Comment by bfb09 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bfb09 | Hacker News Reader

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Rest assured that I am firmly in your camp, and I've been tirelessly making the argument to policymakers that Big Web is not the resident innovative force in computing any more, despite the Obama administration's rapid adoption of their ideals and philosophy to salvage Healthcare.gov. In both the legislative and executive branches I have found many, many sympathetic ears who have been burned by ballooning budgets to handle public cloud and all the concerns that came with it, which folks who advocate for cloud-first deployment tend to overlook when addressing people who genuinely don't know (concerns endemic to Big Web operation of cloud actually need explaining when addressing a sector that's never touched it).

There is a watershed coming where Big Web/FAANG will lose this mantle, and DevOps, half-baked Agile because nobody ever bakes it all the way, framework engineering, and a complete fundamental ball-dropping around security and exploitation of user data are rapidly ensuring it.

At some point, Big Web/FAANG and everybody delivering Web services of some kind got the idea that the Web was computing. I think the prototypical version of this thinking led to Rob Pike's observations about systems research in the early oughts. This forum tends to operate with that underlying assumption about the lens to view computing through no fault of anyone in particular, which is why I say that.

What would you say is the "resident innovative force in computing" now?

I'm a little confused by the reference to healthcare.gov: if Big Web is not the right paradigm to handle a... big web site, then what is?

Perhaps I disagree with the implied assumption that a big web site was the answer. I don’t have an answer for you beyond that, because step one is challenging the increasing belief that Big Web has computing figured out and we need not evaluate the decisions and foundational technologies and delivery models that have led to where we are. Step one is a mountain, as you can imagine, and it’s possible to start the conversation of climbing it with only a handful of ideas of what could be over it. Many smart people with quadruple my intelligence and foresight have toed these waters throughout computing’s history. They just lose to hype and marketing.

I realize that’s an underwhelming answer, but if we asked that everyone who disagreed with the status quo simultaneously proposed a perfect solution to fix it, we would be nowhere in any sense. I assure you that thinking about the answer to your question is a significant part of my life, and talking to people who use computers to shape that thinking is key. Government was largely responsible for setting the computing agenda and spurring all of the right technologies in the beginning, and I believe there is merit to revisiting that thinking rather than ceding computing to engineers on the West coast.

At some point in the early-mid-00s we as engineers just "gave up" on the web as it was formulated as a document/resource transfer system with hyperlinking, and turned it into this ungainly mess of DOM manipulation, rampant RPC calling, database abusing, JS bound bloat. Finding the HTML document under the weight of ... stuff... on top has become impossible.

There were precursors to this... GWT was an early example of abuse of the web browser stack to accomplish something very non-webby. But it's really gone full bore now.

Back in the mid-90s when I made web pages for a living when some designer came to us with a photoshop mockup in a PSD and said "make the page look like this" we felt perfectly fine saying "no, the web can't do that. design for the web, not photoshop"; no such luck now. And so here we are...

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