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0 pointszeroname7y ago0 comments

My two cents: It's a generation of programmers raised on the Web who think web technology is good because that's what they know. They believe in "open standards" and "design by committee" and nonsense like "semantic HTML" being "best practice".

To everyone outside of that bubble, the following is obvious: Web technology sucks. HTML sucks. CSS sucks. Javascript sucks. They're inadequate solutions, which is why people keep reinventing the way to do web frontend every two years.

> It may be hard to answer as we are all biased in favor of HTML.

Not me.

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gwn77y ago· 1 in thread

Yeah I kinda agree with this. I'm not old enough to remember the pre-Web era but I did my share of research and know that hackers of the previous generation does not hold much love for the Web, and I'm convinced that it's for good reasons. Nowadays I feel the same way.

But this problem is not specific to our generation as far as I understand. Maybe the thing that sucks the most that became big in our generation is the Web, but weren't there similar scenarios before us as well?

Doesn't Linux suck? Systemd? Java?

Doesn't every freaking mainstream technology suck? I regularly come across rants from significant developers regarding this issue. There probably is no way to prevent this from happening. Because worse is unfortunately better.

I regularly and seriously consider to leave software development because of this (as I'm really suffering) but then I remember how much power it gives me despite the horrible faults it has.

I think it's very important to understand that the tools we work with mostly suck. In my opinion this is something that is missing from software education curriculums. People need to know and understand how and why everything is messed up and how can we work around this issue while preserving our mental health and the intellectual satisfaction we are supposed to get from the craft.

zeronameOP7y ago

> Doesn't every freaking mainstream technology suck? I regularly come across rants from significant developers regarding this issue. There probably is no way to prevent this from happening. Because worse is unfortunately better.

Web technology is fundamentally different in that you have a big standards body regulating everything from layout down to color blending, then leave it up to multiple vendors to implement all that stuff at great expense and with long delay. Worse, it's all shoehorned on top of some "document model" than was never designed with applications in mind. It's a waste.

To see what a better platform could look like, consider this:

https://mickens.seas.harvard.edu/publications/atlantis-robus...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uflg7LDmzI

The key here is reducing surface area. It's entirely possible that WASM will bring us closer to that, but the web developers of today probably won't like that.

> I regularly and seriously consider to leave software development because of this (as I'm really suffering) but then I remember how much power it gives me despite the horrible faults it has.

I don't know what you do, but I find web development to be significantly more frustrating than other areas. That doesn't mean there isn't frustration elsewhere though and it's definitely part of the job.

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