undefined | Better HN

0 pointsohgh1ieD9y ago0 comments

What you basically do, is hiding and abstracting facts.

That comes at a cost, namely when someone has a special requirement, then that person has to dig very deep into your framework.

It's almost the same like Java GWT or Vaddin. If you stick to the recommended way, everything is just fine, but don't ever try to solve some exceptional problem because then you are in a world of pain where it's just smarter to embrace JS and CSS.

The problem is, abstracting things away doesn't make them disappear, because WEB DEVELOPMENT IS BROKEN BY DESIGN.

I never used your app nor do I know how it behaves, this is just general speaking about the scenario when people try to 'abstract' things away, I hope you understand that I'm not speaking about your app but the idea of hiding things.

The sames goes for all those frameworks who tried to hide HTTP ( I'm looking at you asp.net and some older Java frameworks ), this lead to a pile of shit, newer frameworks accept the fact that we use HTTP and we got less problems by doing that.

Since you mentioned ORM's, it's called the Vietnam of computer science[0], everyone tries to hide SQL, if you are doing some basic CRUD applications everything is fine but if you need more sophisticated queries you are already fighting the ORM which is supposed to help you and not making you developer life miserable, we don't need another DSL for databases, SQL is already the best language to make queries.

I guess, what I'm trying to point out here is that I use those simple tools because I know my way around, I know how to debug it which wouldn't be possible with some abstraction.

[0] https://blog.codinghorror.com/object-relational-mapping-is-t...

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

meredydd9y ago

I assume you're talking about https://anvil.works here. That tension ("hiding facts") is there in every abstraction, but there are some luxuries to the way we do it. By putting a whole, consistent layer over the top of the web platform (in our case, Python and a traditional UI toolkit with a GUI designer), rather than patching little holes in usability here and there, we can prevent you from stubbing your toe on (eg) Javascript-isms every five minutes.

The tradeoff is that if you want to use an obscure feature of the underlying platform (and boy does the web have those), you need to explicitly abandon our abstraction. There's always an escape hatch for this - you can drop down and write HTML/JS/CSS if you need to. (And something similar on the server side too.)

All abstractions leak. Anvil leaks deliberately and rarely, whereas abstractions built in the classic HTML/JS/CSS world leak constantly and unpredictably. We think that's worth the trade-off.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

1 comments · 1 top-level

meredydd9y ago

All abstractions leak. Anvil leaks deliberately and rarely, whereas abstractions built in the classic HTML/JS/CSS world leak constantly and unpredictably. We think that's worth the trade-off.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse