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0 pointsBinaryIdiot9y ago0 comments

> If anything, this understates the problem. A modal web application today takes an absolute minimum of five programming languages

If you're going to call HTML a programming language than when you talk about server-side work you must include XML as a programming language (I see markup far different, more simplistic than a programming language). CSS is simply properties applied to the same markup but I digress; I could see the argument argued either way.

Regardless, you can minimize what you're saying down to just HTML, CSS and a server-side language. You can make good applications without a single line of JavaScript and depending on your purpose you may not need persistent storage in the backend. In fact you can write an entire web application with just HTML, CSS and JS if you want and have no backend (beyond a CDN unless you want to be super pedantic and call that a "backend" but I think that would exceptionally overstate what it does).

> And then come the (leaky) abstractions on top of them:

God, you don't need any of these. JS isn't that bad anymore. It's actually kinda nice in some ways. Same with CSS it's rather easy and there are far lighter projects than bootstrap if you want to do minimal stuff, quickly (but there isn't any reason you can't look at tutorials if you're new and get a CSS layout working pretty quickly sans framework).

For server side this depends on your language. Node has a great built in http capability that many seem to ignore (it's quite easy to write your own web server using it; in fact it doesn't take much more code than plugging into express or hapi). Alternatively other languages have even better, built-in ways of handling server-side logic.

> ...and often...

Ugh, SQL is so easy I don't understand why people even bother with these. Every single time I've been involved in a team that used these abstractions it worked great initially and then steered us off a cliff in the end.

Just don't. RDMS is easy.

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meredydd9y ago· 1 in thread

> If you're going to call HTML a programming language [...] CSS is simply properties [...]

Whatever they are, they're complicated. They've each got syntax, enormous sets of tags/keywords to learn, and quirks coming out of their ears. There are even people down-thread pointing out that HTML+CSS is Turing complete.

> God, you don't need any of these [abstractions]

With respect, almost everyone else in this thread seems to disagree with you. I'd challenge you to find a major public-facing web app written with - let's be charitable - fewer than two of the frameworks on that list.

I do tend to agree with you on the merits of SQL, though. We built a very simple database for Anvil, that doesn't do anything except store and retrieve tuples of data, and for anything more complicated, we say "great, SQL is over there" :-P

BinaryIdiotOP9y ago

> Whatever they are, they're complicated. They've each got syntax, enormous sets of tags/keywords to learn, and quirks coming out of their ears. There are even people down-thread pointing out that HTML+CSS is Turing complete.

Just like with C++ you don't have to use all of those fancy features. You can use CSS as simply properties on many web applications. They can be as complex or as simple as need be.

> With respect, almost everyone else in this thread seems to disagree with you. I'd challenge you to find a major public-facing web app written with - let's be charitable - fewer than two of the frameworks on that list.

I actually work on one during my day job that is used by millions of people :). Though in fairness we're transitioning to a single framework rather than the hand rolled one.

Frameworks have their use cases. Native also has its. For whatever reason people today are taught they have to use at least one otherwise they're throwing their time away or they can't interoperate with others which are both not true.

I'm beginning to think I need to work on a web series around creating web applications without frameworks.

> I do tend to agree with you on the merits of SQL, though. We built a very simple database for Anvil, that doesn't do anything except store and retrieve tuples of data, and for anything more complicated, we say "great, SQL is over there" :-P

This seems to be the exact type of scenario I've seen played out countless times in my career but the easy start of ORMs sucks people in every time (though I honestly think starting without an ORM is also super simple but I think many of them abstract away schemas which, if you just want to jump into something, can seemingly get in the way.

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