this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Are web servers that serve real HTML responses still a thing? Honest question. I thought JSON+client side rendering were the default by now.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (2 children)

You're a couple years behind the SSR craze. We're back to what they were doing with PHP in the 00s except it's now done with Next, Nuxt etc.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Give it a year or two and we will be back to PHP. A lot of people are seeing the massive changes PHP has done and realizing it's just not as bad as it used to be. 7.x was a huge change, and 8.x is also doing great things. And so no one rages about my opinions, there's some sarcasm about "going back to PHP". Obviously the industry will stick to JS/TS for the most part.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

PHP has been “not bad” for a decade. The problem is that it isn’t good and I can’t think of a reason to choose it for a new project when there are so many better, established languages.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

When will JQuery make its return?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Probably never because JS finally had a glow up and added/adapted the many features jQuery had and made it native.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Yaaay I love running node.js as my backend even though nobody thinks it's efficient

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah, PHP is extremely common and python frameworks like Flask and Django are getting more popular, but of course no where near PHP.

https://w3techs.com/technologies/details/pl-php

Just one huge example of a Django user is Instagram: https://engineering.fb.com/2023/08/15/developer-tools/immortal-objects-for-python-instagram-meta/

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (3 children)

no where near PHP

Correct, Python is not nearly the clusterfuck that PHP is

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Ah found the inexperienced developer

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

🙄

I'll admit that it's been quite a while since I've touched PHP, but that was never my main focus.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Coming from C-like syntax, Python looks horrible to me. PHP has come a long way with 7 and 8.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I heard a lot of complaints about Python, but it's looks weren't any of them. It's the sexiest language out there.

Since I moved to python I wish all languages would just drop brackets, they're dirt.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I hear it a lot from almost all my engineer friends, so I guess it just depends on your field.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

All the cool engineers use Python to get shit done soon, and C to get it done right.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've got a C background as well, and I find Python o br considerably cleaner (and the code isn't 50% dollar signs).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Aw shit is it 2010 again?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The wheel is always being reinvented

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Especially with frontend. Feels like every few years there’s a complete paradigm shift that forces everything to be rewritten from scratch.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Because web development sucks, web developers are always trying to reinvent web development such that it doesn't suck, and they keep failing.


They keep failing because it's impossible, and it's impossible because the requirements are directly contradictory.

  • Web application code must be simple and understandable (which requires the application to use a minimum of libraries and frameworks), but web applications must look and feel modern and fancy (which requires big, complicated frameworks).
  • Web development must be easy (which requires the project to be written in JavaScript or something similarly simple), but web applications must have sophisticated functionality and not crash (which requires the project to be written in TypeScript, Rust, or something similarly non-simple).
  • Web development must be easy (which requires the entire project to be written in a single language), but web applications must work to at least a basic degree with scripting disabled (which requires the project to contain non-trivial amounts of HTML and CSS in addition to JavaScript/TypeScript/Rust/etc).
  • Web applications must be fast and not crash (which requires a compilation step with type checking), but it must be possible to iterate very quickly (which requires there to not be a compilation step).
  • And so on.

And they keep failing because, quite frankly, they don't know how to succeed. Most web developers are not grizzled 50-year-olds with decades of experience and a solid understanding of things like type systems and build automation, and most grizzled 50-year-olds with decades of experience and a solid understanding of things like type systems and build automation want nothing to do with web development. Microsoft somehow managed to scrape together enough exceptional individuals to create TypeScript, but they seem to have exhausted the supply of such individuals.

Most web developers don't even seem to fully appreciate what TypeScript does and why it's important, let alone have the skill to write similarly sophisticated tools themselves. Consider, for example, Vite not running TypeScript type checking with every build. Vite's developers cite compilation speed as their motivation for cutting this corner. These people clearly do not understand the importance of correctness checking.

Another example: as far as I can tell, no web application build tools track dependencies between source files for incremental compilation, nor am I aware of any standard format for compilers (TypeScript, Sass, Babel, etc) to communicate that information to the build tools invoking them (Webpack, Vite, Grunt, etc).


Every once in a while there's a ray of hope, like TypeScript, but that's all it is: hope. The web developer experience has never been anywhere close to the caliber of developer experience you'll get with a language like Rust, and sadly I don't foresee that changing any time soon.

And no, htmx is not the answer to our prayers. It seeks to fix HTML, and HTML is not what's fundamentally broken.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

no web application build tools track dependencies between source files for incremental compilation

Angular builds are incremental by default.

Web development must be easy

Why should that requirement hold for web development but not for any other kind of development?

it must be possible to iterate very quickly (which requires there to not be a compilation step)

Again, Angular makes an incremental build in about a second, maybe 5 for large applications. Compare this to Java, where even simple backends require 20–30 seconds of build time.

Web application code must be simple and understandable (which requires the application to use a minimum of libraries and frameworks)

This makes no sense. Which is simpler – a function called mergeObjects from a library or a recursive function of 30–50 lines to do this without the library? Libraries’ whole purpose is making things simpler.

Web applications must be fast and not crash (which requires a compilation step […])

Ever heard of just-in-time compilation?

TypeScript, but they seem to have exhausted the supply of such individuals

TypeScript has minor-point releases about every 3–4 months. What makes you think it’s dying?

To conclude, because this post is long enough: Your comment is full of opinions, but little else.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Job security, baybeee 😎 /s

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Centralise what's decentralised and decentralise what's Centralised and you'll look like a genius.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

At my last company, there was a massive half-year project for the whole department to move all the microservices and all that stuff (multiple hundred projects) into a monorepo.

Then my team was transferred to another department. Here we had a massive, half-year project for the whole department, to pick apart a similarly-sized monorepo into separate microservice repos.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

https://turbo.hotwired.dev/

While it's a new trend, it's not that new.