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Comment by lapsock | Hacker News Reader

web development is such a retarded mess

its really amazing how much effort is spent on building the same CRUD apps over and over again

Then why don't you build that one CRUD app and sell it to everybody? That's gotta be worth all the money being paid to develop duplicate apps.

If I were you, I'd delete this comment before anybody steals the idea.

Their constant jump from one framework to another is simply hilarious. PHP! Yuck; jQuery! Eww, Ruby on Rails! Yawza; Angular! Err, React! Nope; Vue. And all that (and much more), in, what, 10 years? Meanwhile, proper software development has had frameworks that last for decades.

Tell that to the developer communities for Microsoft, Apple, and Linux. Quick, should I develop a new Windows GUI app using Win32, MFC, ATL, WTL, WinForms, WPF, or UWP? Which of the five million flavors of .NET am I supposed to be using right now? Should I be developing Mac/iOS apps using Cocoa or Carbon, and writing them in Objective-C or Swift? What about Qt (or KDE's variations) vs Gtk, and use of Mono or Vala?

Yes, I'm somewhat deliberately conflating languages and libs there, but my point is that while the web dev world has certainly been churning quickly, there's also been tons of churn on the desktop and backend development fronts as well.

The churn you are conflating is over a period of decades for almost each mentioned, whereas here, the turnaround of frameworks is a year to two.

Had a similar opinion until dusting off my browser for some front end work recently..

Browsers being roughly standards compliant, and those standards congealing is a relatively new thing (last 10 years), having this happens facillitates alot of browser-side dev (e.g. JS) which simply wasn't possible before, throw in the growth of mobile/tablet UI's, and server side javascript, and the shift from 'CGI extensions' into web-native applications where the browser is the GUI and the 'web server' is really the 'application server', and the appropriate paradigms to deal with this change rapidly.. the frameworks have changed because the underlying platform and its use is rapidly evolving.

I think if you look at GUI toolkits early on as the desktop evolved and you'll find a similarly chaotic and changing picture (e.g. Cocoa is not MacOS v1; WinNT is not Windows 1.0, and neither are dosshell, etc)

Uhm, huh? The DOM model has not really changed at all. All those framework just purport to make some improvements on how nodes are configured and accessed.

On the other hand, you are very much wrong on the technologies you mention. Cocoa was developed in Next, and a huge amount has remained as was at the time of creation. NT is a kernel, not API. Assuming you mean Win32, which debuted with Windows NT 3.1, it was very compatible in concepts and source with the Windows API (retrofitted as "Win16").

What is "proper software development"?

Front-end dev moves fast because the web moves fast. It's gone from simple documents to complex application delivery in a decade. Backend dev is perfectly complicated with build toolchains and deployment pipelines so why is the frontside somehow not allowed to evolve? None of this is really required and nobody is forcing you to keep up.

Web Assembly will hopefully straighten out some of this mess.

Web development is so mature now that you can make the same application with the same effort than you could in FoxPro 25 years ago.

Just 5 years ago web development was insanely complicated.

Not sure why you are being down voted. You speak the truth.

Just peering into your average bower_components or node_modules folder is like staring into the abyss.

Guess that's the gift and the curse of OSS based web dev. I think there are far too many cooks.

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