Yesterday I made this tweet from @ThePracticalDev Twitter account:
And then I left Twitter to get back to work. I'm not nearly as good about hanging around Twitter as I used to be—because I have better productivity habits. 😄
Anyway, some folks were confused by what I meant, or disagreed:
What I meant was not that our tools for inspection are getting worse. In fact, they are getting better, more powerful all the time. I love my Chrome web tools and Firefox et al are more than keeping pace. But that is generally more for desktop development. It's clearly harder to inspect the source of a page on mobile. It's such a pain in the ass if you don't already have a good setup that many devs probably have never bothered inspecting the source on mobile. Even though most "work" still happens on desktop (debatable), clearly it's not the environment where most computer use takes place.
It's all Steve Jobs' fault. I'm kidding—sort of. We know about his arguments with Woz about how many slots the Apple II should have had, and it never stopped. Apple has worked tirelessly to make their products—both hardware and software—into a black box. I'm all for a user-friendly shell, but it's absolutely a shame that getting under the hood is now for specialists and not for whoever wants to take a peek.
Others, like Google, have followed. Every new operating system seems to make inspecting the gears harder, and it's a shame. Is it important that we maintain the ability for the average user to quickly dive into the source? Maybe, maybe not. I'd personally say yes and others would too, but either way it's a shame to lose this mindset. Code inspection feature that didn't need to exist in browsers in the first place, but it became a standard thing and it's sad that it stopped being the norm across all devices.
Top comments (10)
I think this is an excellent point. In my opinion there is a slow drift towards a higher bar to entry in web development and a stricter separation between developers and consumers. I made some related points about WebAssembly on Reddit a couple of years ago: reddit.com/r/programming/comments/...
Funny to note that the same is true for mechanical engineering. Cars are harder and harder to "debug".
Absolutely, but it's hard to say that this is unavoidable. If it were more of a priority, people would be building more debuggable systems, not less.
Capitalism in action - if you make it difficult to impossible to repurpose, repair, reuse... the product then you encourage or force users to purchase new items.
That's for sure the mission of the SaaS sausage machine. But really the bar will always rise higher with innovation. I personally couldn't have ever understood the method to my current madness my first year and I purposely obfuscate for my own safety when possible. I also believe it's better to take inspiration form another's work vs replication or finding out "exactly" how they did X. I personally enjoy the current hide and seek some sites use these days
I think there are two factors at play here. One is surely that companies don't want their work easy to replicate elsewhere. This is a disappointing trend to those of us who look at development from a scientific lens. (Not the whether-or-not it is a science argument, but the philosophy of discovery and sharing findings with the broader community.) Business models may require certain details to stay private, but there are still a lot of lessons learned that could be shared for the betterment for all.
The other factor is that as we build in more conveniences, the end product gets intrinsically more complicated. Like, a lot more. Someone mentioned cars... old cars are a lot easier to work on -- nearly everything can be done with hand tools. But they usually don't get very good gas mileage and don't have those creature comforts we tend to think of as required equipment nowadays. Convenient, modern cars not only need hand tools but electronic equipment to decipher what the car's CPU is seeing. Because convenience (and sometimes safety).
P.S. Thank you for the preview button on comments!
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I am in no way trying to fight for security through obscurity in what I’m about to say, but I totally agree with the decision to not have devtools on mobile. Tbh the more I’ve learned about the web, the more I’ve realized that security is not the default. Enableing the console etc shouldn’t be hard but definitely out of the way. Specifically in this context, self-xss should never have been an issue, but every browser has a console and for the longest time all our data was in global variables. I love the web and how open it is, but sometimes I feel it’s a little too open for the average users own good
Why are you fighting your natural pull towards Linux?! Come join us!
Something systemd has made clear is the fact that Linux seems to be following that trend a bit, as well.
Hindsight shows us that having a C compiler and ready access to source code has become more and more rare in Linux distributions, for instance. The most popular Linux distributions have made it more and more difficult to get at a command line interface outside of the GUI, too. How do you manage network configuration these days? Is it with a GUI tool like NetworkManager? Sure, the stuff you need to get at the guts of the system is sometimes still there (under several layers of obfuscation and shiny paint), and when it's not you can generally get it, but it's getting more and more difficult.
I'm not saying we shouldn't have the user-friendly graphical user interfaces. I'm saying having them doesn't have to make access to the guts of the system harder, but that's the trend I see anyway.