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Comment by stuffihavemade | Hacker News Reader

A lot of CRUD apps (especially enterprise ones) are icebergs. From the user's perspective, the application is fairly simple, but there is a ton of business logic behind the scenes. Something like Rails provides an easy way to serve the "real" program on the web.

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Contrary to what everyone here seems to think, I've actually used (something like) RoR (Django, to be specific.) Although frameworks simplify the process quite a bit, there's still a lot of stuff that doesn't really need a "proper developer" to do, imho. Again, oversimplifying here, but tbh, aren't a lot of these applications basically "glorified spreadsheets"?

Anyway, I guess I got the title for the post wrong. The main point here is that:

1. CRUD is repetitive.

2. CRUD is boring.

3. Why don't we solve better, harder problems and leave CRUD to the non-programmers?

What stuff are you thinking of specifically? The biggest web time waster to me is the culture of "every site must look unique". Tools like bootstrap mitigate that to an extent, but using them heavily makes your product look amateurish. On the other hand, your application looks and feels amateurish if you don't use Cocoa, or WPF, or Qt/Gtk natively.

Django has generic views for doing CRUD. My experience with them has been that I always, always end up having to replace them with real views due to some not-quite-generic requirement. Every time this happens I think "I'm never going to do that again", but I never seem to learn.

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