tefi know i'm old but i've learned what the front end devs are up to now and i'm both yelling at the cloud and telling the kids to get off my lawn
it amazes me that "please show me all the posts in the order they were made in" now takes three different types of per-request billing to run in the cloud
look, i know it's a thing where someone who doesn't understand the problem at hand (me) looks at what people are doing (webdevs) and goes "what is going on"
but i have lived through countless webdevs complaining about the "mysterious asset pipeline" breaking again and all i can think of is "we have reinvented C++ but with a whole different class of format string like issues" when i see what absolute torment passes for a build process
we have learned nothing from automake and autoconf, nothing
look i know there's reasons behind "we bundle the entire thing up only then to split it back out into pieces, automatically" but
so much of web dev feels like "complex ways to do what you did before for no meaningful benefit other than the satisfaction of solving a harder problem than you needed to"
at some point you have to ask why there are webapps that send over a docker container's worth of code to insert html into a web page, where the html is rendered server side for speed, of course
i am not saying things used to be better i am saying we're repeating our old mistakes, but the landing pages do look much nicer though, sure
look you will get to an age after suffering through some of the worst internal tools known to mankind, ones that make salesforce seem friendly and slick, and you will hear some dev talking about "flimshaking the respirator in order to re-goo the cookies" and your cookies have never needed re-gooing and you're kinda wondering what the hell people are doing to get into that kinda mess to begin with
also i cannot get over that a lot of these approaches come from performance reasons
it's like "why are you hydrating the dom through batched async requests to the server side rendering cache" "ah it would be slow otherwise "
"why's it slow" "well, in order to hydrate the dom via async requests we're sending over about 20 megs of compressed javascript"
ani betts@tef I mean I would argue, that the idea is to make it so that "writing client-focused code" shouldn't be so different than "writing server-generated code", making it so wherever it runs, it Mostly Looks The Same is Cool. Means components can work in either place, without having to rewrite it all, whereas in the Traditional Way, moving a server-side focused page to be client-side focused is a complete rewrite
Also, being able to write code that's really localized, where the logic, structure, and style, are all in one place, then let the computer make that as performance efficient as jamming your entire app into one CSS file, is Cool!
Even if there are a lot of ugliness in the details right now, I still believe in The Dream™️
Mark Pauley@anizocani @tef in my experience, the worst thing you can do with computers is to try and make two things look like they are the same when in fact they are fundamentally not the same.
rablewis