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The downfall of web development

Victor Ocnarescu on March 04, 2023

It has begun. The downfall of web development. I don't know how it started, but it seems unstoppable. Layer after layer of unnecessary complexity k...
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Paulo A. Costa

The use of Docker is justified by the same people who said that Java was good because it could run anywhere. The problem is that to this day, I have never migrated a Java project between different platforms...

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Vinícius Hoyer

I use docker to manage npm and node versions because I don't like nvm

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Jonas Pfalzgraf

What do you have against nvm? Its fast, easy, and super useful.

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Vinícius Hoyer

It's cuz when I was using it on a particular setup of mine, it slowed the terminal startup by like 2 seconds, and I'm always opening and closing terminals, I was just fed up by it and decided to quit it

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Jonas Pfalzgraf

defuq? On what System? I can't confirm this as someone who uses it on a daily basis.

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Sadeed

Can confirm, I have nvm installed on 2 systems both using Manjaro and It has significantly slowed down my terminal load times.
I am using zsh as my shell on both systems (which is very common) so I wouldn't expect it to be the issue.

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Vinícius Hoyer

I'm pretty sure I was facing that problem with this setup as well, actually, manjaro-i3 zsh and ohmyzsh

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Mario

Java is pretty good because It can be run almost everywhere but its not just that. There are a lot of thins to consider in modern jvm

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Tracy Gilmore

I have to confess I quite like TS, but probably because it reminds me of days long go when I used to write C++ and C code. The hype is false, TS is not type-safe or even safer (at runtime), as some claim.

It does provide some helpful IntelliSense (and things like generics, enumerations and interfaces) but none of these survive transpilation into JS. The most useful (everyday) feature can be obtained through establishing good coding conventions across the team and using JS with some JSDoc notation.

In the 2 decades I have been writing applications in JS, I can honestly say, I can count on one hand the number of times I found a bug was down to the incorrect use of a data type.

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leob • Edited

Add to that having to migrate to new and fancy hipster frameworks (both backend and frontend) approximately every month ... :)

Because, node.js can't be good, no it has to be "Deno" now, and all the effort you've put into mastering Webpack goes out the window coz we're now using "Vite", and just rewrite all of your class components to "hooks" - lather, rinse, repeat!

In the meantime we're mostly producing exactly the same functionality as before :-D

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Dennis

I would say there is a benefit to typescript. I'm more familiar with .NET though, so I may be somewhat biased.

I inherited a plugin from a coworker who had left way before I even joined the company. It was built on Umbraco 6, it didn't use any sort of tooling. When Umbraco started to use angular-js for the backoffice, it was translated to angular-js, but still didn't use any javascript tools. The mess that I was greeted with made me want to throw the whole thing away. I can't remember how many times I said "Where does this property suddenly come from!?" or "Where is this piece of code even used?!", but it was a lot.

I work in an environment with many junior developers and what happens is that if something is optional, it simply doesn't get done (writing comments, update documentation, write tests, remove unused code, etc.). This one project is built by a single developer and everybody else who looks at any pull request is like: "I have no idea what this is, I'm sure it's all good". For a junior developer, to make quality code, we need to set rules and typescript does that for us. Typescript helps us convey the intent of a certain piece of code, which makes it more easy to manage expectations for different flows. If you just work with any object, it's for example easier to think: "hey, this object makes its way from here to that other place where I need this data, let's add this property to this object", without considering what the object is supposed to represent. You can still do this in typescript, but by giving objects different names with well-defined properties, you make developers think twice. "Does this list of car doors really belong on the carrot object?"

Especially for projects that get touched once or twice per year and move from developer to developer, it's important to make your code speak and that's something that Typescript does for us.

If typescript doesn't work for you and your team, that's ok, this is just my experience.

That being said: I also see plenty of atrocious .NET code that definitely doesn't speak either.

tl;dr: I think typescript is useful, because it helps to manage expectations in code and it makes the code speak.

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Liftoff Studios

All of this is true, add some serverless to the mix too

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leob

Serverless can actually kill & do away with lots of complexity, if used right ... I'm doing a serverless project right now and I love the simplicity of it - no Docker, no Kubernetes, no "Devops", not even managing a server :)

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Liftoff Studios

I agree, but tbf serverless is just another hype trend (although it's way better than microservice hype), it's not always useful

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leob • Edited

It maybe another hype, but it's a hype that delivers results - I'm using it successfully as we speak:

I'm able to build an application that's 99% oblivious of going to have to run "serverless", and then I can (with a handful of simple tweaks) deploy it as a 'serverless' app - that's huge, as it gives me:

  • potentially huge (almost unlimited) scalability

  • not having to manage ANY infrastructure whatsoever - no servers (hence "serverless"), no Docker, no Kubernetes - just forget about "DevOps"

Most "hypes" or "trends" just mean more work and more complexity (looking at you, "microservices") - serverless, from what I can see, really delivers.

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Liftoff Studios

Agreed :)

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Prasad Saya

I don't use those much, but, thanks for the humor (and sounds very real to me). And, I suspect the list is much larger than the 7 points!

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Muhammad Sifat Hossain

Reverse psychology! I like it.

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Alen Varazdinac

This content reminds me of this website motherfuckingwebsite.com/

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Mario

This is a bunch of pretty simplistic arguments to be honest. You Talk about downfall of web development but these are your frustrations.