties of a class of worker who don’t want to do literal manual labor like typing in SQL.
At many firms it seems as if there is a layer of operations that is only capable of interacting with a CRUD UI, constricted either by ability or tooling.
That is, there is a pressure from management to split a firm in two: those that code and those that do not. This means that even something as simple as making updates to a CRUD interface is entwined with the the rest of the engineering practices.
Case in point: computer engineers writing SQL at the behest of some other entity at a firm who is not capable or allowed or even encouraged to learn or understand SQL.
absolutelynobo|3 years ago
tomjakubowski|3 years ago
whymauri|3 years ago
makeitdouble|3 years ago
This is a small part of the rant, but he is fundamentally mistaken about what backends are. The real life equivalents are not bridges, but kitchens or back-offices: a place where you make the sausage so that the customer can have a delightful experience without the gory business part in sight.
It’s not disconnected from end-users, quite he opposite, as it’s suppose to realize the core value of the product.
I don’t agree with a lot of other parts of the rant either, but the global message of “react needs to evolve in a different direction” is I think interesting.
agumonkey|3 years ago
It always pains me to remember a p2 cpu could do realtime nurbs procedural animation (very complex) and yet we still have manual state machines for simpler tasks like documents / filesystems etc
This article is right that there's a lot to gain in terms of ergonomics by finding leaner ways. I also think the web stack and dev culture is ready to respond well to this idea.
torginus|3 years ago
Strange sentiment. Isn't React templating as well? Besides one of the most famous use of templates is macros (in C as well as other languages). Would people who generate code be allergic to coding?
a_wild_dandan|3 years ago
Nope! You can make React apps with just a plain ol' JS file (and doing so is frankly instructive). Most folk add in JSX for extra syntactic sugar tho, so the confusion with templating is understandable.
qprofyeh|3 years ago
yellow_lead|3 years ago
LAC-Tech|3 years ago
I still think plain old CSS - separate from any JS or HTML or JS that generates HTML - is the way to go.
Just so much easier and less brittle. I get that CSS being too hard for binary tree inverting geniuses to learn is now widely accepted folk wisdom, but it's really not true.
klysm|3 years ago
I also do think CSS is hard to learn because of how vast it is with the decades of shit piled on. There’s no clear way to do a lot of things, and if I have a solution, there’s always this doubt that I’m holding it wrong and fucking over future me.
People that know CSS tend to hate things like tailwind and css-in-js because it’s an absolute abuse of the core design principles of “correct” CSS. But these things succeed for not 100% bad reasons.
stasm|3 years ago
How does macOS achieve its reactivity? Is it two-way bindings? Events/messages? Immediate mode re-renders?
skohan|3 years ago
ex3ndr|3 years ago
personjerry|3 years ago
bdcravens|3 years ago
Ended up disabling Javascript on the site to make it readable (ironic I know)
encryptluks2|3 years ago
Website proceeds to slowly load and runs like crap.
berjin|3 years ago
DonHopkins|3 years ago
Also from 6502 to 65C03 to 65C816 to 68k to PowerPC... But Apple ][ users were painfully aware of the 68k transition. ;)
klysm|3 years ago
mkl95|3 years ago
Well I closed that tab.
rco8786|3 years ago
twohaibei|3 years ago
bagels|3 years ago
Anyone know what this means?
Gigachad|3 years ago
Hellion|3 years ago
doctoboggan|3 years ago
melony|3 years ago
oefrha|3 years ago
Aeolun|3 years ago
AtNightWeCode|3 years ago
makeitdouble|3 years ago
I know Chrome OS is really seen as the way forward for many many people, but what if they are just betting on the trend to last, when it is just the usual cycle of “applets” vs local applications ?
The same way Java was pushed in the browser, to then cement its role in desktop apps (or the Flash -> Air progression), wouldn’t javascript heavy work sites at some point move to a native JS hooked into the system and opening the door to system wide drag and drop, undo etc.
wildermuthn|3 years ago
He’s not wrong, but I wonder what kind of applications he’s working on that require all three of those characteristics simultaneously. If you only need 2 out of his 3 data requirements, then React + Apollo can handle it just fine in experienced hands.
For apps that truly do need all 3 capabilities, the problem isn’t React per-se. The problem is that such apps are just complex by their very nature — even by reducing accidental complexity to zero, you are still stuck with a huge amount of essential complexity. That’s just the nature of the beast.
Although I have long since moved on from Clojure since Rich Hickey made it clear Clojure was not about me but about him and his consulting business, you really need a powerful language like Clojure to do something as tricky as the author wants poor little JS to do. Someone one described JS as a cute dog with three legs — you feel for it, and take care of it, but you know it really isn’t capable of too much. A hard problem needs a powerful tool, and nothing written in JS (kinda-typed or not) is going to get the job done.
anthk|3 years ago
And, well, Kopete was pretty much the "Adium" for Linux/BSD, and KDE3.5 (once you disabled Artsd and enabled DMIX on the Penguin) it was a beast.
wheelerof4te|3 years ago
If I learn some fancy framework today, I expect to use it for years to come else my knowledge and time is wasted.
rk06|3 years ago
The most long lived framework currently is emberjs. But it is not the hottest, so you won't find it discussed much. The most "future proof" framework is "React" which is the one mentioned in Original article.
It goes without saying but React is the cause of a lot of churn in js ecosystem, particularly due to its "no-battery included" approach.
## what about other popular frameworks?
Other popular frameworks are angular and Vue.
Angular has gone through such a major shift between angular 1 and angular 2, that angular 2 should have been renamed.
That being said Angular2+ is also going through a paradigm shift (albeit in right direction this time)
The other popular framework is Vue. Vue's templates have has gone through minor changes. And it has gone through a major change (vue 2 to vue3) recently. It is unlikely that another such large rewrite will happen for next 3-4 years. But after that, who knows?
The only option here is to refresh your skills regularly every 2-3 years
tuukkah|3 years ago
199X|3 years ago
amelius|3 years ago
pas|3 years ago
if someone sends you a link to a piece of content on FB and then you use the back button it sends you to your feed, and now they have a much greater chance of trapping the dear user in their algoverse.
AtNightWeCode|3 years ago
Fervicus|3 years ago
llIIllIIllIIl|3 years ago
klysm|3 years ago
arminluschin|3 years ago
kevincox|3 years ago
DaiPlusPlus|3 years ago
EugeneOZ|3 years ago
I also remember something, and you forgot to mention it: other frameworks were honestly saying that they took some ideas from React (or improved their solutions being inspired by React’s ideas).
I don't think it was a good idea to use such a hostile style of writing - it is ok for web frameworks to evolve. It is more than ok to share ideas. Every time I see that some new framework took some idea of React (or Ember, or Angular, or PHP) - I see the “credits”, the authors are not trying to hide it.
Some people are criticizing some frameworks - it is ok, no need to start holy wars because of that. Valid criticism will help, pointless toxicity will just shade away.
nathias|3 years ago
tartoran|3 years ago
akdor1154|3 years ago
pkrumins|3 years ago
DonHopkins|3 years ago
>Menus let you cross over empty space and other menu items, instead of strictly enforcing hover rectangles.
I know the guy, Frank Leahy, who implemented that feature invented by Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini.
When he was at Apple, he rewrote the Menu Manager for Mac SE and Mac II.
We were working together on a project at Current TV, and reminiscing about how great the original Apple Human Interface guidelines were, and how Apple had totally lost their original devotion to excellent user interface design, and I mentioned how the original edition of the Apple HIG book I had actually illustrated, documented, and justified that subtle feature.
Frank proudly told me he was the one who implemented it for the Menu Manager, and that he was touched that somebody actually noticed and appreciated it as much as I did.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17404401
https://bjk5.com/post/44698559168/breaking-down-amazons-mega...
>Breaking down Amazon’s mega dropdown [...]
>DonHopkins on June 26, 2018 [–]
>The comments are actually great -- even Tog weighs in! It also mentions Frank Lehey, who rewrote the Menu Manager for Mac SE and Mac II.
>Jake Smith • 5 years ago This was first implemented by Apple's HID team back in the 80s, specifically Bruce Tognazzini, I believe.
>Bruce "Tog" Tognazzini Jake Smith • 5 years ago Yes, I did invent it back in 1986 and it is firmly in the public domain. From what I remember, it was Jim Batson who worked out the math and coded it for the Mac OS. The OS X team later failed to copy the algorithm, so I am happy to see that amazon has resurrected it.
>Josh Davenport Jake Smith • 5 years ago I think it was yes. It looks like it was originally implemented by NeXT and then removed by Apple when they bought NeXT. Tog himself talks about what happened here: https://www.asktog.com/columns/022DesignedToGiveFitts.html in the answer to question 6 - "When I specified the Mac hierarchical menu algorthm in the mid-'80s, I called for a buffer zone shaped like a <, so that users could make an increasingly-greater error as they neared the hierarchical without fear of jumping to an unwanted menu...........Sadly, the NeXT folks, when coming to Apple, copied Windows, rather than the Mac"
>markr_7 • 5 years ago Can't comment on the HID team, Bruce, or possibly the many times it was even implemented at Apple, but as a young developer at Apple in the 80s, I remember stopping by Frank Leahy's office as he was tweaking his code to get menus to "work right." I've often recalled the experience because of the time he was spending to get it right, and how the behavior wasn't simple once you started really trying to meet a users expectations. If I remember right it wasn't just the direction, but also time and therefore velocity. For example, you wouldn't want to stick with the wrong menu if the user wasn't really moving with purpose in the direction of the sub-menu.
gardenhedge|3 years ago
impetus1|3 years ago
faangiq|3 years ago
DonHopkins|3 years ago
This is exactly what I was getting at when I wrote this recent post about Smarty (in response to the following parent comment proposing building a crippled scripting system for designers), to which somebody insightfully commented "Someone doesn’t like Smarty…"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32886317
parent> Even in game development, it often turns out to be a huge mess that coders have to go and sort out after the fact, it's almost inevitable if it's general purpose enough. If you do decide to build a scripting system for designers, I would recommend being very conservative with features and thinking twice before adding any new feature.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32886424
>DonHopkins 5 days ago | prev [–]
>Just hire competent and trustworthy designers, instead of purposefully crippling the tools you spend so much time developing. The best designers can also code, and if you design a system that discourages instead of encourages designers from coding, you're wasting the potential of those precious coder/designers, and wasting the opportunity to train your best designers to code too.
>It's not as if Rock Star can't find anybody qualified who wants to work for them, or any designers who are willing to learn to code in a powerful visual scripting language.
>This attitude causes disasters like PHP's "Smarty" templating language.
>PHP was already a templating language, but somebody got it in their head that there should be an iron-clad separation between designers and programmers, and that PHP gave designers too much power and confused them, and that their incompetent untrustworthy designers who refused to learn anything about programming deserved something even "simpler" than PHP, so they came up with Smarty.
>Then over time the realized that their designers were powerless, so their programmers would have to learn TWO languages so they could wade into the Smarty templates to make them actually work with all the extra code they had to write because Smarty was so crippled, so they nickle-and-dimed more and more incoherent programming language elements into Smarty, making it EVEN HARDER to use and more complicated and less consistent than PHP, yet nowhere near as powerful.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20736574
DonHopkins on Aug 19, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on: YAML: Probably not so great after all
One of the most ridiculous examples of this was the Smarty templating language for PHP.
Somebody got the silly idea in their head of implementing a templating language in PHP, even though PHP is ALREADY a templating language. So they took out all the useful features of PHP, then stuck a few of them back in with even goofier inconsistent hard-to-learn syntax, in a way that required a code generation step, and made templates absolutely impossible to debug.
So in the end your template programmers need to know something just as difficult as PHP itself, yet even more esoteric and less well documented, and it doesn't even end up saving PHP programmers any time, either.
https://web.archive.org/web/20100226023855/http://lutt.se/bl...
>Bad things you accomplish when using Smarty:
>Adding a second language to program in, and increasing the complexity. And the language is not well spread at all, allthough it is’nt hard to learn.
>Not really making the code more readable for the designer.
>You include a lot of code which, in my eyes, is just overkill (more code to parse means slower sites).
https://web.archive.org/web/20090227001433/http://www.rantin...
>Most people would argue, that Smarty is a good solution for templating. I really can’t see any valid reasons, that that is so. Specially since “Templating” and “Language” should never be in the same statement. Let alone one word after another. People are telling me, that Smarty is “better for designers, since they don’t need to learn PHP!”. Wait. What? You’re not learning one programming language, but you’re learning some other? What’s the point in that, anyway? Do us all a favour, and just think the next time you issue that statement, okay?
http://www.ianbicking.org/php-ghetto.html
>I think the Broken Windows theory applies here. PHP is such a load of crap, right down to the standard library, that it creates a culture where it's acceptable to write horrible code. The bugs and security holes are so common, it doesn't seem so important to keep everything in order and audited. Fixes get applied wholesale, with monstrosities like magic quotes. It's like a shoot-first-ask-questions-later policing policy -- sure some apps get messed up, but maybe you catch a few attacks in the process. It's what happened when the language designers gave up. Maybe with PHP 5 they are trying to clean up the neighborhood, but that doesn't change the fact when you program in PHP you are programming in a dump.
pas|3 years ago
There's value in separating the presentation layer from the other parts. There are nice things in Twig that are not in PHP. (Pipes, for-else, etc.)
Of course PHP was (is?) far from a general purpose language, but a templating lib allows PHP core devs to focus less on "templating".
And it's just reality that fixing/improving/iterating/evolving a library is much easier than the host language. Updating a lib version is easier than updating language version. Similarly it's a real constraint that not every company/team/engineer will be able to "just hire competent designers".
React is also suffering from this. (Due to its popularity, hence it's the victim of its own success. Or looking at the big picture it's the normal part of the hype cycle.) The article mentions that every React repo/project is different and full of their own conventions. (And implies that they are broken too.) Oh, who would have guessed? After all it's just a view layer and people will put a myriad things on top of whatever the current "create react app" spits out.
rco8786|3 years ago
pingiun|3 years ago
pier25|3 years ago
One thing I do agree is the rant at the end about zoomers. We see stuff like tailwind popping up which really reflects the zoomer ethos of not wanting to learn fundamental stuff like CSS. "It's so easy to get started! Why would I learn anything else?"
I think gen Xers and late boomers will be the most tech developped generations because we had to use computers that were hard to use.
wildrhythms|3 years ago
klysm|3 years ago
I argue that it solves a clear design deficit in CSS. You cannot have tight coupling with CSS and a lot of the time you want tight coupling. In-line styles are insufficient, so we have tailwind. It’s an API to css that lets you tightly couple your styles. The re-usability of those styles is accomplished by composition of components or composition of atoms via @apply.
pts_|3 years ago
mikessoft_gmail|3 years ago
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