Is web programming a series of hacks on hacks?

at news.ycombinator.com

6 up and 2 down, posted by xat 2782 days ago 6 comments

Granger 2782 days ago. link 0 point ▲ ▼

Broken clock, twice a day.  Author seems to be projecting a lot of insecurity outwards, having failed to keep up with the trends.  If he's struggling to "get" today's web development concepts, which are nothing but redressed actor patterns and light FP, then we're dealing with somebody who slipped through the cracks on shell scripts and StackOverflow.  

You see a lot of this, the old C guy who managed to kludge his rusty college math into a few utilities, now he's the "expert" at this or that company, twenty years senior, but who never really stopped to consider the theory, now he's calling out "incompetence" or "hacks" where really he sees even teenagers of nimbler mind picking up ideas he can't grasp.  Sucks, but if you're irrelevant, you gotta be gone.  Times change.  

Stay in the back, old timer, hit your vape and leave the engineers alone.

Replies

tracker1 2782 days ago. link 6 points ▲ ▼

As a relative old-timer, I'm pretty offended by a lot of what you're saying... there are plenty of us who've kept up with the language and techniques (following node from the start, using it actively sine 0.8/0.10), and understand the newer ESnext bits... Been using babel since the beginning, though I was a little late to webpack, wasn't sold on its' value over Browserify.  Fighting for 3+ months in my team to get the tooling updated wasn't fun to say the least.

Beyond that, I was more functionally minded all along, even with C# I was more inclined to have simple POCO with static utility libraries.

Not all of us old timers are out of touch with the times.  That said, web dev is a completely different way of having to think than desktop apps... not to mention cookies vs local/sessionStorage vs indexdb vs websql and where/how it works... Though it's all *FAR* more easy to work with today vs. the turn of the millenium when v4 browsers were kings, and the next-get half baked was just coming out.  I don't think the author of the question would have handled that time at all.

MaxArt 2781 days ago. link 1 point ▲ ▼

Well... It depends on what you mean with "plenty", I guess.
Because while I have no doubt that you and your peers managed to keep up with new technologies, many old-school developers actually struggled a lot with the ways of JavaScript, in terms of async code, functional programming and single-thread techniques.

JavaScript gave birth to some of the most exotic frameworks and introduced revolutionary development stacks. From React to Angular, from jQuery to Elm, from Browserify to Webpack, from Grunt to Gulp... an unprecented flexibility.

Also add isomorphic code, JWTs, WebSockets, PWAs, the end of the boundaries between JS, HTML and CSS... It's no surprise if someone gets dizzy.

But really, it's not a series of hacks. Personally, I can work with it just fine.
Developing for Wordpress feels like a series of hacks and monkey patches. But if you're saying that for modern web development, chances are you're not getting the hang of it!

And that's fine! It's normal, really. Just take your time and stick with one technology for as long as you need to be comfortable with it.

tracker1 2780 days ago. link 1 point ▲ ▼

Oh, I've known quite a few who resisted change... hell, converting ASP.Net apps to use node tools as part of build scripts over the hacky VS plugins was a fight a few years ago... (around node 0.10 release).  There are a lot of old timers that resist change, but I've seen relatively young devs (mid 20's) resistant to change as well.  I don't think it's really a product of age so much as hitting a point where learning new stuff isn't as appealing.